BioShock Infinite is as much a failure as a success. It succeeded in how it made players feel at launch through more emotional stimuli like your AI companion Elizabeth and the gorgeous aesthetics of the floating city of Columbia. It arguably failed in barely feeling like a
BioShock game and in having holes in both its plot and its message about American politics and religion.
Infinite changed dramatically over the course of its development. The game we were all promised in 2010 with the game’s longest E3 gameplay demo looked like a true successor to
BioShock, if still highly divergent, but behind the scenes it still needed a lot of work. In early 2012 a year before release Irrational Games brought on Jordan Thomas and Rod Fergusson to rein in development and finish the game. The result is a game that’s absolutely shippable and technically delivers on several promised features just rarely in the way those features were clearly intended.