It's not worth spoiling such a major plot point. However good the actor, someone would have caught on..
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Bioshock Infinite | Official Spoiler Thread |
- Thread starter BruceLeeRoy
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It's not worth spoiling such a major plot point. However good the actor, someone would have caught on..
Hot Coldman
Banned
They could have given him like a fake pseudonym, or something. Or maybe that goes against whatever VA guild there is. IDK.
I would have liked to have seen it, nonetheless.
Yeah, and Comstock is significantly older than Booker, and people's voices do change as they get older.
I don't think that's possible. Well, at least that's not what the game is hinting at or trying to say. At the end point in the game Liz transcends the universes. I think of it like she's operating outside of the confines of the multiverses. If the timeline is a tree that splits at important decisions, then she is looking at the tree from the outside. When she kills Booker before the baptism she's essentially cutting off that branch of the multiverse. It wouldn't take another universe where she fails at killing booker. It would take another multiverse.
Remember, there were plenty of universes where she failed. That's why the loop was happening in the first place. It took her getting outside of things and getting to the source root to do it.
Um, no, we could have things like that. In the ending she even stated "there's always a lighthouse, and there's always a man." So yes more of these things could and do happen. But this specific game isn't about stopping all bad men everywhere or even the possible bad man Booker could become outside of this. It's about stopping this specific bad man who really fucked things up not just in one universe, but multiple through the Luteces.
I think that one has to just accept the fact that the ingame logic involving the multiple universes demands a certain amount of rigidity to the events that take place. She mentions the concept of constants and variables and how every universe has these constants: a man, a lighthouse and a city. However, if the multiverse were truly infinite the way we're thinking about it, there should be universes without those. So you can either accept the fact that this game's multiverse has constants, one in which Elizabeth kills every Booker that would become Comstock and it all makes sense, or you can reject it and things start falling apart.
How crazy would it have been had they pulled an MGS4 and had pre-credits to list both Booker and Comstock being the same actor to make you think "wait wtf", to then return to the game and play out the ending where it's then revealed. Obviously it wouldn't work too well in its current form without changing much but it could have been neat.
The One Who Knocks
Member
Not all infinites are the same size. You can still have an infinite amount of universes even if you impose constants on those universes.
UltimaPooh
Member
This is why I believe people are missing the forest for the trees when it comes to this game.
Breaking down timelines and alternate universes IS interesting but it isn't the ultimate point that this game is trying to make and it's certainly not the main theme that I think ultimately gets explored.
It's about Cause and Effect.
And its theme I believe is that both religion and science is ruled by a higher power which I am using a loose definition of. That power happens to be physics and that it is something that is impossible to break just like in religion it is impossible to break the cycle of life and death and escape the control of a higher power.
TheChillyAcademic
Member
I mean, Comstock and Booker had the same voice actor right?
Right, which is why I'm saying it's easier to understand and accept the game's logic if you accept the fact that Liz is successful as a constant.
Future PhaZe
Member
Am I the only one who feels like the story is a bunch of nonsense?
It was executed well yes, but holy deus ex machina batman
It was executed well yes, but holy deus ex machina batman
TheChillyAcademic
Member
i was curious so I checked after I beat the game. The VA for Comstock is Kiff VandenHeuvel.
I've read all of the explanations and justifications for the ending, but none of them hold water to me. This is a character who gains almost complete omniscience at the end of the game and the ability to travel to other realities at will. Minutes after achieving such power, she willfully wipes herself and her own biological father from existence just to prevent a handful of possible realities from occurring.
If she was in a position where she could see across all possibility spaces, what drive would she have to essentially kill herself? The Comstock realities lost all meaning when she can just choose which reality in which she will exist. She gains the ability to choose her own reality and then throws it all away almost immediately.
Forget getting hung up on the concept of "infinite" realities. Even if we don't expand upon it to that degree, she already proved that she can travel to and exist in "other" realities that don't feature Comstock, the attack on New York, or presumably any other bad turn of events that she wants to avoid.
The ending doesn't hold up to close examination, I'm afraid. I really wish it did, but I'd be fooling myself if I rationalized it all away.
If she was in a position where she could see across all possibility spaces, what drive would she have to essentially kill herself? The Comstock realities lost all meaning when she can just choose which reality in which she will exist. She gains the ability to choose her own reality and then throws it all away almost immediately.
