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[sillythoughtsaboutstupidthings]

On casual vs competetive game design

I watched this video, it got me thinking a bit and the comment I posted on the video ended up being so long that it would fit here cleaned up a bit and expanded a bit. The video itself makes the very good point that to make a good game you need the lowest possible skill floor with the highest possible skill ceiling.

However.

I think there's a bit of confusion when it comes to terminology and developer intent in the video. The word "casual" here is pretty much exclusively referring to noobs, however the term can also (as is often the case in TF2 discourse) be used to refer to people who play for fun rather than to win, or simply non-e-sport players. "Competitive" on the other hand is used to both mean "highly skilled players" and e-sport. The best highlight of this confused terminology is with the two 343 quotes. When they said the game was "too competitive" they mean that it favored skilled players too much. Later when they say that Halo was always about competitive play they are referring to e-sport. However, in both cases the argument that the developers is actually making has nothing to do with skill expression, it has to do with controlling the experience. The developers believe that they need to control the experience in such a way that new players will have a "good" or "rewarding" experience by simplifying the game to lower the skill floor and giving them cheap easy kills respectively. Also keep in mind that the comment was made at a time when skill-based match making wasn't the norm yet, meaning it was entirely possible for a single player with 1000 hours in the game to stomp lobbies full of new or inexperienced players. Later when arguing in favor of e-sport, they argue against mechanics they can't control, such as physics. This is because in the eyes of the developers e-sports have to be a finely balanced numbers game that can be tweaked so that all variables are perfectly balanced to ensure "fairness". The issue here is that

Concessions made for the sake of maximum retention of new players are neither fun nor fair.

Concessions made in order to keep the game "fair" at a top 1% competitive e-sport level are sterilizing and not fun either.

What these developers fail to realize is that engineered e-sports always fail because of this, just look at what happened to Overwatch, every single change made was made in service of the competitive meta and the result is that everyone hates it and the competitive league died. I think the whole issue stems from the fact that these developers look at games like Counter Strike and League of Legends and try to emulate their sterile, point and click numbers game and apply that mind set to a game formula that simply doesn't work like that.

Ironically making a good game that's fun and has lots of options for creative skill expression can often lead to a game becoming an e-sport despite not being perfectly balanced. Perfect examples of this are Super Smash Bros (Melee being a particularly good example with wave dashes etc.) and Quake and TF2.

TF2 is an especially good example of "competitive vs casual" because the actual competitive e-sport scene for the game has their own rule-set that bans a ton of weapons while reducing the number of players and effectively cutting the game in half as many classes aren't even viable at all (or barely viable) for competitive play. Valve tried and failed (miserably) to bridge the gap between casual and competitive play and the result was a lot of weapons being re-balanced, some deserved, other not, some weapons that used to be completely dominant got nerfed into the ground and became useless, some goofy weapons that were never a problem were nerfed into the ground (RIP caber) and some already fairly well balanced weapons were nerfed into the ground specifically because they'd be overpowered in competitive play. Not that any of that mattered to competitive players as they would continue to enforce the exact same weapon bans and continued with the exact same meta as they always had.

The lesson all devs should learn is to make a fun game and then give the players the freedom to tweak their experience to fit their needs. Should a competitive scene arise it will then sort itself out using weapon bans and other tools you make available to them to adjust the experience to ensure the balance for their e-sport.

As for making a game more accessible to new players it's probably easiest if the game is designed in such a way that low skill players can feel like they're contributing in some way even if they're bad. For FPS games having objectives that aren't just based on K/D ratio does the trick. Anyone can push the payload or stand on a point in TF2 or Overwatch and feel like they are meaningfully contributing to their team regardless of if they have a 0/10 K/D.

[sillythoughtsaboutstupidthings]

Why is nothing simple and functional anymore?

This is something I've been thinking about for a while and comes up in conversation from time to time regarding things like car interiors or the very existence of "smart" appliances. But at least in those cases you can buy a used car with all the knobs and buttons you could ever want and there are still "dumb" appliances available (although likely built to a much lower standard than they were 20 years ago).

