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Bioshock Infinite | Official Spoiler Thread |

Beat the game today. The best part of the game by far was the Quartet singing "God only Knows.' it's one of my favorite songs of all time, and it caught me off-guard.
 

Shahadan

Member
Just finished it. Meh. Saw it all coming.
Well except the Rapture appearence, but amusingly, I was hoping for something like this somewhere during my playthrough. Can't remember when and why though, maybe there was a subtle hint.
 
Just finished it. Meh. Saw it all coming.
Well except the Rapture appearence, but amusingly, I was hoping for something like this somewhere during my playthrough. Can't remember when and why though, maybe there was a subtle hint.
tumblr_mklu70kIai1qjm4z5o6_250.png
 

TriniTrin

war of titties grampa
Does anyone think that the last scene after the credits is the same universe as rapture? I still don't understand how the Rapture tribune got into Booker's Apartment.

1364791201681_zps0c4f4b00.jpg
 

Neverfade

Member
I thought I had this all figured out, but I have one more question. The "struggle to create memories where none exist" thing -- how does it work. Shouldn't Booker have memories of selling his kid and seeing the exact same folks who are helping him now? I get that the rift jump fucks with your mind, but does anyone remember the specific instance where this is all explained?
 

Guevara

Member
I thought I had this all figured out, but I have one more question. The "struggle to create memories where none exist" thing -- how does it work. Shouldn't Booker have memories of selling his kid and seeing the exact same folks who are helping him now? I get that the rift jump fucks with your mind, but does anyone remember the specific instance where this is all explained?
You think you've been hired to capture adult Liz to "wipe away the dept", but actually you're remembering 20 years prior, when you sold baby Liz to wipe away the debt. Exactly what Lutece says: manufacturing new memories from old ones.
 

Salamando

Member
I thought I had this all figured out, but I have one more question. The "struggle to create memories where none exist" thing -- how does it work. Shouldn't Booker have memories of selling his kid and seeing the exact same folks who are helping him now? I get that the rift jump fucks with your mind, but does anyone remember the specific instance where this is all explained?

Not really. There's a voxophone that states when Robert Lutece was brought over, he was having problems dealing with the cognitive dissonance. The game deals heavily with quantum states...dead and/or alive...heads and/or tails...so the mind can be seen as another potential one. Bringing him over made his mind both Robert and Rosalind.

When Booker was brought over, no entity known as Booker Dewitt could be found...there wasn't any, since the baptism. Everything that happened post that never happened in this world. Trying to remember those past 20 years must've been like trying to remember something out of nothing. He could remember anchor points, or points shared with Comstock, but not much else.
 

Neverfade

Member
Not really. There's a voxophone that states when Robert Lutece was brought over, he was having problems dealing with the cognitive dissonance. The game deals heavily with quantum states...dead and/or alive...heads and/or tails...so the mind can be seen as another potential one. Bringing him over made his mind both Robert and Rosalind.

When Booker was brought over, no entity known as Booker Dewitt could be found...there wasn't any, since the baptism. Everything that happened post that never happened in this world. Trying to remember those past 20 years must've been like trying to remember something out of nothing. He could remember anchor points, or points shared with Comstock, but not much else.

This answer pleases me.
 

Korey

Member
I thought I had this all figured out, but I have one more question. The "struggle to create memories where none exist" thing -- how does it work. Shouldn't Booker have memories of selling his kid and seeing the exact same folks who are helping him now? I get that the rift jump fucks with your mind, but does anyone remember the specific instance where this is all explained?

Going through a tear mixes your memories together from the old one and the new. Your brain tries to piece it together so that it makes some sort of coherent sense.

The first time he hears "bring us the girl and wipe away the debt" is a note planted on the lighthouse by the Luteces. It's like inception. So he, like you the player, assumes the goal is to retrieve a girl to pay back some debts. Even though it's a false memory (nobody actually went to his office to tell him to go to Columbia and retrieve a girl), it's reinforced by what he sees and hears in the new universe.

What he doesn't realize is that it's actually part of an old memory, from 20 years ago. He just mixed up the context of the mission he's suddenly shoved into and his brain adapts to it. He does remember Anna, to some extent, but it's kind of blurry and he doesn't put it together.