Forget getting hung up on the concept of "infinite" realities. Even if we don't expand upon it to that degree, she already proved that she can travel to and exist in "other" realities that don't feature Comstock, the attack on New York, or presumably any other bad turn of events that she wants to avoid.
The ending doesn't hold up to close examination, I'm afraid. I really wish it did, but I'd be fooling myself if I rationalized it all away.
I don't think you (and some others) are seeing how this paradox has been dissected and explained. Elizabeth says that she can see behind every door and that this one point is where the paths start. The paths of Comstock - Booker. And she explains that the only way Comstock is created is if Booker excepts baptism at this point.
And the biggest catch is that Booker CAN'T make the choice himself. For as soon as he makes a choice the timeline breaks to support each path (baptism/ no baptism). Therefore Elizabeth has to end the loop herself. By doing that she creates a paradox in that loop that if Comstock ever exists Elizabeth will exist and will drown Booker in the same way. So that loop becomes closed.
The Lucete's explain how there are some constants in these timelines. The flipping of the coin is an example of this. Going to that baptism is another constant choice Booker makes. That's why she ends it there.
We can debate that going to a different spot in his path could also effect his desire to get baptized but then Booker wouldn't be the exact same person he is at that exact point in time. And once again the fact that Elizabeth only wants to change the Comstock outcome its understood that she doesn't want to change Booker entirely she just wants to save the world from who he becomes.
From my understanding one of the other reasons that Elizabeth excepts her own death is because she knows what she can become, how strong she can be and how evil some of her choices can be.
And she knows that she isn't supposed to be there. She isn't supposed to exist in that timeline. And that the reason she has powers is because she is currently living in two dimensions.
"The world doesn't like it's pees mixed with its porridge."
And then the fact that once the siphon is destroyed and she becomes all powerful she becomes evil and attacks the "sodom below". She is shown attacking New York City.
So the only way she doesn't become all powerful is if the siphon isn't destroyed and she continues to be a captive in a life that shouldn't exist.
She talks about redemption because she (like Booker) is weighed down with all the bad she is doing to others and wants to be cleansed of that pain.
Just like Booker wants when he gets baptized.
Does that make any more sense?
How so? I thought it built to its end pretty well and all the elements of the story were introduced beforehand.
I feel the ending lost a lot of impact for me because I knew they were going to go with the parenthood angle super early on, I didn't figure it out or get spoiled I just assumed. The whole game I was just waiting for them to reveal it and when they did I was like, meh.
The whole time travel dimension deal is just bringing up the same debates that every other time travel story brings up.
Still a fantastic game with amazing art and the story is for sure well told. I just get the feeling that its been done before.
I do also love a lot of the theories people are bringing up but I try not to overthink it and just take it as its delivered. The tainted love and girls just wanna have fun spots had me laughing my ass off.
The whole time travel dimension deal is just bringing up the same debates that every other time travel story brings up.
Still a fantastic game with amazing art and the story is for sure well told. I just get the feeling that its been done before.
I do also love a lot of the theories people are bringing up but I try not to overthink it and just take it as its delivered. The tainted love and girls just wanna have fun spots had me laughing my ass off.
The One Who Knocks
Member
It has to be a constant however. Since we see her at the end deciding to erase all Comstocks if we assume the possibility of her failing exists, then so does the probability of her succeeding. If the probability exists, it happens in some timelines. Yet if she can succeed once (which by definition automatically affects every single timeline that's relevant) she can never fail, as she's already erased everything. They're mutually exclusive sets of universes; either she succeeds, or she fails, but only one of those sets can exist in the multiverse since the first removes the probability of the second and the second removes the probability of the first.
Future PhaZe
Member
Why not just go back in time and stop Lucette from being born? Then no time travel or selling of child.
GuitarAtomik
Member
One thing I'd like someone to explain is how is killing the player's Booker at the baptism the same as killing ALL Bookers at the baptism? Does he become that reality's Booker (with memories intact) even though he's technically time traveling back? Obviously walking through tears doesn't always result in a person becoming the new reality version otherwise you would just become Comstock when you are taken to Columbia. Is this a specific way Elizabeth can tear reality in the same way she tried to save the horse in the gameplay demo?
UltimaPooh
Member
What about the variable of a tear destroying a single Liz keeping her from arriving to kill Booker in time? And from that single variable there are an infinite amount of scenarios in which the tear kills her and stops her from completing it.