What has got me wondering where our collective sanity has gone was when I started looking for a replacement for my electric toothbrush yesterday. Turns out every single one on the market tries to be your personal dentist, or rather your annoying mom, bothering you repeatedly as you're brushing to make sure you do it their way. A 2 minute timer and a stop to remind you to brush somewhere else every 30 seconds is now just the default on every single electric toothbrush I could find that wasn't what seemed like some leftover old stock of the model I have, which is probably 10 years old or more at this point. I'm unclear as to the degree to which these brushes turn off automatically after the 2 minutes are up, I did see a video review for a more advanced "smart" toothbrush that praised it for turning off automatically, so maybe that "feature" is restricted to higher-end models. I think it's worth mentioning that my old model actually has timer that makes it temporarily stop and buzz in a few pulses every 2 minutes, which is a mild annoyance that I thought was the result of the motor spazzing out because I was pushing too hard sometimes or something, turns out it was a "feature". But at least it only does it once every 2 minutes (so typically only once per session) and goes back to brushing.

The great question is: Why the hell isn't there an electric toothbrush on the market that simply starts when you press the button and stops when you press the button again, with no interruption? Surely there's a market for that, surely I'm not the only person that doesn't want to slavishly obey a timer set by our corporate overlords? Surely?

At this point it almost seems like you have to get one of those über expensive ones that comes with some stupid app just to be able to disable the god damn timer. The ones where you pay more just to give them data about your fucking tooth brushing habits, because nothing says "smart" like cataloging your tooth brushing habits in some database somewhere for some hacker to inevitably come along and breach. Assuming they even allow you to disable the timer. God knows they have to treat us like fucking children who don't know how to brush our own god damned teeth.

"No no little Timmy you can't just brush however you want! You must remember to always spend exactly 30 seconds on each quadrant of your mouth little Timmy. Don't you know that 9 out of 10 dentists recommend brushing each quadrant of your teeth for exactly 30 seconds? Timmy you must follow what the dentists say, you mustn't deviate in the slightest, that is simply not acceptable behavior. What would your insurance provider say if they saw you?"

SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP YOU'RE NOT MY FUCKING MOM I'M A FULLY GROWN ADULT I KNOW HOW TO FUCKING BRUSH MY TEETH

It's a bleak future we live in where we let such a simple aspect of our lives be controlled by the programming of the tool that should be working for us, especially when that tool is a fucking toothbrush.

[sillythoughtsaboutstupidthings]

I want shorter games with less stuff by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding

After recently re-playing through Ace Combat 4 and 5 I've come to the realization that I prefer more concise and focused games.

Although Ace Combat 5 is largely an improvement over AC4 in just about every way I still find myself having more fun in AC4. The main difference between the two is a larger focus on story and storytelling through gameplay in AC5 with things like having your allies on the ground (or sea) actually being vulnerable to enemy fire and losing all of them being the failure state of multiple missions. Also having your squad mates participating in the battle and actually helping out, generally having a story that is more complex, more varied objectives and even some superficially branching paths (you can pick version A or B for two different missions). Despite all this the simplicity of AC4 appeals more to me. Every objective is just some variety of destroy enough stuff or a set of specific things within the time limit. Even so the simple arcade-style fun of just trying to destroy stuff with the greatest possible efficiency beats out the greater immersion and story engagement.

The games are also quite different in length, AC4 took me 9 hours to beat, while AC5 took 14. I really feel like AC4 nails its length, it takes just as long as it needs to and has a very linear sense of progression throughout with the same being true for the difficulty curve (aside from the spike in the second to last mission).

There are of course other things that could've influenced my enjoyment. Maybe it's a case of escort missions being bad, maybe it's the frustration of failing a couple of mission towards the end repeatedly that soured the experience.