The first time he "sees" the fake office event happen is when he passes out from the baptism at the entrance of Columbia. Note that later he sees a vision of NYC burning. This is because his memories are mixed with Comstock's from the current universe.
 

itxaka

Defeatist
Jesus fucking christ the comstock boat figth. How fucking boring. Stupid shooting getting on the way of a magnificent game. Just fucking boring to deal with hordes and hordes of enemies for...what reason? To pad the game length? To make it more "epic"?

Im even thinking of not finishing it, getting bored of the figths. Seriously what a piece of shit boring parts of a otherwise very brilliant game. I can find the logic there Mister Ken Levine.

Sigh.
 
Bioshock Infinite has about the same appeal as the God-awful film, The Butterfly Effect, and is only held to a different standard as it it a video-game.


Edit: Or Donnie Darko (also ironically with a Tears for Fears cover) now that I think about it. In fact the more I think about Infinite's ending the less impressed I am.

Nosebleeds and all!
 

Guevara

Member
Jesus fucking christ the comstock boat figth. How fucking boring. Stupid shooting getting on the way of a magnificent game. Just fucking boring to deal with hordes and hordes of enemies for...what reason? To pad the game length? To make it more "epic"?

Im even thinking of not finishing it, getting bored of the figths. Seriously what a piece of shit boring parts of a otherwise very brilliant game. I can find the logic there Mister Ken Levine.

Sigh.

I agree. It makes me glad I played it on normal difficulty first.
 
Jesus fucking christ the comstock boat figth. How fucking boring. Stupid shooting getting on the way of a magnificent game. Just fucking boring to deal with hordes and hordes of enemies for...what reason? To pad the game length? To make it more "epic"?

Im even thinking of not finishing it, getting bored of the figths. Seriously what a piece of shit boring parts of a otherwise very brilliant game. I can find the logic there Mister Ken Levine.

Sigh.

But you're like, 30m max from the ending if you're on the Comstock boat :(
 
Jesus fucking christ the comstock boat figth. How fucking boring. Stupid shooting getting on the way of a magnificent game. Just fucking boring to deal with hordes and hordes of enemies for...what reason? To pad the game length? To make it more "epic"?

Im even thinking of not finishing it, getting bored of the figths. Seriously what a piece of shit boring parts of a otherwise very brilliant game. I can find the logic there Mister Ken Levine.

Sigh.

This part of the game is clearly when they ran out of steam.
 
So... I know people are very high on BS:I right now, and thus this won't be a popular opinion... but I feel like it was a bunch of pretentious wankery that is only being lauded as genius because our medium has so few "big budget" examples of real avante garde thinking/narrative.

The entire Rapture bit felt like pandering, and worse, felt like a self-aware Ken Levine recognizing that he has been telling the exact same story, moderately well, for more than a decade now.

In the realm if "multiple-world-theory" themed sci-fi, this is merely "me too" fiction, and as a commentary on player agency it is Levine repeating himself, while his betters have moved on and are working on ways where player agency PRECISELY means something to building a shared post-modern story between author and player.

Ironically, I got Spec Ops for free preordering this, and felt it was a massively superior exercise in game narrative. And hell... it even had pop songs in it too. :p

Bioshock Infinite has about the same appeal as the God-awful film, The Butterfly Effect, and is only held to a different standard as it it a video-game.


Edit: Or Donnie Darko (also ironically with a Tears for Fears cover) now that I think about it. In fact the more I think about Infinite's ending the less impressed I am.

this is a pretentious post
 

Nugg

Member
This is bothering me. A lot.

I'm sure there's still a few easter eggs that are just that, fun stuff with no real meaning. Rapture was established in 1946. The only way would be going to Rapture with a tear and bring it back. Maybe Lutece went to Rapture and lost it there.

A Rapture DLC would be fun though.

By the way, did you know that Lutece is the french name of Lutetia, the roman city where Paris now stands? Someone mentioned it earlier and I thought it was neat, considering Elizabeth's obsession with Paris.
 
I know, Im just mad as hell :(

Oh, the very last fight? Yeah that really made me mad. I dunno if it's actually easier to take a more proactive approach with Charge and close-range tactics on normal/hard, but I hadn't upgraded that stuff in 1999 mode so it didn't help. It's hard to give tips because there's a certain amount of luck to it - sometimes the heavy hitters hang back for a lot longer, the gunboats might miss a lot and so forth. I finally got through it using up all the carbine ammo, then the sniper rounds and finally just zooming around on the skyline with the RPG and grenade launcher until all the zepplins were down and the deck cleared.

