[Perry] Why You Should Play Bioshock: Infinite

Elizabeth.

Today’s post is now complete. Go play the game so that you can meet her.

…What? You want more reason than that?

Do you NEED more reason than that?

Fine.

It starts simply…but then again, the best stories always do, don’t they?

You’re Booker DeWitt. You’re rowed out to a lighthouse, given a key, a gun and a simple directive.

“Bring us the girl and wipe away your debt.”

You get launched up to Columbia, a floating haven ruled by “The Prophet”, father Comstock, who’s like a…theological dictator, kinda.

Anyway, you run into the girl, find out that she has special abilities, the ability to open ‘tears’ in reality.

One of the best examples of how her power works was shown in this old E3 trailer. Watch about a minute of this if you feel so inclined (bonus, it involves a horse!).

Once you ‘rescue’ Elizabeth, she starts to run around with you, accompanying you around as you go.

Playing games for a while…you sort of learn that escort missions kind of suck.

So the team at Irrational had a dilemma on their hands.

If they forced the player to constantly watch over and protect Elizabeth, she would quickly become an annoyance. Imagine an escort mission that lasts the whole game. As soon as she died or if her AI fucked up and she wandered into the open, it’s game over and restart from the last checkpoint.

So what to do…?

They apparently seriously considered the option of removing her from the game altogether, it got that difficult to develop her AI.

Until they hit upon a new idea.

Instead of FORCING the player to protect her…they made it sort of optional, in a way.

Elizabeth can’t be hurt in combat. She doesn’t have any sort of life bar so she doesn’t ever ‘die’ when you’re in a fight.

But in the way they made her act…

They wanted to make her live and breathe. So they recorded and filled her with many many kinds of idle animations.

She’s alive. Really, really alive. Not just some fixed NPC that stands there spouting a set of ‘randomized’ lines.

Not just some tethered NPC partner who follows two steps behind you all the time and barely speaks.

Like…she talks. ALL the damned time, she talks. She’s been locked in a tower all her life, remember, so she’s possessed with this huge, burning curiosity about the world.

She’s alive even without your input and she reacts to the world around her.

She’ll wander off when you’re on the boardwalk to browse the shop fronts, or take a handful of free cotton candy from the vendor.

It’s not like she follows you…and more like she follows an approximate area around you, and the area is fairly large.

It’s hard to describe unless you see it in action. She reacts to her environment, do you know what I mean? If something interesting happens that every other NPC is looking at, she’ll stop to look at it too, regardless of how you’re moving around.

Ken Levine, the creative director of Bioshock and Irrational Games’s cutely named “Liz Squad” talk about the somewhat revolutionary (I’m using that word with FULL awareness of what it means) AI and how it came into being, how they brought her to life. It’s an interesting watch, even if you’re not really into games because there are nuggets of wisdom in there regarding how to PRESENT a living, breathing character to your audience, regardless of medium.

During fights, though she can’t be damaged, she takes cover. She hides. She SCURRIES from cover to cover to move with you or stays behind if there are too many explosions and bullets.

There’s this strange….protective urge I feel toward her despite the fact that I know intellectually that she can’t be hurt.

She reacts and moves in a realistic enough way that in the hectic moments of combat, I kind of forget that she can’t be hurt and sort of naturally focus on enemies that are shooting around her first.

On top of that, during combat, she throws shit at you.

When you run low on ammo, when you run low on salts (mana) or health? You’ll be kind of cowering behind a pillar and your gun clicks empty and you have just long enough to get that little spurt of panic when you hear, “Booker! Catch!”

Then you hit the button and Elizabeth throws you whatever you need at the time.

She pulls the objects from tears and there’s a decently long cooldown between when she can do it so it doesn’t feel particularly overpowered. It’s juuuuust enough to make her feel real, ish? Enough to get the sense that she WANTS to help you.

At the beginning and the end of the day though, Bioshock IS a game. All things must be slave to the whims of the player. If you’re the type of player to just charge through from one objective to the next, if you’re the type of player to never stop to take in the scenery or walk because you think your character might…I mean, in all honesty, if you’re that type of player, there’s a fantastic chance that this will mean nothing to you and that you won’t meet the real Elizabeth. Above all of her interests, Elizabeth is required to stay by you, so if you just charge from one objective to the next, she’ll be right there with you, doing her best to not hold you back.

To you, she’ll just be a supply of items and ammunition and a convenient plot device.

If you’re not that type of player though…

If you’re anything like me…you might meet a completely different Elizabeth altogether.

Elizabeth is vibrant. She’s utterly and completely vibrant and watching her struggle to get through the trials she faces is…difficult.

But you root for her, you know? You root for her and you hope that by the end of the game, she’ll finally get to go and see Paris, that she’ll get to go out and see the world she’s read about for so long.

I can’t describe this character in a way that will make you understand, I really can’t. Simply put, I just don’t have the words to convey to you just how amazing she is. I don’t know how to tell you about the protective urge toward her that you just gradually start to feel.

And I certainly don’t know how to tell you how badly it breaks my fucking heart to witness some of the things that she goes through.

But…maybe I don’t have to.

Maybe you’ll decide to pick up the game, just to see what all the fuss is about.

Maybe you’ll enter the city of Columbia and meet Elizabeth for yourself.

Maybe then you’ll understand.

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