Either way the difference is that AC4 left me wanting more, AC5 left me feeling relieved it was over. That's not to say I didn't enjoy AC5, it was still a great game, just not as fun.

To return to my overarching point I've found the same thing to be true with many sequels to games I like. DOOM (2016) -> Doom Eternal SUPERHOT -> SUPERHOT MIND CONTROL DELETE Sly 2 -> Sly 3 Jak 2 -> Jak 3 Infamous -> Infamous 2 Fire Emblem The Blazing Blade -> Fire Emblem The Sacred Stones Portal -> Portal 2 That's not to say that the sequels are necessarily bad games, I just didn't enjoy them as much as what came before. Games that were simpler, had less mechanics and stuff in them and in some cases also were significantly shorter.

[sillythoughtsaboutstupidthings]

Sequelitis - Doom Eternal and Super Hot Mind Control Delete

After having finished both of these games I was struck by how little I enjoyed them compared to their predecessors. One part of it might be that it's more or less just more of the same and that it becomes a "been there, done that" affair. However one thing that the two games had in common was that they both introduced things that ended up detracting from the core gameplay experience from the previous game.

New Enemies

The main thing they both share is the introduction of new enemy types that are a pain to deal with.

In Doom Eternal the marauders were the biggest pain point, luckily the designers were smart enough to only really spawn them when there are no other major threats around. The main problem is that combat against them plays like Assassin's Creed (1 and 2 at least) or Batman Arkham series combat except you're not allowed to attack on your own, only counter the enemy when it plays it's little cue animation/noise. Also due to the marauder's shotgun (and any mistakes you might make) you have to run to some fodder enemy to get your health back at regular intervals and probably to get ammo too since the marauders are massive bullet sponges.

In SHMCD the biggest issue are the enemies based on your newfound powers. The problem there is that those enemies literally don't care about anything you try to do to them, meaning that they can easily corner you unless you can charge or hotswitch away. The worst offender is the charge enemy, if you get within range of its charge, the chance that you'll end up taking a hit from it is very high. I was very rarely able to get out of the way of it before it hit me and there was no clear feedback as to what I did right those times to dodge it. SHMCD also has enemies that require you to aim at specific body parts in order to kill them, which causes some frustration when you have to spend a bunch of bullets on one guy because his arm got in the way of his torso a bunch of times, or you're just forced to wait for them to get close so you can shoot whatever arm or leg is exposed.

Too much stuff

Both games also suffer somewhat from too much stuff. In Doom Eternal there are a bunch of different upgrade trees using different currencies for each and it's just such a pain to fiddle around with. I really just don't want that kind of thing in a linear FPS game. I don't care about "player choice" when that choice is almost exclusively just "what thing do I upgrade first". Unlike an RPG where you create a specific build, in this case it's just a question of which weapon or ability you want to be slightly better than the others temporarily until you get enough points to upgrade the rest. It's not fun, it adds nothing, actually, the fact that you start with pathetically small ammo reserves and basically no armor only detracts from the experience in the early stages.

SHMCD on the other hand has a ton of "hacks" that randomly generate across a "Node" (a randomly picked set of levels you have to get through with a limited number of lives), some of which are almost more likely to hurt you than your enemies and many that are so specific that they only really help if you get a few others that fit well with them (which is unlikely to happen). The game also feels a bit too long overall.

Other issues I had with Doom Eternal:

The fact that many abilities are on cooldowns or greatly limited by some relatively uncommon resource makes it hard to use them. I never used the regular grenade the entire game, the freeze grenade I sometimes remembered to use since it at least has utility. Using the flame belch to recover armor was also something I forgot about for most of the game, the moment you take a hit it's probably all gone anyway. There are moments where it's intuitive to use the flame belch, such as when you're going to some weaker enemies to gather health, but no such thing for the grenades. The slayer blade only came out when I was out of ammo or if there was a pickup for it nearby.

Another annoying thing in Doom Eternal was the general lack of ammo, constantly having to hunt down some enemy to chainsaw because some big motherfucker just ate my entire supply of rockets and energy just gets tiresome.