Try to memorize where all the supplies are so you can plan accordingly, because when I didn't have a zen-like perception of where everything was, I ran out of ammo all the damn time. Amusingly, I tried repeating that fight (out of morbid curiously) a couple of days after finishing and won with my second try by essentially hanging around very close to the core and dying repeatedly - I had a lot of money, your vigors are partly refilled, songbird still does his stuff on the zepplins, and being able to get several kills per death outweighed the enemy's hp regen.
 

Shahadan

Member
I just used the water magic to kill enemies before they could board the zeppelin haha. And Shock Jockey to stun/headshot the rest at the same time. It was boringly easy.
 

Laughlin

Member
So I feel like the answer to this is no, but are there any equivalents to a man, a lighthouse, a city in the System Shock games?
 

jackdoe

Member
Jesus fucking christ the comstock boat figth. How fucking boring. Stupid shooting getting on the way of a magnificent game. Just fucking boring to deal with hordes and hordes of enemies for...what reason? To pad the game length? To make it more "epic"?

Im even thinking of not finishing it, getting bored of the figths. Seriously what a piece of shit boring parts of a otherwise very brilliant game. I can find the logic there Mister Ken Levine.

Sigh.
I was about to give up as well until I read someone's suggestion to just use Return to Sender traps around the core. It took no damage and the fight was a breeze.
 
I forgot to mention a lot of people advised using undertow to quickly clear the RPGs from the upper-side catwalks, and if you've got it upgraded you can do the same to the Patriots. I was about to try that before I finally nailed it.
 

Quesa

Member
My bro just asked me this and I'm not sure about this -- if Comstock pays Booker's (the one you play as) debts for Anna, then how are the Luteces able to get him to cross a tear and go after Elizabeth? Is the booker you play as from a universe where the Luteces paid his debts (if so, how did he lose Anna)?
 
My bro just asked me this and I'm not sure about this -- if Comstock pays Booker's (the one you play as) debts for Anna, then how are the Luteces able to get him to cross a tear and go after Elizabeth? Is the booker you play as from a universe where the Luteces paid his debts (if so, how did he lose Anna)?

I'm not sure if this is the question but:

  1. Booker sells Anna to Comstock and Comstock pays off his debt (probably using Robert Lutece to pay whoever Booker owes money to).
  2. Comstock renames Anna to Elizabeth.
  3. The male Lutece becomes guilty for taking Anna and meddling in the multiverse. Both he and the female Lutece (who he forces to help him) decide to reset things.
  4. Comstock orders the Luteces to be murdered. They get scattered in the probability space.
  5. The Luteces, now scattered among the probability space, and appear to Booker, offering him the chance to take back Anna.
  6. Booker crosses through the Luteces' tear to the set of universes where Elizabeth is. Booker forgets almost everything after crossing over (Comstock's memories conflicting with his own) and he invents new memories around 'bring us the girl, wipe away the debt'. He doesn't actually have any debt at this time.

I hope that helps/is what you're asking.

EDIT: At the above, we haven't had non-euclidian ye...until now.

EDIT: Did anybody actually use the Dollar Bills vending machine? With how plentiful supplies were, and with Elizabeth's constant discovery of non-existent items they seemed a little redundant to me.
 
I'm not sure if this is the question but:

  1. Booker sells Anna to Comstock and Comstock pays off his debt (probably using Robert Lutece to pay whoever Booker owes money to).
  2. Comstock renames Anna to Elizabeth.
  3. The male Lutece becomes guilty for taking Anna and meddling in the multiverse. Both he and the female Lutece (who he forces to help her) decide to reset things.
  4. Comstock orders the Luteces to be murdered. They get scattered in the probability space.
  5. The Lutece's, now scattered among the probability space, and appear to Booker, offering him the chance to take back Anna.
  6. Booker crosses through the Luteces' tear to the set of universes where Elizabeth is. Booker forgets everything almost everything after crossing over (Comstock's memories conflicting with his own) and he invents new memories around 'bring us the girl, wipe away the debt'. He doesn't actually have any debt at this time.

