MikeWehner said:
"Way to advance gaming as a medium, guys. Sexist escort missions, here I come!" It's not an escort mission, I explicitly state that it's not an escort mission in the review. You are wrong.
"you just have to sit there and watch it happen because GAME WON'T LET YOU!" You are wrong.
"I'm guessing they were making it an actual sequel to Bioshock until Dishonored dropped." You are wrong.
"I honestly hope I'm wrong" Well congrats, because you ARE wrong!
Now stop being an Amazon-esque review bomber and shut your mouth before you play the game. <3
I watched the video again to make sure I didn't miss anything you said about Elizabeth. You talk a lot of about Elizabeth's abilities to do things like resupply and spawn in cover. You never explicitly state that it's not an Escort Mission. Maybe I should unpack what I think an "escort mission" is. An escort mission is when an NPC exists who is important to moving the plot forward, but is not a powerful combatant. This results in them dying and causing you to fail the mission unless you CONSTANTLY babysit them. Hell, even NPCs who CAN defend themselves tend to walk in front of your gun while you're trying to shoot in other games. So if you say Bioshock Infinite is avoiding this, then I say good for them. (With the caveat that non-annoying NPC AI is like enemies who use grenades intelligently. I'll believe it when I see it.) Glad I was wrong.
No contrived "you have to watch the bad guys kick the puppy and twirl their mustache, BECAUSE EMOTIONS!" moment? Glad I was wrong.
I admit the last thing I saw about Bioshock infinite prior to watching your video review was an old trailer where they show off the sky city and the lighting engine and everything is deserted and then a thing attacks the camera, so that led to the expectation that it would be like Bioshock 1 and 2 but with a sky city. Now that I stop and think about it, creating a ton of NPC dialogue and behaviors and clean clothing on all the models would take a lot of time, so it's ridiculous to think they were planning on making a destroyed city like Bioshock 1 and then changed it when Dishonored came out. So, glad I was wrong.
You can see why people would react this way, though, right? Prominent developers at industry events are explicitly telling us what we've suspected for years: that they are idiots who think polygons equals emotions. Games like Aliens: Colonial Marines are screaming "We are liars, we are liars, we are liars! Don't believe us!" every time they release another "vertical slice" bullshit video. This is the type of reaction that the entire industry is conspiring (albeit probably inadvertently) to engender.
Anyway, Kudos to you for responding the way you did. That takes guts. You're putting your credibility on the line to back up your statements. This doesn't strike me as the way a typical component of the industry hype machine would behave. Maybe you're even telling the truth. Maybe Bioshock really is some kinda transcendental emotional uber storytelling combat game.
Man, wouldn't that be nice? Honestly, I would settle for a decent first person shooter with a cool world and which doesn't trip all over itself in the gameplay. But they can't advertise that, they can't say "this game is pretty good, here's what's in it," they have to promise us the BEST GAME EVAR every single game that comes out.
So yeah. Hoping for the best. Sorry for being overly pessimistic. But you can see why my expectations would be so low, even after watching your review, right? Although I really can't think of anything you could have done differently. It's not like you could preface your review with "I know this sounds like hype, but no, the game actually IS good, honest." Actually by referencing the TV campaign you kinda sort of did do that. Didn't work. Huh.
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