What if Bioshock Infinite Wasn't an FPS?

I've been thinking a lot about Bioshock Infinite lately. I also recently watched a pretty brutal criticism of it done with a guy with a brogue of some kind--if you know what it is, let me know because I'd like to find it again. Anyway, this guy took a hammer to Bioshock Infinite like it slept with his girlfriend and also he was his girlfriend's pimp. That's too harsh on him, maybe, but the point is that he really went all-in denigrating the game with the interest being that he would illustrate that Bioshock Infinite wasn't deserving of the plaudits it received back in March.

Anyway, he had a lot to say and as soon as I can find the video I'll let him say it, but there was a small sliver of information that got me thinking: a first person shooter is not something that served Bioshock Infinite's story. That makes sense: a story about a man seeking redemption from a life of violence and brutality isn't well-served by a scene where he chainsaws a man and hurls his corpse into a crowd of screaming civilians. Elizabeth even responds to moments like this with fear, but she's remarkably on-board for Booker's pretty goddamn crazy murder spree, especially since he's already gained the ability to shoot crows out of his hands by the time she meets him.

The original Bioshock was a survival horror game. Everything about the game lent themselves to that central conceit; everything served to remind you that this was a game about feeling scared and isolated in a place that was full of insane junkies hungering for your blood. Considering the big twist at the end of the second act is a moment where you realize that you weren't in control and technically you haven't been all along. Plus, the people who are trying to kill you are superpowered mutants who've lost touch with reality and want to make a you-skin belt.

However, the major thing in Bioshock Infinite is Elizabeth: interacting and bonding with her, learning about her powers, and using her to explore the world. The villains are mostly regular people. Regular people representing a racist society, but they're never racist at us, and there's a surprisingly small amount of actual interracial violence, for a game that originally seemed premised on it. It seems to me that there are mechanics that would work better with that story, and that would allow us to take better advantage of the powers we're told Elizabeth has. My immediate response: first person puzzle game! Now, all three Bioshock games (we'll count 2 because we're nice) have featured a "puzzle" that really just sends you to get the nearest free plasmid. "The wall is frozen, we need fire to melt it. You'll never see ice again, for the rest of the game. Seriously." "These doors can only be opened with electricity. Also, there'll never be another one of these doors ever again. Seriously." It's somewhat frustrating. However, from a narrative standpoint it's nice to have an objective aside from "Open door" with a solution more complicated than "Murder everyone and touch everything until the door opens."

Having goals aside from "murder everyone" and the tools to do it would be such a revelation in game design. For example, in addition to all the other crap heaped on them, Big Daddies are essentially magic janitors: one of their jobs is maintaining Rapture. The first ranged weapon you get in Bioshock 2 is a rivet gun. An objective where you are tasked with repairing damaged pipes with your rivet gun literally writes itself. Ideas like this for Bioshock Infinite's many, many cool mechanics should be easy.

Let me know what you've got. I'll come up with some too. It'll be fun!

Playing With Voices

In addition to drawing silly pictures and writing silly ideas, I also do silly voices! This first video is me, rocking a thinning hairline and a series of impressions of orc, troll, goblin, and ogre voices from Warcraft 2. The trolls are my favorite, but I think I might do a whole line of Orc voices once my throat has recovered. If you have a funny thing you want me to say with a funny voice, leave it all up in the comments section and I'll do my best to mangle your pristine funny with my noisemaker.

An aside to actual voice talent: if you know what you're doing, I'd love to hear your take on my technique. I learned mostly by watching Billy West give interviews. Tell me what I'm doing wrong, I love improving.

  And here's an improvised monologue I did with my King Candy impression. Don't ask me where it came from, I was just sitting in my living room and it kind of struck me. But I have a lot of fun doing these!

Brain in a Jar

In an early bid for immortality, the Eblonians pioneered the out-of-body experience. It's a brain in a jar. In theory, the brain will live forever, in sync with the Heart of Eb, reliving its life moment for moment in a perfect loop. Of course, brains don't work like that, especially brains with no external feedback. Also, low-fat jar fluid? Their poor myelin sheaths!

