stoydell

Doom Eternal was one of my personal biggest disappointments with a game in a long time. I adore 2016 and I felt the changes in Eternal either made the game significantly worse or did not move the needle at all, which made me wonder why they were made at all. I think the direction they took the story and Doomguy was fucking stupid, I don't like how strongly they encourage you to deal with enemies in a very specific (but also never fun) way, and the ammo scarcity initially made me quit playing the game within the first hour (I went back to it months later but never finished it). My biggest frustration, though, is how much they overload the player mechanics. Why the fuck am I thinking about cooldowns all the time? Why do I have so many grenades? Why are there basically three melee moves? Just coming to grips with how many buttons they want me to press, but only at very specific times in particular circumstances, just made the whole enterprise a drag, and it felt like a deep misreading of what worked about 2016. It's been years since I've actually played 2016 but I'm 100% confident in my comparative assessment of these two games on a personal level.

@oldirtybearon: No doubt about that. People were not wrong about the game being better on a second playthrough, and on a harder difficulty. Foreshadowing like fuckin' crazy.

@oldirtybearon: I agree with you on almost every point, so I don't know why you say I assume that there will be another Bioshock. I don't know if one is in development (and I hope not), because you're right, this ending is pretty perfect at tying together this universe (how ever small it is at the moment and however big it has the potential to be).

@extomar: I don't think I implied that I think it's impossible to make it original and fun, but I think if they had held back on that revelation (not that I'd suggest it), it couldn't hurt the next game. I think what I'm trying to say is that when we all went into Bioshock Infinite expecting it to have very little to do with the original Bioshock, thematically or narratively, the constants and variables revelations explained the entire universe to us when we thought there wasn't really a huge universe behind it all.

In case the title wasn't clear enough, there will be spoilers, most specifically discussion about the ending of Bioshock Infinite.

I feel like when Elizabeth pulled back the curtain on the "formula" for the Bioshock universe (the constants, "a city, a man, a lighthouse"), any games that try to follow this in this series will feel derivative. They tipped their hand, and I feel like leaving us with that revelation about the universe of Bioshock is where it should be left. Then again, maybe it'll give Ken and the Irrational Games team more opportunities to subvert our expectations and, in all likelihood, blow our minds again.

I'm not positive, but I think when you look past the baptist in the first part of the game, you can see the place where Booker was baptised/not baptised after Wounded Knee. It doesn't look anything like where Booker ends up after he wakes up from the vision of New York being attack after being baptised.

@thur: I'm pretty sure that through all of Comstock's dimension hopping, we're to assume that he saw Booker coming through a tear, and set everything up for when he came to Columbia.

The last couple minutes reminded me a TON of To The Moon, and it felt pretty inspired by a Robert Heinlein short story called "-All You Zombies-", which is an excellent little time travel parable.

I think the idea is that the game isn't actually racist (the racists, nationalists, and xenophobes ARE the bad guys, after all), but is using those themes and concepts to tell a story and convey a message, whereas the problem with sexism in games is that very few games (at least that I know of) use sexism as a way to tell a story, but are instead just kinda sexist.

I did play through twice and I'm positive I loaded the proper save file (since they were separated by two months). I haven't gone back in to see if anything has changed, but my statistics screen also fucked up in both episodes. It simply said something like "Episode _: Decision 1: 50% of players agreed, 50% did not agree" and so on. Also, whenever I quit out of the save file that was messed up, on the main screen it would show me that my save file had been deleted and that Episode Two wasn't even out. So many strange technical things wrong with this episode, along with the poor frame rate much of the time.