Incendiary
Banned
Yeah that's the only piece of dialogue that made me cringe.
It might have worked better if there was more to it. But ending on that line, and then going straight to happy lockpicking Elizabeth was jarring and really bad.
Yeah that's the only piece of dialogue that made me cringe.
Yeah that's the only piece of dialogue that made me cringe.
Replaying the game, bookee gets a nosebleed around the time comstock talks to you when you head up an elevator to go to monument island. Can someone explain?
Whenever a person enters a different universe, the memories of the version of that person from that universe becomes superimposed on their own. Comstock didn't do any of the things Booker did, so he was trying to remember Anna and the Pinktertons, where his memories just did not exist.
I'm pretty sure Anna gets mentioned before this moment, which is what strikes me as odd.
I loved this game almost completely throughout...
My main problem with the story was the ending. The idea that the Comstock timeline was supposedly removed after killing Booker before the baptism... it doesn't make sense to me. The Luteces' go through the whole game setting up the idea of died, dies, will die... ie, every possibility is present at every moment and the apparent flow of time is simply illusory... so if this is the case then you can't say that the Comstock stuff hasn't happened because it has happened, is happening, and will happen.
Unless the idea is to stop it continuing to happen, by creating a loop which causes it to endlessly loop around and never get past a particular point.
Surely there are Comstock timelines where he isn't an asshole. Maybe there are Booker timelines where he is an asshole?
I dunno... I'm probably overthinking it, but it seemed like too much of a simplistic representation of the many worlds theory to leave me satisfied...
Maybe I'm in a timeline where I'm an asshole...
I'll shut up.
I loved this game almost completely throughout...
My main problem with the story was the ending. The idea that the Comstock timeline was supposedly removed after killing Booker before the baptism... it doesn't make sense to me. The Luteces' go through the whole game setting up the idea of died, dies, will die... ie, every possibility is present at every moment and the apparent flow of time is simply illusory... so if this is the case then you can't say that the Comstock stuff hasn't happened because it has happened, is happening, and will happen.
Unless the idea is to stop it continuing to happen, by creating a loop which causes it to endlessly loop around and never get past a particular point.
Surely there are Comstock timelines where he isn't an asshole. Maybe there are Booker timelines where he is an asshole?
I dunno... I'm probably overthinking it, but it seemed like too much of a simplistic representation of the many worlds theory to leave me satisfied...
Maybe I'm in a timeline where I'm an asshole...
I'll shut up.
I dunno... I'm probably overthinking it, but it seemed like too much of a simplistic representation of the many worlds theory to leave me satisfied...
Maybe I'm in a timeline where I'm an asshole...
I'll shut up.
That's true, but the Luteces key objective is pretty much to prevent Columbia from ever existing, right? If that's right, they really don't care about timelines with a "nice Comstock" or a "virtuous Columbia". Their business is just with the nasty stuff.
In that case, you might be right when you say they're trying to create some sort of endless loop, thereby removing the possibility of Columbia from all timelines.
Questions:
The idea of the grandfather paradox. If the Luteces remove Columbia from infinite timelines, then technically they would have never lived on Columbia, meaning they wouldn't be able to remove Columbia from existence. Likewise, if Elizabeth kills pre-babtism Booker, then Elizabeth was never born, meaning she never killed pre-baptism Booker.
The only escape from this paradox is "split time-line theory", which supposes each Elizabeth is distinct, and wouldn't be harmed by "killing herself" or her father in another timeline...The game obviously adheres to this, which makes me wonder why the Elizabeths fade away in the end?
I've gone cross-eyed. Many tiny logistical questions, but perhaps Levine just wants us to embrace the paradoxes. Maybe we're not supposed to understand exactly how time and space work within the logic of the game. Maybe we're supposed to struggle to grasp it in the same way that the Luteces do.
To clarify, the only worlds we care about as part of the overarching narrative are the ones where Comstock utilizes Columbia to further his agenda. According to the multiverse theory (as I understand it), every time any single decision is made, that forms a new universe. But that wouldn't make sense for a game narrative, as it would totally invalidate the importance of the story.
Due to the nature of Comstock (again, limited to the ones who have experienced things as we see them in Infinite) he will always attempt to utilize Columbia to create injustice, persecution, etc.