I've been drawing organs in jars lately, and I think that's a sentence you don't really have appreciation for how creepy it is until you say it out loud. If I had to guess why I've been doing it, I'm going to say three way tie between Mike Mignola, TF2 and Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness.

Zombies!

 

Got inspired to draw one of the Judge-type zombies I was developing for the story a couple years ago. Lesson learned, though: don't do a composition without having at least a rough background sketch to fall back on.

The Judge Zombies are particularly well-preserved ghouls tasked with commanding heavy machinery for the maintenance of Eb. They move around their facility on elevated tracks, hooking into the nearest limbs. Although huge and seemingly cumbersome, the limbs are actually extremely flexible when they're kept in good condition.  Although pickled nicely, they're a bit crazy: this may have something to do with being zombified while still alive, having your limbs cut off, and being enslaved as a heart surgeon for a thousand lifetimes.

Anybody have any recommendations on the background? All black and spolights weren't really cutting it for this one.

Another Kark Doodle

The Kark is a guy. He's a big guy, right? Tough. I don't know what's happening here. I guess somebody's throwing something at him? Well, they are now. In short order he'll get up there, and they won't throw things at him anymore. Or throw things in general. Ever again.

The Kark hates it when people throw things at him. 

Factions and Possession in Bioshock Infinite

Recently I wrote a blog about factions in Bioshock Infinite, wherein I described the way I felt the mechanics for a good factional combat game had been laid into BSI's combat system. Today, I had a further epiphany for an enemy that could take advantage of the factional system. Now it's time to meet the Mesmer.

The Mesmer would be a vigor-using Heavy Hitter, using the Possession vigor the same way the player would: hypnotizing their opponents. It might be used to steal away friendly units or to hijack friendly machinery. However, its most interesting mechanic is its ability to hypnotize the player. While under the effects of a Mesmer's possession, random allies and enemies would appear to change sides, making it difficult for the player to know who to kill without paying attention. To escape his possession, the player would have to kill him or risk breaking the alliance. In later levels or at higher difficulty settings he may also use a modified version of Ghost Soldier to haunt weaponry.

Deciding on his visual design would be necessary to make him immediately recognizable. The Firemen and Zealots both have props that call to mind stage magicians and escape artists of the era; arcane torture devices, coffins, and chains. Of course both the Vigor demonstration videos and the Vigor vending machines feature tuxedo-clad magicians as well. So a third stage magician style is called for. I am sorely tempted to use the Orientalist-type magician: the self-styled "swami" or "Turkish sorcerer" in ill-researched costume. It seems reasonable that such a viciously racist society would take a certain amount of transgressive delight in attending shows put on by a "foreign menace". And connecting the design to Rapture via  Epstein the Swami and Suresh Sheti does have a certain appeal, doesn't it?

To sell the design as a Columbia vigor-user and to give him a distinct profile, he'd require a totem to tie his outfit together. I'd initially thought it natural that a hypnotist carry a watch. However, I was worried that it might confuse the design with Jeremiah Fink, so I elected for a cracked bell. The bell symbolizes Pavlovian conditioning; where scientists were able to condition animals to associate the stimuli of a bell sound with the presence of food, until they would salivate purely as a response to the bell. The swinging motion of the bell also bears a certain similarity to the movement of a watch in a stage hypnotists' act: together they suggest a character capable of coercing her enemies. There's also wonderful resonance with the morbid imagery carried by the other vigor-users: coffin and the chains; the tolling of a bell in mourning is a classic thanatopsist image, as in the John Donne poem. As not for whom the bell tolls! It tolls for thee!