I may have also made the experience worse for myself by trying to be a hardcore video gamer and playing on the highest difficulty I could stomach (which was Ultra Violence (or hard in other words) for most of the game) which meant repeating almost every combat encounter at least once.

There was also a seemingly big focus on story and lore that felt too half baked to really get me invested, but also given too much time to the point that it felt a bit in the way. In some way it felt a bit immersive since I felt like the Doom Slayer, not really understanding what's going on beyond "kill the demons and kill those who work with the demons" while someone is going off in my ear about something.

Other thoughts on SHMCD:

One big issue with the game is that the random elements of the game really start to get on your nerves after a while. You can only take so much bad RNG until you start to get mad at the game. In the later stages not getting the right hacks pretty early on usually meant death and having to start over so many times gets really annoying after a while.

The hand crafted nature of the encounters in the first game was one of its biggest strenghts, as it made every fight into somewhat of a puzzle that makes you feel smart when you solve it. Not having that makes the game feel less rewarding.

Once again I might have made things hard on myself, I played with hotswitch from as soon as I got it, which meant having only two lives instead of three. However it did help me get out of tricky situations a good number of times, so I might've been more frustrated had I not had it.

The story this time around also wasn't as interesting. It's a bit cheekily self aware about being more of the same and sort acts like you're the bad guy for wanting it.

[sillythoughtsaboutstupidthings]

GPU Industry Rant

I'm angry, angry about graphics cards.

Why?

Because what used to be a fun exercise in trying to find the best value or trying to find a good deal at a shoestring budget has turned into "how long do I need to wait to find something that isn't awful value".

It used to be that you could get a reasonably decent new gaming GPU for about $100-$150 and every new generation there'd be new cards in that price range that were a decent bit better. You used to be able to get a genuinely good gaming GPU at $150-250 with significant improvements every generation.

What used to be

It has soon been 4 years since the release of the GTX 1650, and about 3.5 years since the 1660 Super and 1650 Super. These three cards represent the last time there was a step forward at these two price points.

In 2016 we had the GTX 1050ti at $150, the RX 470 at $180 and the RX 480 at $200 ($250 for the 8GB model). The 1050ti was pretty awful value compared to the 25% faster RX 470, but it still beat previous generation $200 cards by a few percent. The GTX 1650 then at $150 just about matched the RX 470 in 2019, still not a great value improvement, especially since AMD released the slightly faster RX 570 at $170 in 2017, but at least you paid slightly less for about a match in performance. The GTX 1650 Super half a year later was about similar, matching or slightly beating the RX 580 (which in turn was a bit faster than the 480 and slightly cheaper) at $160, making for a small step up in performance compared to the RX 570. The 1660 Super at around the same time set you back $230 while providing about 25% more performance than a 1650 Super or RX 580, making it on par with 2016′s $450 GTX 1070, quite an improvement in value.

As for cards below $150, we've had nothing since the GT 1030 ($70 2017), RX 550 ($80 2017) RX 560 ($100 2017) and GTX 1050 ($110 2016).

Since then we've had

the GTX 1630, a card that costs $150 while performing somewhere between a 1050 and 1050ti, making it uncompetitive against the bad value 1050ti from 2016. The only way to make the 1630 look good is if you compared it to the 950 from 2015. The RX 6400, $160 for a card that gets beaten by the 1650 by a slight margin while also having issues in older PCs due to limited x4 PCI-E bandwidth. The RX 6500XT a $200 card that gets handily beaten by the 1650 Super with the same PCI-E issue as the 6400. The RTX 3050 a $250 (in theory at least) card that very slightly beats the 1660 Super. You're pretty much paying at least $20 more for unusable raytracing and the privilege of being able to use DLSS.

