Elizabeth
N: Let’s talk about Elizabeth, the ultimate hybrid of Alyx and, uh, Dog, from Half-Life 2. While she wandered around and kept busy, I thought of all those games where AIs would stand around and mutter miscellaneous chatter. Elizabeth isn’t like that at all.
Cody: Well, looking at it technically, it was part writing, part scripting, part environmental queuing. Watching her wander off to examine random items in the environment was a neat trick, but I thought it was sort of absurd when she decided to plop herself down on a couch during more dire events in the game.
N: There were some odd moments, but still, the illusion is pretty complete.
Cody: Booker’s and Elizabeth’s relationship felt pretty fleshed out. The sequence where you meet her for the first time almost feels like something out of a Disney flick and shows a lot of character. I felt a bit uncomfortable spying on her as she was going about her daily routine, but at the same time, you slowly got to know her more and more. The problem is when you have to switch between a sequence like that and actual gameplay, it seems to break down. To their credit, they managed to do it as well as you can expect, but it falls apart when you’ve got a component, like the player, that is an unknown. There’s a lot of assumptions that have to be made there.
N: Where was a specific moment where you saw it break down? I saw a few missed opportunities from time to time, but I think it worked out really well for the most part, like when she revives you when you bite the big one, that transition is awesome.
Cody: The revival sequence is pretty neat, and lends to the fact that you’re relying on her as much as she’s relying on you. It’s just a great sequene altogether. I think mostly in the random conversations that come through when you’re moving around a level break it. She’ll pipe in with a comment and Booker will reply, that sort of thing. Then, all of a sudden, her item gathering function will kick in and she’ll toss me some cash. It broke the flow once or twice.
N: She was always throwing me cash. Kelly made the comment that it was odd she would take money (she doesn’t really take it, but I digress) when you died, but give it back at random.
Cody: I really do enjoy the “item get” mechanic she has, when she calls out to you giving you ammo, medkits, or salts. It just feels jarring having the camera twist around to look at her before shifting quickly back to the combat, especially when the enemies are still in motion, running at you, or taking pop-shots with an RPG.
N: I could see that being a problem, but thankfully neither your enemies nor your reticle changes during the interaction. Besides that, accepting the aid is kind of an implicit move on your part to stop the action, rather than the game doing it at random, which would really be annoying.
Cody: Then there were bugs. During the sequence where you’re leaving the Hall of Heroes, she got stuck on a sky-rail. It was odd because I hadn’t noticed it at first and was moving down sky-rails towards the boardwalk. I was half-way down when I noticed that I was running out of ammo and med-kits, and she wasn’t saying anything.: I started looking around when I noticed she wasn’t around at all. I went back to the plaza in front of the museum and there she was, just hanging there, sparks flying from her sky-hook like she was moving. I couldn’t jar her from the rail, and she wasn’t jumping off the sky-rail of her own volition, so I had to keep moving without her.
N: That sounds like a product of their new emergent designs for her, ha! She actually got stuck between some NPCs at a point and reset with a pop. It broke me out of the experience, but with a game like this, it’s to be expected. It’s why I cut Bethesda games so much slack.
Cody: I love Bethesda’s games, but that’s for another time. I noticed they’d set it up where she’d teleport around to different spots near you if the level wasn’t agreeing with her. I had a moment where I’d hear her yelling at me to take the ammo she’d found, then have her teleport behind a wall, out of the way of gunfire, and throw me the ammo.
N: Did you find it odd that she embraces the outside world so easily?
Cody: I think it’s the game way to present her naïveté about the outside world. A bit cliche, but relevant to the story and necessary to create a sense of innocence surrounding her entrapment within the tower for so long. The recordings of her attempting to lockpick the door out of her chambers shows she wanted to escape and explore.
Combat
N: This game has a lot of combat and it feels so good. In BioShock, you were squared off with a one or two enemies at most and they clung to ceilings and leapt everywhere and it was kinda sluggish. Infinite feels much more like a shooter, but not so much that your run-and-gun, Call of Duty-style antics will let you get away with much.
Cody: You know, oddly enough, I did a lot of running and gunning in this game and got laid out maybe twice. The addition of equippable gear helped out, especially the one that allows you to gain back health when you’re nearly dead after you’ve killed an enemy. That saved my bacon countless times. I can honestly say that I paid almost no attention to upgrading my skills or changing out equipment. There’s definitely a switch here with the Vigors. In BioShock, everyone was after Plasmids and Adam. In this game, it’s never really explained what Vigors are.
N: I couldn’t run and gun. If I got in too deep, I’d get squished. Like the original game, I was thankful that the game’s tips reminded me to use my Vigors, something I’d often forget when I tried duck and cover shooting alone. I got to a point between a few of those equippables that I was able to melee my way through a bunch of foes when they lined up just right by gaining health back. I mentioned it to you before, but there was a late game multi-stage boss encounter (those still exist?) that stopped the game for me. My flow went from a conservative run and hide to simply rushing out, unloading a clip or two, then dying. The same thing happened in BioShock 2 where a few bosses were so overwhelming that it was a hassle to battle them conventionally. It reminded me a lot of Deus Ex: Human Revolution when you tackle Barrett and the whole game just stops.
Cody: Oh yes, I remember that one. I had a sniper rifle at the time, and kept unloading into its face as often as I could when I wasn’t being assaulted by cannon fodder enemies. I relied on an equippable hat that would set enemies on fire 70% of the time when meleeing them. That one killed a lot of enemies for the fire damage alone. The melee attack always felt somewhat over-powered, you could probably get away with using a lot if all the enemies were human and running at you constantly. I clung to the Sniper Rifle and Hand Cannon and only ever changed out when I ran out of ammo for either of those two guns.
N: I used the repeater and the shotgun usually. I always had ammo for all my weapons. In fact, I stopped buying ammo about a third of the way into the game and would just pick up a new gun and roll from there.
Cody: I remember having to scavenge for a different gun a lot in Halo because I’d ran out of ammo for another gun I was using. I spent a good bit of cash on buying ammo, myself, but I don’t think I ever had more than 1500 silver dollars on me at any given time throughout the game.
N: I spent a lot of money upgrading guns. It actually reminded me of Deus Ex in that way: I was always accumulating ammo for every other gun, so it just became a matter of acquiring a different gun when I ran out of a particular ammo. It’s good that the game lets you do it both ways.
The game becomes relatively easy with its incredibly liberal resurrection mechanic, but I guess that was all part of making it a game people could experience rather than play, you just kept playing and the penalty was usually money and a little patience. This versus the “resurrection booths” of previous ‘Shock games.
Cody: The resurrection mechanic is just a soft level reset in some cases, and felt realistic in the universe. You weren’t putting your DNA into a random booth that made no canonical sense, you were being revived by a desperate Elizabeth who saw you as her one hope in escape the city.
N: Yep, and I really enjoyed it here when it felt so odd to have a free respawn system in BioShock. I can’t quite put my finger on the difference. Maybe it’s just the scarcity of the encounters in those games or having to run back across half a level when you died.
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