Also everyone seems to be forgeting about the ending after the credits. If Liz kills all Bookers who survive Wounded Knee then how does he have Anna at the end? I believe that is there to show us that while what Liz and Booker did is a noble they are bound by the laws of physics and they couldn't change anything in the end. It's a tragic story.
UltimaPooh
Member
Your Liz isn't there to killy you at the end.
I hope it's something that is explored in the DLC.
You are assuming she cares about herself and herself only and fuck everyone else. She hated what Comstock did and did not want him to come about in ANY reality.
But even if she did, I don't think it works the way you suggests it does. In the ending, it was not only our Elizabeth that drowned us, but various kinds. A young Elizabeth, the Elizabeth in the original dress, hell even the initially revealed Elizabeth from E3. To me, this suggests that she no longer exists as a single entity in a single universe, but her omniscience also gives her omnipresence that has her existing in all universes simultaneously. So long as one Comstock exists, so does she. Therefore, all comstocks have to die, making it so she never gets powers and only lives as an ordinary girl.
Good point, that's a great explanation.
Well she eliminated the probability that Booker would accept the baptism, leaving only the probability that he would reject it. It leaves Booker to live his intended depressing life with Anna without Comstock's interference, but hey, maybe things pick up for him, who knows.
Broder Salsa
Banned
Finally finished this and all I can think of is infinite amount of monkeys.
UltimaPooh
Member
An interesting take on logic for sure.
But based on the OP setup she kills ALL BOOKERS. The constant is that any Booker that survives the Battle of Wounded Knee he ends up going to the Baptism where he either A. Accepts the Baptism or B. He rejects it. Liz comes to the root of that choice and stops him before ever making that decision.
However ultimately if we are to believe that there are infinite universes (as the game's title suggests) then there has to be ones where she fails and there has to be ones where Booker's never decide to go to baptism.
She does kill all bookers, which creates a paradox. Think of it as the universe looking at this paradox and just resetting it so that Booker only rejects it as a constant, because the alternative would result in the paradox occurring again.
That doesn't matter. See here:
Again, look at my tree analogy. The game sets this whole scenario up as though the universe and timeline is a branching tree. The Luteces found out a way to transfer things from one branch to another. At the end of the game Elizabeth pretty well exists outside of that tree since she can bounce around anywhere and pull anything. The Luteces exist outside it, too, throughout the game. Now, what the ending portrays is her clipping off the branch that houses any possible Comstocks. i.e. where that branch happened was at baptism. As long as any branch happened after accepting baptism, there existed a possibility for Comstock to emerge, and so she clipped it by drowning Booker.
All it takes is one Elizabeth clipping that one branch for the loop to close. And once that loop closes, as it did in the game, there is no Elizabeth either... no all-powerful Elizabeth anyway. There exists an Anna, though. After the loop closes there is no opportunity for failure either. That entire branch is gone, wiped from existence. It's a constant that Booker does not accept the baptism. She basically turned it from a variable in the multiverse to a constant.
And to save the world.
UltimaPooh
Member
But we know she doesn't kill all Bookers based on the after credits ending.
Time is not linear so stop thinking of it that way. I don't know if this is a good analogy or not because it's very hard to visualize the concepts involved here, but think of the game's reality as a star, that become unstable (paradox) and ultimately goes supernova (nullification of the paradox) and from the resulting mass of gas reforms into a new star that is stable (one where booker never becomes comstock and no paradox is formed).
If we assume that the multiverse goes for the easiest path out of a paradox, which seems to be how people are explaining the way the paradox of Elizabeth killing all Bookers works out, why does the game happen at all? Wouldn't the default state of the multiverse be that the game has already happened and therefore can't happen?
Saving the world from herself yes. She wants redemption because she knows she destroys it. Redemption from her own sins.
But she puts Bookers hand around her own throat to show how she would rather die than go back to be trapped in that tower.
She becomes aware that there is a not a timeline where she has a normal life. She knows she doesn't belong there.
Correct. The game never happened. You didn't play it. This thread.. you aren't reading it.
2K.. still has our money... hmm..
Well now you are dealing with things that physicists themselves have been arguing over for decades.
You can always argue that point in any time paradox story. Always. But then you don't have a story at all. So you go to the origin of a timeline and see how it turns out.
Have any of you thought that Elizabeth is actually committing suicide by drowning Booker? That it is completely self serving? That like him she wants to be cleansed of her sins and this is how she can do it?