As a final coup d'grace, we have the Liberty Bell, to bring home some patriotic imagery. For the Mesmers associated with the Founders, the Bell retains its status as a pure symbol of American independence, and so they'd wield one. For the Vox Populi-associated Mesmers, the bell carries later, Civil-War themes of liberty for all, and that era's anti-slavery propaganda would feature heavily into their thinking. Both would carry the cracked bell; I had originally thought of it as being a censer, but felt that it would make for janky animation if the Mesmer has to move quickly in combat, so a crozier with the cracked bell hanging from the end seems like a better solution.

Finally, the Mesmer's writing and voice acting should reflect the nature of his disguise. His vocalizations at high health should be deep-voiced and bear a distinctive fake accent. It shouldn't be ridiculous: fake enough to be recognizable but not so fake as to excessively stand out from other enemy vocalizations. However, pain vocalizations and low-health vocalizations should both be handled in an American accent, recalling famous yellowface stage magician Chung Ling Soo; the man who publicly lived as his stage persona and only broke character once: to announce that he had been fatally shot.

Factions in Bioshock Infinite

Another post about Bioshock Infinite. This time I think I glimpsed something that became cut content, or maybe unreleased content: it's hard to tell when I'm just guessing from promotional material and the final game. Either way, we'll file this under DLC speculation for now. Bioshock players beware: plot speculation may include spoilers ahead. You've been cautioned. Is the bold too much? It feels like it's too much.

Early in Bioshock Infinite's dev cycle, enemies were more patriotic, wearing red-white-and-blue ensembles. Saltonstall, a politician from one of the early trailers, wore striped pants in this fashion. A Handyman in a demo wears a similar outfit. However, in later versions enemies are almost totally stripped of this political chic. The outfits are streamlined, divided into either blue outfits or red. Blue is the color of the Founders; most soldiers wear blue, their outfits assembled to look like uniforms or military gear. Their gun icons are blue. The Vox always wore red, but it's further codified as numerous enemies were given red character models, and the Vox weapons are adorned with red ribbons, in addition to their red gun icons.

 At one point in the game, you emerge to find the Vox are your allies. Friendly without being Possessed, they join you in the fight against the Founders. If you attack one (as I did, not realizing that the guys executing unarmed men were supposed to be on my side) the game warns you to stop shooting allies. This mechanic is explored for the next five minutes, then never discussed again. It was heavily touted in press releases that in certain instances enemies wouldn't attack unless provoked, which seems like a mechanic that would play into factional combat.

Knowing all that going into BSI, I assumed that the faction-specific guns were relevant to that. Most of the guns are nearly carbon copies across the aisle. The mechanics are slightly modified between factions, but in practice most weapons are nearly identical. Additionally, upgrades are faction-specific; upgrading the Vox Heater doesn't improve the Founder China Broom or vice versa, so if you want a fully upgraded shotgun you're loosely encouraged to pick sides.  There's the rub! The game's enemies were redesigned, seemingly to help players differentiate between the Founders and the Vox. The combat system was designed to facilitate the player swapping between weapons, but then you're heavily encouraged to invest in faction specific weaponry. The game even offers warnings when you hit allies in the one section where that is legitimately a serious concern. Factional combat was baked into BSI, and then almost totally ignored.

So I was thinking about how it could have been expressed. It's pretty simple: as you enter an area, enemies might take exception to the gun you were carrying and attack you, declaring you an enemy sympathizer. Alternatively, killing enemies could make the other side sympathetic to you. Depending on your relationship with a faction, they might offer you side-quests.  Potential hostiles would ally with you and you could turn battles in their favor. Allies, for ease of recognition, would share faction-specific HUD colors in addition to their appearance. How strongly do you sympathize with a particular faction? Will you fight to further their goals, or will you use them to further your own?


Why do I care about this? Well, Bioshock Infinite doesn't have a mechanic that carries it in an interesting direction the way that Bioshock's Little Sisters do. I also feel that a factional system makes for the possibility of a more interesting "moral system": rather than saying "Press X to be Good or press Y to be Evil", the game would let you join a party, then decide whether or not you want to toe the party line. Which faction you join and how much effort you put into serving them influences the outcome of the story.