I do see your point about the oddity of the rules, though. Ken seems to play with the whole constant/variable portion of the universe by limiting our perception of the infinite nature of the universe to Elizabeth's portrayal of them without ever showing them directly, in order to allow for specific story points to be more ironclad.
Who said that all Comstock timelines lead to Columbia?
Also... with regards to your Columbia never existing idea, isn't there a paradox in that Bookers are repeatedly taken away from booker timelines by the Luteces... yet if the goal is to ultimately remove the possibility of a Columbia, then there would be no Columbia from which the Luteces would take these Bookers.
I don't fully understand the Luteces motivations. They recognize that every possible event has occured, is occuring and will occur... So surely they recognize that in there efforts to remove Columbia there is a possibility that they will fail...
It's a very complicated area... and I do think Levine approached it admirably... as a Story, it works.
The problem I guess I am having is can you really manipulate timelines the way the Luteces apparently try to? Is it even possible?
Well, they did end up getting a time god on their side at the very end. I'm sure that helped.
Elizabeth could see different possibilities and traverse them...
Nobody ever said she could manipulate them.
In fact the opposite had been pretty well set up throughout the game with the Lutece encounters. They kept insisting that all possibilities have been, are, and will be... When they kept repeating lines of this form, they were reinforcing the idea that timeflow is illusory, and that infact the universe is static, with all points in time merely representing different points in higher dimensional space which all exist simultaneously...
That's how I understood it, anyway. And if that is how it is, then how can you change it?
Do you wanna know how I got these scars?
Actually if you look into the audio diaries, the female Lutece believed what you said. The male actually believed that there could be a way to affect timelines so some didn't exist at all. And Elizabeth obviously has some type of power to manipulate the realities. The ending is kind of a metaphor for how she was drowning an infinite number of Booker's at the same time. That is something special.
EDIT:
Not sure if this address what you're referring to (apologies if it isn't) but there are an infinite number of sets of universes, where Rapture exists is one of these sets. Rapture's sets of universes only exist in universes where Booker rejects (and presumably is also reliant upon a host of other factors, constants, variables etc.) so we don't wipe away universes where Rapture exists at the end (there is always a lighthouse, a man, a city; all singular, so each universe only has one of each). If you mean just mean is it one of the many universes then yes, this is indeed the case. They basically made "Bioshock" refer to the entire multiverse that was shown as opposed to any specific place, area, time etc.
Again, I'm not sure if this really addresses the question (although maybe it's rhetorical, I can't really tell) so if it doesn't, sorry once again and feel free to ignore this.
"There is always a man, a scientist and a city." (something along those lines)
I'm just trying to reconcile the metatextual message about gameplay and agency from the first game with the message in the third game.
I do like the concept that in a parallel timeline, a good man could be a Hitler-type, so that was cool.
DO NOT CLICK IF YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED VIRTUE'S LAST REWARD:So have people been comparing this game's narrative to VLR's? Seeing as it has the basically same spine, that parallel timelines can be controlled and that a man can basically be the villain in his own story from another timeline?
This game has the worst telescopes. What are they, x1 magnification?
Well, talking about agency, I would say they are quite similar...
In that we have no agency. Right?
Well, then the question that I would ask is if Booker/Comstock is dead, does the "original" Bioshock ever happen?
I'm just trying to reconcile the metatextual message about gameplay and agency from the first game with the message in the third game.
I got the impression that Booker and Elizabeth were "just visiting" in the Rapture universe. I'm not sure anything specific about Comstock would influence Andrew Ryan deciding to build that city, nor does he seem to be knowledgeable about Columbia. Basically, I don't think there's any relationship between Booker and Andrew Ryan at all (though the theories that Anna will become Andrew in the post-credits scene are hilarious.)
Maybe we could make it analogous to comics. There's a DC universe, right, and a Marvel universe. They exist independently of each other and have multiple "worlds"/realities within them. There's nothing stopping the characters from traveling between them as fiction/commerce dictates - the Avengers and the Justice League have hung out several times. Yet Superman doing something in one universe won't affect what happens to Spider-Man in another. Yet, like the Bioshock multiverse, there are constants - superheroes, supervillains, genre types, etc. - that happen no matter what, they just play out in different ways.
So Bioshock Infinite and Bioshock can both happen; the visit to Rapture was incidental (and fanservice-y) and a way to get rid of Songbird; getting rid of Comstock Booker doesn't keep Rapture from existing.