GuitarAtomik
Member
When they say "All Bookers" They are talking about relevant Bookers. The Bookers that never decided to go to the baptism exist, but they are irrelevant because they will never become Comstock as are the Bookers that die at Wounded Knee and so on. It is a whole separate branch that never needs to come in to play and this is why the baptism is chosen as the point to kill him because it is where the relevant branch (created by the choice to be baptized or not) is created.
Once that branch is clipped off, there ARE no Elizabeth's that failed because it only took one succeeding to clip it off. They did exist as did Bookers that rejected the baptism but, once that branch is clipped, Elizabeth can't fail because (omnipotent) Elizabeth no longer exists. She only exists in that branch. Only Anna can exist which you see after the credits. It's the same way that Comstock no longer exists because Comstock only existed in that branch and it has been eliminated by making it a paradox.
I'd draw a picture but I'm at work lol.
EDIT: I removed all mentions of "relevant" Comstock. If the probability of Comstock exists at all then they are relevant so according to Elizabeth, they only exist in that branch.
sleeprockss
Banned
I think there's three ways you can go with the ending.
1. Every Booker that goes to the baptism dies but in some dimensions Booker doesn't go to the baptism at all. Since the only way comstock exists is the baptism, Anna never gets taken from Booker in those dimensions.
2. Every Booker that goes through with being baptized drowns but the ones that reject it live a "happy" life with Anna.
3. Somehow comstock still exists and the circle goes unbroken.
1. Every Booker that goes to the baptism dies but in some dimensions Booker doesn't go to the baptism at all. Since the only way comstock exists is the baptism, Anna never gets taken from Booker in those dimensions.
2. Every Booker that goes through with being baptized drowns but the ones that reject it live a "happy" life with Anna.
3. Somehow comstock still exists and the circle goes unbroken.
Conciliator
Banned
I took all the Elizabeths in the ending as symbolic of omni-Elizabeth simultaneously travelling to every relevant dimension and killing Booker in all of them.
This is a crazy fuckin game.
This is a crazy fuckin game.
The One Who Knocks
Member
Don't know how much this will help:
The Green "X" can be seen as "X'ing" the Accept and Reject timelines, or only the Accept timelines depending as whether you subscribe to theory one or theory two but it is clearly visible how the "X" originates from the Accept timeline circle. Eliminate that entire set and you eliminate the X ever existing.
MMBosstones86
Member
How can 2) happen? When Booker rejects the baptism, he ends up selling Anna.
Also, Booker is killed BEFORE the baptism even happens, eliminating the choice all together.
Well unless there is a thriving market for baby selling in that universe the opportunity probably won't even come up unless Comstock is around.
MMBosstones86
Member
UltimaPooh
Member
I believe I am getting a better comprehension of it. Just took a bit more thinking
So explain to me in a little more detail why only one instance of Booker being killed before the baptism creates a paradox. Other universes still exist with Comstock.
The One Who Knocks
Member
You're looking at 'killed' too literally. If every Booker is killed before the baptism, no Booker accepts, no Booker becomes Comstock, no Elizabeth exists, no Elizabeth exists to kill Booker before Booker accepts or rejects. This only happens, if a single Booker accepts. If no Booker accepts, no Booker is killed; ever. This is the exact same thing as only Bookers that accept being killed is. The entire events of the game never happened, they simply don't exist. No Booker was, will or ever are killed at the baptism. All that 'actually' happens, is every Booker rejects, and one of these Bookers become a gambler, become an alcoholic and have Anna. No Booker literally dies.
EDIT: Again, if visualising this makes it easier to understand why they're the same thing: http://i.imgur.com/mLDw5iL.png (slightly editted version of the set diagram above), the Red Circle cancels out the existence of the others, if there is no red circle, there is no cancellation. If Booker rejecting is, was, always will be a constant, nothing ever happened to him. The main problem is simply about finding the explanation that makes it clear, since each person may 'learn' (interpret things?) differently and it's about finding the explanation that suits the person best.
EDIT: At the above, the ending is symbolic, the multiple Elizabeths representing Elizabeth 'drowning' every single Booker at the baptism (whether it's those who accept, all Bookers, whatever; it's the same thing in conclusion) in every single infinite set of timelines simultaneously; removing the entire branch to accept (because that would lead to its own inexistence before its existence).