I hope that helps/is what you're asking.

EDIT: At the above, we haven't had non-euclidian ye...oh wait. Sorry.

Another One Who Knocks post added to the OP
 
Something that's been bugging me...What happened to the Elizabeth from the martyr Booker timeline? The timeline the back-half of the game plays out in.
 
My bro just asked me this and I'm not sure about this -- if Comstock pays Booker's (the one you play as) debts for Anna, then how are the Luteces able to get him to cross a tear and go after Elizabeth? Is the booker you play as from a universe where the Luteces paid his debts (if so, how did he lose Anna)?
I'm guessing it's against his will, they just grab him through and plant the note on the door of the lighthouse to help him to convince himself that he's supposed to be saving Elizabeth.
 

Quesa

Member
I'm not sure if this is the question but:

  1. Booker sells Anna to Comstock and Comstock pays off his debt (probably using Robert Lutece to pay whoever Booker owes money to).
  2. Comstock renames Anna to Elizabeth.
  3. The male Lutece becomes guilty for taking Anna and meddling in the multiverse. Both he and the female Lutece (who he forces to help him) decide to reset things.
  4. Comstock orders the Luteces to be murdered. They get scattered in the probability space.
  5. The Luteces, now scattered among the probability space, and appear to Booker, offering him the chance to take back Anna.
  6. Booker crosses through the Luteces' tear to the set of universes where Elizabeth is. Booker forgets everything almost everything after crossing over (Comstock's memories conflicting with his own) and he invents new memories around 'bring us the girl, wipe away the debt'. He doesn't actually have any debt at this time.

I hope that helps/is what you're asking.

EDIT: At the above, we haven't had non-euclidian ye...until now.

That's great, thanks!
 
So... I know people are very high on BS:I right now, and thus this won't be a popular opinion... but I feel like it was a bunch of pretentious wankery that is only being lauded as genius because our medium has so few "big budget" examples of real avante garde thinking/narrative.

It's being lauded as 'genius' [is it really?] because it's one of the very few games that successfully foreshadows a major twist constantly throughout without the majority figuring out said twist until the desired reveal. Because it utilizes a number of methods to foreshadow that reveal [dialogue - both character and collectables, environmental details and scripted sequences], with a variety of sections / dialogue within the game taking on a fresh meaning upon completion of the game [Hall of Heroes, for example].
All whilst being set amidst unique aesthetics and combat with greater verticality and depth than your average AAA shooter [compare BS:I to your latest military shooter for example]. It's not exactly something that is seen regularly within this industry, as you say, and it's something I imagine is rather difficult to successfully pull off. The sheer amount of clues and double entendre throughout the game is pretty staggering - and most of it designed to give the player a way of justifying these clues from their current understanding of the rules of the narrative.

It doesn't hurt that the writing is of a high quality throughout.

The entire Rapture bit felt like pandering

Well yeah, it was a nice bit of fan service that they managed to tie into the narrative. I don't see the problem - they didn't dwell on it, and made a single meta joke on the subject - yet you watch let's plays or read comments on forums and people adored that section. It also legitimises the use of the Bioshock name [besides the gameplay and common themes].

and worse, felt like a self-aware Ken Levine recognizing that he has been telling the exact same story, moderately well, for more than a decade now.

You'd have to be rather cynical to take relevant narrative details [in this case Elizabeth's explanation regarding the constants of the tears] and call meta-commentary on the limitations of the lead writer. Levine's games do contain similar themes yes; but I doubt this was a call to that.

In the realm if "multiple-world-theory" themed sci-fi, this is merely "me too" fiction,

The genius is in the execution of the reveal, not the unique nature of the narrative. Everything is spelt out to the player, but let's plays and forums indicate the vast majority didn't figure out the ending until it occurred. Just like Booker [though the player is intentionally misled via Bookers own misunderstanding of 'reborn']. It's also one of those rare AAA games in which the player learns everything about this world and the various rules at the same pace as the protagonist.

and as a commentary on player agency it is Levine repeating himself,

True, but the ideas presented are one of the themes of a canon Bioshock game [from those we've seen so far].

while his betters have moved on and are working on ways where player agency PRECISELY means something to building a shared post-modern story between author and player...

Could you list some examples? [AAA games of course, not indies.]
 
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