Just a thought. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't.
Edit: Remember also that it's hinted that the tech for Handymen/Songbird is cribbed from Rapture. Closing off Comstock Booker's timeline keeps Columbia from developing that stuff but it doesn't affect the Rapture universe. It just makes it so Columbia can't peek in on it.
Edit: And another thing, it's kind of interesting how little of Columbia's cultural and technological input was self-generated, lifted instead from parallel realities and Rapture. Maybe Andrew Ryan had a point.
So one way to resolve this is that even though there are a multitude of parallel universes, inspired by probabilistic quantum models, that the "Booker" branch with Columbia is still somehow independent of the world of Rapture... meaning that, in theory, Elizabeth could technically show up in ANY universe and not just the ones that she is directly involved in.
Which means, assuming they had the rights to the franchise, they could have just showed up in the world of System Shock if they wanted to?
It just makes me wonder why connect the game to the original game at all then. lolI think that's a pretty fair assumption, yes.
It just makes me wonder why connect the game to the original game at all then. lol
Arguably, they could have had them jump into the Halo-verse if they wanted the whole "a man (Master Chief), a girl (Cortana), and a lighthouse (the Halo)" motif to carry through. In fact, maybe it would have been more clever if they made a fake version of the Halo universe and had the characters walk through that instead of the intro of Rapture.
I dunno, I'm just wondering how much they thought about including the original game and the way it would inform both games to do so.
Yep. I think of it like the search for M-class worlds in Star Trek. There are plenty of other worlds out there, but M-class is what they're really after, and allows for the stories to take place.So one way to resolve this is that even though there are a multitude of parallel universes, inspired by probabilistic quantum models, that the "Booker" branch with Columbia is still somehow independent of the world of Rapture... meaning that, in theory, Elizabeth could technically show up in ANY universe and not just the ones that she is directly involved in.
Which means, assuming they had the rights to the franchise, they could have just showed up in the world of System Shock if they wanted to?
"... I've always thought they were lighthouses. Billions of lighthouses, stuck at the far end of the sky."
Yep. I think of it like the search for M-class worlds in Star Trek. There are plenty of other worlds out there, but M-class is what they're really after, and allows for the stories to take place.
So considering a universe of possibilities, with an infinite set of possibilities branching off of the choices of those possibilities, an explorer of reality spaces would find it handy to have certain aspects to each world that they could depend upon. Those certain constants, always to be found and relied upon, with so much else being left to variables and choice.
In that sense, all the -shocks are connected. They all have similarities in design and theme as they may be the same story told in different ways. Maybe even the same actors, just clothed in different masks, using different props, and seeded with their own memories to ground and motivate them.
Well, then we're getting into the idea of the entirety of fiction acting as a metaverse and every book, movie, tv show, and game being a window into a parallel dimension...but that might be getting a bit far afield. It's certainly not a new idea, but I don't know if that was their intent. (Your idea is pretty amusing, though, and it would have been a really satirical and clever sequence. I'm not sure that's the tone they wanted to go for, though.)
Like I said, I don't know if my idea is good or makes sense, but it's how I'm reconciling everything for now.
Yeah, it certainly lacks explanation as to why they are so bad... y'know, apart from all the violence and that.
Just finished the game and DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN, MY MIND WAS SHATTERED!
Though I didn't see the after credits scene.
Am I missing much?
Booker wakes up in his PI office, and hears Anna crying the next room over, and goes "Anna?!" and runs to open the door to her room.Just finished the game and DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN, MY MIND WAS SHATTERED!
Though I didn't see the after credits scene.
Am I missing much?
Just finished the game and DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN, MY MIND WAS SHATTERED!
Though I didn't see the after credits scene.
Am I missing much?
VIRTUES LAST REWARD SPOILERS:More spoilers that shouldn't be clicked unless you have played God's Nector.....I mean VLR:Some people have mentioned the similarities, not a lot though. I am forced to assume that is because many people have still not experience the greatness which is a shame.
So you want a realistic element of how America was in 1912 to be either fabricated or made up? What a bad argument.
So the mask dudes in Comstock House are just different Bookers that have gone mad? They all sound like Troy Baker.
I don't want to read too much into Comstock House. I think the most likely explanation is that it's a section salvaged from an otherwise scrapped version of the game.