Bioshock Infinite - the $200 million 6 hour literally on rails interactive movie with guns thread

[Multi-headed Cow]

GUYS GUYS GUYS I have cracked the mystery of one of the things about the ending.

Spoiler

Comstock's radically different personality from Booker.

Alright, important thing to know which a lot of this is based on. A log in the Lutece lab which talks about how dimension jumping sorta meshes the personalities of the jumped person and creates a new slightly more neutral mix of the two.

Keeping in mind Comstock does less actual dimension jumping (Stealing Elizabeth), Comstock is closer to Booker's natural personality. It's mentioned/implied that Booker enjoyed scalping them injuns at Wounded Knee, is a general asshole by being a Pinkerton enforcer, is a general asshole sent to kidnap Elizabeth, is a liar (Definitely going to Paris), and is an all around bad person. Comstock is Booker had he taken a more religious bend by being baptised. Lady Comstock as much as calls him a lying murdering horrible shit in a few audio logs. The Booker the player plays is not too far removed from Comstock, just younger and without the religious (Possibly an act, or he genuinely thinks the ends justify the means) angle.

The PC Booker is dimension jumped multiple times throughout the game. In fact you're jumped (Without Booker's or the PC's knowledge) in the opening sequence. We know this because of a telltale nosebleed, and because Booker knows nothing about Columbia, which in the universe Columbia exists it was well known what with flying around and seceding and such. So you start out in a universe that isn't your own, but you're still mainly asshole Booker/Comstock. You're shoving people into your meatgrinder hand, lying to Elizabeth to get her to New York and your (Real as far as Booker is concerned) horrible criminals who want her, etc. Then you start getting dimension jumped more.

As the game progresses, you'll notice Booker becomes a nicer person. To the point at the end of course where he's up for self sacrifice, and feeling sorry for and wanting to genuinely help Elizabeth instead of dragging her off for his own benefit (Keeping in mind this is a guy who is such an asshole he sold his baby daughter). This is likely because he's going through Elizabeth-made tears, and as is said and implied during the g-g-g-ghost mother sequence and in other parts of the game, the tears Elizabeth games are either created or heavily influenced by her wishes/desires. So without the game outright telling you WOULD YOU KINDLY YOU WERE BEING MANIPULATED DUN DUN DUNNN, your character is being subtly manipulated and changed over the course of the game. To the point where it kills him in the end.

Hopefully that's legible. This is something that struck me in the shower at around 3AM and I'm clattering it down at around 4:30AM and I am entirely convinced that it's 100% accurate and what Ken Levine was doing and not just a crazy theory pieced together by a madman.

 

[Azazel]

GUYS GUYS GUYS I have cracked the mystery of one of the things about the ending.

snip

In actuality, it's because the release build of the game features a story that was written in the last 14 months before launch and then pieced together from the audio assets they had already recorded for the very different game which they ditched entirely sometime in early 2012. Booker doesn't become a nicer person, it's just audio not being used in the sequence it was intended to have been.

 

[agentorange]

GUYS GUYS GUYS I have cracked the mystery of one of the things about the ending.

snip

In actuality, it's because the release build of the game features a story that was written in the last 14 months before launch and then pieced together from the audio assets they had already recorded for the very different game which they ditched entirely sometime in early 2012. Booker doesn't become a nicer person, it's just audio not being used in the sequence it was intended to have been.

Stories being entirely rewritten, scrapped, or merged with newly written material is a pretty common occurrence. It doesn't somehow negate the final piece.

 

[Gelbvieh]

GUYS GUYS GUYS I have cracked the mystery of one of the things about the ending.

I think I get what you're saying. So either you're sane, or I don't understand.

My sanity is 48.

 

[Jaedar]

GUYS GUYS GUYS I have cracked the mystery of one of the things about the ending.

snip

In actuality, it's because the release build of the game features a story that was written in the last 14 months before launch and then pieced together from the audio assets they had already recorded for the very different game which they ditched entirely sometime in early 2012. Booker doesn't become a nicer person, it's just audio not being used in the sequence it was intended to have been.

Stories being entirely rewritten, scrapped, or merged with newly written material is a pretty common occurrence. It doesn't somehow negate the final piece.

It does when the final piece is incoherent and nonsensical.

 

[DraQ]

Yes, old school shooters are doom duke nukem 3d unreal and quake. Flashpoint and stalker is a hiking simulator for larpers like skyway.

 

[grdja]

It's a shooter where you can't even stick out around the corner

Not sure if serious. Sticking around the corner is popamole mechanic, in old school shooters you don't stick around the corner.