Cope

Some youtubers a while back went on about how "the age of the APU" is coming or something like that. Arguing that anything up to about $150 will be made obsolete by integrated graphics. They were technically correct, but only if you compare the latest and greatest iGPU in laptop CPUs, the Radeon 680M to the GTX 1630, which as I mentioned earlier is worse than a 1050ti, a $150 GPU that's coming up on its 7th birthday in a few months. Presumably the same 680M and possibly a 12CU RDNA 3 GPU will make it into some Ryzen 7000G APUs later this year, but even then I think top iGPU (which will be included in a CPU that'll be more expensive that it would've been to buy a cheap CPU + GPU combo back in the day) only might match RX 6400 performance or maybe 1650 performance, certainly not 1650 Super performance and absolutely not what ought to have been $150 performance this generation (which is to say something closer to the RTX 3050).

Hope

At least the used market is back to relatively normal, so if you want RX 6500XT performance but don't feel like paying $200 for it you can just buy a used RX 580 for like $90 or if you want better you can go for a 1660 Super for about $130 (both "buy it now" prices on ebay). The prices of these used cards are scaled quite appropriately from what new card pricing for the same performance levels ought to be.

The downside of buying older cards is that they don't always age that well. The GTX 9 and 10-series have aged like fine milk in the latest games (which is to say that relative performance to the 20 and 16-series is down by a lot) and AMD dropped support for their 2012-2015 lineup in 2021.

Additional notes

It is worth mentioning that the RX 6600 is currently available at $250 in the US when on a small discount and provides a good 25% performance uplift compared to the RTX 3050/GTX 1660 Super, however this pricing is not universal, the same card on German amazon is €280 or $300, on canadian amazon the best I found was 270 USD. Here in Sweden some part of increased prices is definitely due to inflation, 1660 Supers used to be around 2700 SEK, now an RX 6600 is at best 3200 SEK which is a pretty big change, sure it currently translates to just below $250 before our 25% sales tax, but that doesn't make it feel any better.

[sillythoughtsaboutstupidthings]

Bioshock Infinite

Preface

Just finished playing through Bioshock Infinite, first time I’ve beaten a game in a long time.

I remember when the game was relatively recent some people were very disappointed with how it didn’t live up to the hype and differed from the previous games in the series. I’ve seen Bioshock Infinite criticized for its cut content, two weapon limit, story that has a plot hole so large it completely falls apart and of course for abandoning Rapture.

From my experience with the game it was exactly everything I expected it to be, some of that expectation being formed by the criticism I’d read and heard. I went in expecting a competent, somewhat spiced up PS3/360 generation shooter, which is exactly what it is. Compared to Bioshock 1 which I played back in 2014 it’s clear that the game underwent some serious CoDification. I absolutely understand that that wasn’t what fans of the series wanted, but I don’t think it was all for the worse.

CoDification of a oldschool shooter

Let’s go over the ways that Bioshock Infinite was made more like Call of Duty.

Aim Down Sights

Two weapon limit

Regenerating “health” (shield)

Sprint

Linear structure

Cinematic cutscenes

As far as ADS is concerned it’s thankfully basically a completely pointless addition. “Hip fire” or in other words shooting without aiming down sights is the optimal way to play 95% of the time, the spread on the weapons is so limited that you can be very accurate at almost any range with almost any weapon. Additionally the ADS mechanic itself adds recoil that isn’t there when not aiming down sights and also removes any spread from all weapons, resulting in vastly different behavior for something like the machine gun. This in combination with most weapons using iron sights actually makes it more difficult to aim down sights. The only time ADS comes into play is for the sniper rifle and maybe the hand cannon or carbine when enemies are absurdly far away, but most of the time you’re better off just repositioning closer to them in those cases.

