BioShock Infinite

Regenerating health and two-weapon limits make fights calmer, with fewer decisions. BioShock Infinite is grouped with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Far Cry 5 and Gears 5 as shooters whose conventions flatten choices, in contrast to DOOM Eternal's four-question load.

Regenerating health makes players hide rather than change how they engage, and limited arsenals cut interesting weapon choices.

The world's state tells players which actions feel permitted. BioShock's ruined Rapture, full of bloodthirsty splicers, makes looting and killing feel natural. BioShock Infinite's Columbia is a semi-functioning society with shops and innocent citizens, so the same acts feel uncomfortable.

Making Elizabeth unkillable fixed escort frustration but broke the story. BioShock Infinite makes Elizabeth invincible in combat to avoid escort mission frustration. Yet the story calls her vulnerable while in play she protects Booker, finding ammo, pulling in machine guns and reviving him.

Booker is told she is an investment who is not safe. "It does create a nagging disconnect between what's happening in the story, and what's happening in the gameplay." The advice: don't make a companion invincible if the story says they're in danger.

Build the bond with a villain through the game's existing mechanics. In BioShock's Fort Frolic you don't fight Sander Cohen. You collaborate on his art project by hunting three protégés, photographing their bodies and placing the pictures in frames, using only shooting and the camera.

BioShock has no dialogue system, so the relationship is built from verbs the player already knows. "This relationship with Cohen doesn't happen in a cutscene, but through the game's most basic mechanics."

Cohen's portrait of mental illness is a weaker example. Compared with Psychonauts, which avoids making its asylum patients villains or jokes, BioShock's Sander Cohen is noted as a much less successful portrait of mental illness.

The lesson drawn: treat sensitive subjects with care and avoid stereotypes or easy cures, even when mechanics are metaphors.

Making Elizabeth unkillable fixed escort frustration but broke the story. BioShock Infinite makes Elizabeth invincible in combat to avoid escort mission frustration. Yet the story calls her vulnerable while in play she protects Booker, finding ammo, pulling in machine guns and reviving him.

Booker is told she is an investment who is not safe. "It does create a nagging disconnect between what's happening in the story, and what's happening in the gameplay." The advice: don't make a companion invincible if the story says they're in danger.

Build the bond with a villain through the game's existing mechanics. In BioShock's Fort Frolic you don't fight Sander Cohen. You collaborate on his art project by hunting three protégés, photographing their bodies and placing the pictures in frames, using only shooting and the camera.

BioShock has no dialogue system, so the relationship is built from verbs the player already knows. "This relationship with Cohen doesn't happen in a cutscene, but through the game's most basic mechanics."

Let one antagonist's personality fill every part of the level. Cohen hijacks your bathysphere and your radio, shutting off Atlas and Andrew Ryan. He sets your goals, the shops hold his twisted art, and almost all the audio diaries are by or about him.

Fort Frolic was meant as a short stopover between Arcadia and Hephaestus. Cohen is the most unhinged of the taunting villains, alongside Frank Fontaine, Andrew Ryan, Peach Wilkins and Dr Steinman.

Make the player perform in the villain's show, tuned for meaning over difficulty. After the third photo Cohen sends a wave of enemies while Tchaikovsky's "Waltz of the Flowers" plays and a spotlight follows you. The enemies were purposefully given very little health so they die almost instantly, turning combat into choreography.

Some players timed wrench strikes to the music's crescendos. "You realise that you're putting on a show for Cohen, performing a twisted ballet."

Give the villain a human motive and let sparing him be the player's call. After the fourth photo Cohen appears unprotected, admires the joint work, gives a prize and lets you go. You can kill him for a key to his other treasure, but nothing labels it a moral choice.

Andrew Ryan explains Cohen is waiting for someone to tell him he's still got it, which is why he let you live; he fears being unappreciated. The ending leaves the player asking whether he deserves to die, and whether he is any worse than them.

Keep the villain's behavior tied to whether you respect his rules. If you later find Cohen's apartment, he only attacks if you disrupt his dancing splicers, warning "Don't dare rattle their rhythm!"

The player's restraint keeps the peace, extending the relationship built in Fort Frolic.

Use a small first task as the tutorial for the level's loop. At Fleet Hall theatre, Kyle Fitzpatrick is strapped to a booby-trapped piano. You photograph his body, frame the photo in the atrium and earn a crossbow, exactly the routine you then repeat with three protégés.

Open the level after a guided start, drop the marker, orient with layout. Poseidon Plaza lets you take the three targets in any order and the compass arrow disappears, so you stumble upon them exploring shops. Big signs and a mall layout with a central hub keep you oriented.

You explore a shop, return to the center and pick somewhere new. The stable architecture offsets the destabilizing enemies.

Give each repeated target a different kind of encounter. Finnegan hides among ice statues in a frozen tunnel, Cobb is a traditional fight against waves of splicers, and Rodriguez has no battle, appearing after a poignant story moment tied to the wider plot.

You can place each photo as you go or collect all three first, and each placed picture grants a reward.

Escalate with enemies that fit the theme, not bigger stats. For the seventh level, Fort Frolic doesn't use stronger or faster enemies. It matches Cohen's unhinged personality with creepy, unpredictable spider splicers and plaster splicers.

Spawn scares behind the player, triggered by their own greed. Plaster splicers spawn silently in statue-like poses where you aren't looking, often in areas already cleared, with only cracking ceiling tiles as warning. They appear only if you use the gun upgrade station; other splicers trigger only when you pick up upgrades or loot safes.

Some players never see them. Making explored spaces unsafe again keeps tension up after the player thinks they're done.

Use one well-placed jump scare, then shift to subtle dread. In Sinclair Spirits six plaster statues surround an upgrade station; you use it, turn around and get a jump scare. The statues then vanish and the plaza fills with silent plaster splicers.

"Jump scares are a bit cheap but when used sparingly they're powerful."

Let players hear threats before they see them. Dark lower floors and strong audio mean you're more likely to hear spider splicers scuttling on the ceiling than see them, so the player scans the environment.

Rewarding virtue too well removed the dilemma's cost. BioShock asked you to kill Little Sisters for more of the resource that powers you up, but paid players who spared them more stuff in the long run.

A dilemma needs the good option to hurt. "It bungled the execution by rewarding virtuous players with more stuff in the long run."