Fail! Or I guess Thief and SS2 (and first R6 games) were popmole? Not pure doom-clone FPSes invented leaning around corners long long time ago. Popamoles did steal it and absorb it into "pres SPACE to enter cover" gameplay. But it was there long before popamole and context sensitive environments.

 

[ohWOW]

You are full of shit trying to prove shit no one cares about

 

[ohWOW]

I'm insulting, not answering.

 

[aris]

Elizabeth still throws healthpacks at you constantly.

No, she doesn't. Could you at least try to use arguments that are vaguely factually accurate?

 

[aris]

2) Anyway, you are seriously overpowered. I think I've died 6-7 times during the entire game and most of the time because I was simply bored and inattentive. That Overkill piece makes serious damage. Another case of "Dishonored".
5) Loot Madness. I'm serious about this. If you are a hoarder like me, you will go insane. Looted all the shit I found and to be honest this is one reason I hate this game. Yeah, you cannot upgrade all weapons or plasmids, but you are pretty close to that shit. At the end of the game I think I had Life, Shield and Plasma on lvl 8 and only 4 plasmids which were not maximized. Also most weapons were upgraded to the max. I even upgraded weapons I never used. Full ammo on everything. Left lots of stuff on the ground. What the fuck.

You clearly haven't played 1999 mode, so I guess you don't know that that mode exists. You should haved played it from the beginning. And how is the level design bad? It allows for much more interesting and tactical gameplay than bioshock 1 and 2 allowed for, at the very least.

Go towards a bleak ending. It might work in the right conditions, but no. We must all suffer the same inevitable happy ending. The eternal cop-out.

How is it a happy ending? did you even play it to the end? Or are you just guessing?

3) The pacing of the game is retarded. One fight, awkward silence, resupply, next fight. The entire game can be described in those terms. They try to break this monotony by putting a section without supplies towards the end of the game.

How many games can you name that does not have this? It's a natural consequence of having enemies tied to areas, even though it's not always the case; you will frequently get ambushed too. And what does that have to do with the pacing anyway? Nobody forces you to have neither an awkward silence, or resupplying, you can just walze through constantly fightning everything, if you have the skills for it.

Here are a couple of other games the same retarded "pacing"

Half life 1 and 2
bioshock 1 and 2

 

[DraQ]

Fail! Or I guess Thief and SS2 (and first R6 games) were popmole?

You're just not hardcore old-school enough and thanks to the likes of you decline is evolving, a true purist plays shooters without any cover mechanics be it, GoW style or leaning. Fpses died after 1997.
If it has mouse aiming, WASD movement and graphics above 16-bit color I simply don't play it, and if you or anyone else had any form of conscience you would simply not play other games, I would be ashamed to even say that I play FPS games after 1997. Now you simply cannot wipe away your debt, some sins cannot be forgiven.

 

[aris]

GUYS GUYS GUYS I have cracked the mystery of one of the things about the ending.

Spoiler

Comstock's radically different personality from Booker.

Alright, important thing to know which a lot of this is based on. A log in the Lutece lab which talks about how dimension jumping sorta meshes the personalities of the jumped person and creates a new slightly more neutral mix of the two.

Keeping in mind Comstock does less actual dimension jumping (Stealing Elizabeth), Comstock is closer to Booker's natural personality. It's mentioned/implied that Booker enjoyed scalping them injuns at Wounded Knee, is a general asshole by being a Pinkerton enforcer, is a general asshole sent to kidnap Elizabeth, is a liar (Definitely going to Paris), and is an all around bad person. Comstock is Booker had he taken a more religious bend by being baptised. Lady Comstock as much as calls him a lying murdering horrible shit in a few audio logs. The Booker the player plays is not too far removed from Comstock, just younger and without the religious (Possibly an act, or he genuinely thinks the ends justify the means) angle.

The PC Booker is dimension jumped multiple times throughout the game. In fact you're jumped (Without Booker's or the PC's knowledge) in the opening sequence. We know this because of a telltale nosebleed, and because Booker knows nothing about Columbia, which in the universe Columbia exists it was well known what with flying around and seceding and such. So you start out in a universe that isn't your own, but you're still mainly asshole Booker/Comstock. You're shoving people into your meatgrinder hand, lying to Elizabeth to get her to New York and your (Real as far as Booker is concerned) horrible criminals who want her, etc. Then you start getting dimension jumped more.