The two weapon limit is probably the most controversial change from previous Bioshock games, not being able to carry around an entire arsenal in your pocket marked a clear departure from the series’ oldschool roots. Overall I think it’s a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand in you can’t use any weapon you want whenever you want, but on the other hand it allows for more weapons total and also (at least in theory) forces the player to switch to whatever weapons are available. However in Bioshock Infinite this is implemented sort of half-way, as you still have your pockets full of ammo for all the different weapons, the only things restricted is which you can actually use. This differs from most games, like CoD or Uncharted etc. where the only ammo you have is whatever you found with the weapon or that you picked up from other copies of the same weapon. In contrast in Bioshock Infinite weapons found on the ground don’t supply you with ammo, rather random drops from enemies and vending machines provide ammo like in previous Bioshock games. On top of this you might randomly get some extra ammo from Elizabeth if you’re about to run out. This means that for most of the game you can simply keep your favorite couple of guns and just ignore any others. The only exception is when there is so much fighting between vending machines that you end up running out of ammo, in which case you might actually have to pick up weapons across the level to fight on. In my experience I ended up sticking to a carbine and RPG combo for almost the entire game, however sometimes I would swap weapons mid-fight, most often to a sniper rifle to conserve ammo on my carbine. Toward the end I was forced to give up my carbine in favor of the more powerful alternatives, the hand cannon and sniper rifle in order to dish out as much damage as possible. Overall I think the game would’ve probably been better off with the old weapon system, or if they wanted to have a CoD style two weapon limit they should have implemented it all the way. As it is it doesn’t add much in terms of enjoyment and adds lots of frustration toward the end when you scramble to find anything usable after having emptied your weapons into multiple tin men, a handyman and tons of grunts.

The shield is more of a Halo-fication since it works exactly like it, you have a regenerating shield that takes some time before it starts to regenerate after being hit and when you run out of shield you start taking damage to your health. This essentially makes it so that some of the damage you take is completely negated as long as you sit behind cover for a bit. In practice this allows you to save money on health kits and worry far less about the damage you take. However unlike previous games you can’t carry health kits with you to restore your health when needed. This changes the nature of combat encounters, as rather than being focused on conserving the life you have, you can gamble a bit more knowing that you can always get your shield back as long as you don’t take enough damage to run out of health. Combine this with occasional health kits thrown by Elizabeth and you get combat encounters that have lower stakes compared to previous games while being more dynamic at the cost of having to sit and hide behind cover from time to time, although often this can be substituted with a fun ride on the skylines. Overall a good change in my opinion, as the old system just made me anxious about every bit of damage I took.

Sprint is basically only ever used to get from point A to point B, in combat it’s almost entirely pointless since you rarely want to face away from enemies when retreating, and often there are skylines you can use to reposition faster. It does help traversal though since the areas in general are far more open and larger in scale compared to the cramped corridors of Bioshock 1/2. I would’ve preferred a simple increase to movement speed (as it would’ve made combat faster and more dynamic as well), but at least there’s the equipment thing that gives you faster strafe and backpedaling speed (which I kept equipped the entire game).

The linear structure was in my opinion an improvement compared to Bioshock 1, I found it quite annoying to backtrack and try to navigate the samey looking corridors of rapture. Also I’m a bit lazy and went into the game with the expectation of turning my brain off, not having to think too much about where I’m going or where I came from allows me to do that.

As for the cutscenes I feel like they were a fine addition, even if the engine clearly wasn’t intended to show characters and objects as up close as they did in some cutscenes. In some cases I saw some really odd looking shadows, like on the very polygonal baby and any closeup of someone’s face.