As the game progresses, you'll notice Booker becomes a nicer person. To the point at the end of course where he's up for self sacrifice, and feeling sorry for and wanting to genuinely help Elizabeth instead of dragging her off for his own benefit (Keeping in mind this is a guy who is such an asshole he sold his baby daughter). This is likely because he's going through Elizabeth-made tears, and as is said and implied during the g-g-g-ghost mother sequence and in other parts of the game, the tears Elizabeth games are either created or heavily influenced by her wishes/desires. So without the game outright telling you WOULD YOU KINDLY YOU WERE BEING MANIPULATED DUN DUN DUNNN, your character is being subtly manipulated and changed over the course of the game. To the point where it kills him in the end.

Hopefully that's legible. This is something that struck me in the shower at around 3AM and I'm clattering it down at around 4:30AM and I am entirely convinced that it's 100% accurate and what Ken Levine was doing and not just a crazy theory pieced together by a madman.

Spoiler

Hey! You are right! Each time he goes through to another world, you have some memories from the previous one, but you lose much knowledge of who you are as well, you become closer and closer to a "blank slate" (as seen by many of the soldiers having spazms and vaguely recording that they died in the other world). That's a pretty good and plausible explanation why Comstock turned out to be so different. What is not clear however, is how on earth did he get the resources, being a mere soldier, to build a fucking flying city. He did get help from the two scientists, but that doesn't explain all.

 

[Commander Xbox]

Spoiler

Hey! You are right! Each time he goes through to another world, you have some memories from the previous one, but you lose much knowledge of who you are as well, you become closer and closer to a "blank slate" (as seen by many of the soldiers having spazms and vaguely recording that they died in the other world). That's a pretty good and plausible explanation why Comstock turned out to be so different. What is not clear however, is how on earth did he get the resources, being a mere soldier, to build a fucking flying city. He did get help from the two scientists, but that doesn't explain all.

One thing I didn't get was why the soldiers were having those spazms and remembering that they died? The infinite amount of dimesions all exist seperately from each other, so why would they suddenly ''remember'' that they were killed in one of them? Does booker and elizabeth crossing from one dimesion to another somehow merge the two or something?

 

[aris]

Spoiler

Hey! You are right! Each time he goes through to another world, you have some memories from the previous one, but you lose much knowledge of who you are as well, you become closer and closer to a "blank slate" (as seen by many of the soldiers having spazms and vaguely recording that they died in the other world). That's a pretty good and plausible explanation why Comstock turned out to be so different. What is not clear however, is how on earth did he get the resources, being a mere soldier, to build a fucking flying city. He did get help from the two scientists, but that doesn't explain all.

One thing I didn't get was why the soldiers were having those spazms and remembering that they died? The infinite amount of dimesions all exist seperately from each other, so why would they suddenly ''remember'' that they were killed in one of them? Does booker and elizabeth crossing from one dimesion to another somehow merge the two or something?

Spoiler

It seems like it, like MHC mentioned that the scientists said in one of the audio logs, going from one world to the other, merges the people from the two worlds. Either that, or they were simply rifts from the previous worlds, looking at them, they kind of had the same look as the things you could bring from rifts of other worlds.

 

[ohWOW]

My thoughts on tasty Infinite's plotline:

Spoiler

it's crap

 

[DraQ]

It ruins the backstory, it doesn't ruin the plot any more than Star Wars ep. 1-3 ruined the original trilogy.

The difference is that situation in New Hope doesn't really demand additional explanation - you have a clueless moisture farmer with a lot of knack for mystical Force (apparently it ran in family), wise old mentor and they are fighting space nazis. There is nothing unusual about this setup, it doesn't matter how exactly SW universe ended up where New Hope starts off, because there are no unanswered questions situating it balancing precariously on the edge of absurdity.

Now, the situation in SS2 definitely does require explanation and fast - in a setting where interstellar travel is a BIG DEAL suddenly Shodan* in distant star system.



*) Allow me to illustrate:

 

[aris]

About the scientist twins

Spoiler

Maybe this is obvious for everyone else, but now I'm pretty sure that Rosalind's twin brother is Rosalind herself, having obtained him from the other world, I think that it's the same person, just born with another gender in the other world.

 

[Diablo169]

Yeah it was fairly obvious when you listened to the audio diaries.

 

[toro]

How is it a happy ending? did you even play it to the end? Or are you just guessing?

Spoiler

At the end of the game, Booker DeWitt is awakening in his house, in the day he was supposed to give Anna. Nobody is at the door and he hears his daughter crying from the next room. And then the screen fades out before we see if Anna is still in the cradled or not.

Let me think about some things:
1) Because Booker was drowned before the baptism, he would never become Comstock. Therefore there would be no debt to be paid and no people will die in New York or on Columbia.
2) After going through all that shit, Booker would be in the best position as a father for his daughter. He would basically be 100% prepared for the job.
Yep. I call this a HAPPY ending. The story of how Booker became a good father. I can feel tears in my eyes.

The problem of the game is that Levine cannot comprehend infinity - once you define an infinite number of universes, there is no longer a true reality.
The end of the game implied that by drowning Booker, he would never became Comstock in any universe and there will remain only one reality in which he is Booker DeWitt.
And this is the problem. The world is inconsistent. You cannot jump from a multi-universe world to one-universe world just because you need to deliver a happy ending.
This is retarded and the work of a hack.

 

[toro]

Spoiler

Hey! You are right! Each time he goes through to another world, you have some memories from the previous one, but you lose much knowledge of who you are as well, you become closer and closer to a "blank slate" (as seen by many of the soldiers having spazms and vaguely recording that they died in the other world). That's a pretty good and plausible explanation why Comstock turned out to be so different. What is not clear however, is how on earth did he get the resources, being a mere soldier, to build a fucking flying city. He did get help from the two scientists, but that doesn't explain all.

One thing I didn't get was why the soldiers were having those spazms and remembering that they died? The infinite amount of dimesions all exist seperately from each other, so why would they suddenly ''remember'' that they were killed in one of them? Does booker and elizabeth crossing from one dimesion to another somehow merge the two or something?

Because the script says so. If a lot of shit is happening on the screen, perhaps you think less.

 

[aris]

Did anyone find out how to get into the tomb next to the tomb of lady comstock near the end of the game, with all the goodies?

 

[aris]

How is it a happy ending? did you even play it to the end? Or are you just guessing?

Spoiler

At the end of the game, Booker DeWitt is awakening in his house, in the day he was supposed to give Anna. Nobody is at the door and he hears his daughter crying from the next room. And then the screen fades out before we see if Anna is still in the cradled or not.

Let me think about some things:
1) Because Booker was drowned before the baptism, he would never become Comstock. Therefore there would be no debt to be paid and no people will die in New York or on Columbia.
2) After going through all that shit, Booker would be in the best position as a father for his daughter. He would basically be 100% prepared for the job.
Yep. I call this a HAPPY ending. The story of how Booker became a good father. I can feel tears in my eyes.

The problem of the game is that Levine cannot comprehend infinity - once you define an infinite number of universes, there is no longer a true reality.
The end of the game implied that by drowning Booker, he would never became Comstock in any universe and there will remain only one reality in which he is Booker DeWitt.
And this is the problem. The world is inconsistent. You cannot jump from a multi-universe world to one-universe world just because you need to deliver a happy ending.
This is retarded and the work of a hack.

Spoiler

I know, I saw that scene after the credits too. It is extremely ambiguous though, and might just be a figment of his imagination, his final thoughts before he died. The only thing certain about the ending, is that Booker did drown. If the elisabeth you knew remains, is however unknown. How is the world inconsistent with itself? You need to explain that a lot beter.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

Sounds like Lost to me.

 

[Blagrar]

I just watched a couple of videos from a Walkthrough to see what the fuss is all about and already I'm confused.

Apparently, Booker goes to Columbia to find a girl and bring her to the surface to repay a debt. Why not just stay in Columbia and screw his debtors? Granted, I don't what and how much he owes exactly, but given how hard it seems to reach Columbia, I'd wager he'd be pretty safe up there, since Columbia probably wouldn't recognize any legal claims from some dude coming to collect. Also, they'd first have to find him, which seems pretty hard to do in such a big city.
How would anyone even know he broke the deal? Wouldn't they just assume he failed and possibly died if he didn't come back? Whoever sent him probably knows who Elizabeth is and how important she is.

The transition from meandering around to the actual gameplay is also pretty damn jarring. One minute you're walking around, playing games on a fair and the next you're ripping peoples heads off with your execution moves like a fucking savage. You then proceed to slaughter your way through dozens of police officers in various ways.
That seems a little extreme just to repay a debt. Booker can obviously handle himself, couldn't he have just kill his debtor(s) instead of fighting a war against an entire city? Or just stay in Columbia. I bet he could handle any collectors coming for him if it came to blows.

Reading through the thread though, I've picked up something about the debt not being the real reason he's there. Apparently something about a guilt trip involving his daughter or something?
Can someone sum up the story for me? I don't think I want to watch however many more hours of this mess.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Downgrade total.