On the story

The story really is as confused as I’ve heard, there’s the whole people being un-killed business that makes no sense. More confusingly what happens to all the universes that are hopped in and out of? The original universe you come from has no Booker nor Elizabeth left in it, that universe’s Comstock must be quite frustrated to see that his plans were ruined just like that. The second universe you go to ends up presumably having two Bookers and Elizabeths temporarily, or perhaps that universes Booker and Elizabeth had already jumped somewhere else? Who knows. The “final” universe where the revolution is in full swing has a dead Booker and a second Elizabeth locked up in Comstock house. What happens then when Songbird grabs Elizabeth and takes her to get experimented on? Are there two Elizabeths now in that universe or did the other one manage to flee somehow? Another Elizabeth then drags you into the future, supposedly from that same universe you were in, but she then sends you back to stop that future from happening, but the only way for that future to happen is for him to be gone from the past because he was pulled into the future like that. Also where’s the second Elizabeth in this (these?) universe(s)? The ending also makes no sense. I mean if there are infinite parallel universes how exactly are you going to stop someone from “being born in the first place”, your actions are obviously only going to affect a single universe or is Booker saying he’s going to spend a literal eternity going through every single possible universe? Booker is Comstock, so stopping himself from being born is a grandfather paradox. If it’s a metaphorical statement then that means he’d have to somehow go through every single possible universe where he becomes Comstock to stop it from happening, but given the infinity of universes that’s also impossible and even if it was it would also undo everything he did to get to that point in the first place creating another paradox. Could Ken Levine just not figure out a good way to wrap things up after all that dimension hopping? It seems so.

Aside from that both political sides of Columbia are cartoonishly evil to the point of it being kind of silly, one is lead by a cult leader who argues that racism is good because cruelty is good because god, like some cartoon villain version of an American conservative. On the other side you have a revolutionary with red flags who literally kills children for no apparent reason, as if to try to outdo the evil of real life revolutionary leaders who waved red flags.

The hamfistedness of the messages portrayed is also quite absurd. There’s moments like at the start of the game when they make a public exhibit of a mixed race couple and raffle out baseballs to throw at them, it’s completely absurd and cartoonish. There’s of course also the capitalism stuff with Fink’s wonderful philosophies some of which aren’t too far off from the real life dystopian hellscape that is the USA. I mean if you showed Fink's personal creed to the average Wallmart manager they’d probably agree wholeheartedly if the antiwork subreddit is anything to go by. However I will say that the bit where workers have to bid with times to complete a work task in order to get the job and thus be able to earn an income was not only funny but also an interesting interpretation of where uncontrolled capitalism could go in the case of a complete oversupply of workers. Sadly it’s not shown what the consequences of failure to complete the work in the time you’ve set for yourself is. It’s also interesting because in real life consulting firms will bid on jobs in a similar manner, with the cheapest (which typically means the one promising to use the least number of man-hours, but could also mean the one to pay their workers the least) typically winning. A system that obviously can’t ever go wrong ever, absolutely doesn’t lead to vast underestimations of the time it takes to complete something and never leads to quality issues.

Some additional thoughts on the game

I ended up barely using any of the vigors the game provided, just like with the weapons I found a couple that really worked and stuck to them throughout most of the game. In this case it was Shock Jockey and Bucking Bronco adding Devil’s Kiss to the rotation toward the end of the game to attempt to do a bit more damage to the big sponge enemies.

Speaking of spongy enemies, the handymen are so spongy they make Borderlands games look like their enemies’ healthbars are perfectly reasonable.

The level design of the game and the shooting as a result is much more more enjoyable than Bioshock 1. There are far more opportunities to get out of trouble either on skylines or by hiding behind cover.The overall scale of everything is also larger generally putting enemies at a greater distance from yourself, meaning you always have a good chance to take out melee enemies before they’re on you like a zombie horde in Left 4 Dead. Thanks to this, the changes in mechanics and the nice upgrade that makes enemies ragdoll when you melee them I didn’t have the problem of being overwhelmed by enemies running straight into my face like in Bioshock 1. The only time I faced that issue was against handymen, because they just refuse to stay more than a few meters away from you for more than a couple of seconds, jumping and running to you the moment you try to reposition and of course they take minutes to kill.

The PC version is an interesting beast, on the lowest settings it can almost run on integrated graphics from the time, while maxed out at 1440p it often struggles to stay above 60fps on my Ryzen 2700X, RX 480 machine that in terms of GPU power vastly outperforms the best GPU at the time and even slightly beats the best GPU that came out later the same year as the game

Overall a solid 7/10 experience.