BioShock Infinite

[mjukis]

Late(?) game story stuff, confusion.

 

What the shit is going on?

Booker is dead/in a quantum mechanically confused state (and bleeding out of his nose)

Brother Lutece was found in a grave, his sisters grave was empty

Not far from the siblings grave there is a white suited Liberty Statue headed corpse

 

Who does booker owe money? Related question, who can give orders to the lutece twins? Surely someone/an entity with INTERDIMENSIONAL travel dont take no guff from anyone.

Why is booker/lutece special cases?

What's the deal with the black and white closet/room? Is this lutece for whatever reason preventing booker from dying (you know except for keeping the game going)?

 

[Brannigan]

A lot of your questions are answered by finishing. There's audio logs that explain the luteces a little too, though there's still a lot of mystery to them.

[Brannigan]

Tried 1999 mode, if you die in the game you die in real life. Dying costs money, if you don't have enough money, game over. Food gives almost no health too.

[feelthedarkness]

Wow, people have already finished it? I'm only about 3 hours in, but am absolutely loving the world of Infinite. All the religious iconography is beautiful, even though it doesn't make any sense that a society based on white supremacy would go with a heavy Catholic influence (those groups tend to dislike Catholics almost as much as they dislike other races).

 

The kind of central planning and wealth needed to get a city in the clouds would need a Catholic style top down organization. Maybe the DLC will feature some kind of floating evangelical, snake handler tent church/hang glider thing? Plus Glossolalia would be a cool vigor.

[soggybagel]

Some later game issues I have.

The boss fights are not particularly fun or good. Fighting Elizabeth's mom multiple times isn't fun. Not quite Deus Ex:HR boss bad, but they weren't fun at all because nothing about dying against her teaches or informs you about mistakes you made. You basically have to run around like a mad man and avoid her giant concussive wave attacks that murder you fast. Plus the fact that she can continue to raise guys from the dead means your limited ammo can really fuck you. Combine that with the fact that when you die they regain a lot of health it just makes sense to restart from the last checkpoint which is also annoying due to no quick save. I really hate that you can have Elizabeth spawn a barrel that say, has shotguns in it, but once you pick it up you can't keep getting ammo from it even though the barrel has multiple guns still in it. It's weird.

[chummer]

Some later game issues I have...

Yup. This is basically the only thing keeping me from going into 1999 mode on a second playthrough. I went through most all of the game on hard except the specific encounter you mentioned and one more.

[soggybagel]

Wow. Absolutely disappointed in the ending of this game. I'll let it sink in for a while before i post about it in spoiler space but not the conclusion I was expecting or wanted. Keep in mind too that I'm all for open ended endings and things don't have to be wrapped like a bow. But this, I don't know. I don't particularly enjoy this ending, the rate it dumps things on you at the end, and a few other things. I'm also speaking as someone who pretty much got all the audio logs. I think I missed 7 the whole game so I'm not missing out on too much as far as I know. 

 

And not so much dissonance but there are actions your character takes when the game takes things out of your control that seem unreasonable at the time. I bought the season pass so I'm interested to see what the DLC will decide to do. 

 

Okay fuck it, end game spoilers here:

 

Why even go to Rapture at the end? It's unclear to me, though I did get excited for a second thinking it might go one way, but it felt much more trite when it just ended up at the light tower zone. And the game flows well but I felt like the last 1/4th was far too much unpleasant combat (see also my previous post on why combat sucks near the end against powerful mobs/boss fights).

[savdec449]

Gosh, so I'm going to make an argument for this ending. It's late and I was up late writing a paper last night too, so if I begin to sound like a crazy person just ignore that part and see if my main point is useful.

This game is like a 400 page novel that concludes with a 30 postmodern poem, which may or may not contain the characters we've seen up until that point. I mean to say, our previously linear shooter all of a sudden becomes Thirty Flights of Loving. Which, uh, is obviously a really weird thing to do. So why do we get that kind of ending and not a trip to Paris like the narrative seems to have led us to expect? It seems very likely to me that this should be read as a continuation Bioshock 1's analysis (in it's twist) of the role of the protagonist/player in the shooter. Only this time, instead of agency, we are asked to consider complicity. Booker is complicit in Hannah/ Liz's abduction; the player is complicit in violence and acts which cause violence in kind. The ending, the final drowning of Booker, whoever that really is, could then be read as the epitaph of the genre--the men who stop murderers are murderers, and they must be stopped just as judiciously as their adversaries. Where does this leave the genre? Well, you can't make another regular shooter after that, after you've just killed your protagonist/player. 
I don't think all of the stuff that goes into the ending makes sense, but this is a game about a fucking city in the sky. Realism is not the goal of this game. But there's a huge amount of interesting work being done by this ending, if the kind of stuff that is more exciting to English majors than someone not looking to explore dichotomies of violence that may be intrinsically embedded in a genre. So I also kinda understand the urge to be upset at this? Because it could seem unfair to bring me through a relatively normal game only to at the end change the rhythm and nature of the storytelling to imply that all I've spend the past 13 hours doing is perpetuating something bad. I don't agree that it is unfair, but I understand the reaction. 
So of course when you get back to the main menu, 1999 mode unlocks so you can replay with EXTRA CHALLENGE and fuck video-games why do I even bother.

[savdec449]

Why even go to Rapture at the end? It's unclear to me, though I did get excited for a second thinking it might go one way, but it felt much more trite when it just ended up at the light tower zone. And the game flows well but I felt like the last 1/4th was far too much unpleasant combat (see also my previous post on why combat sucks near the end against powerful mobs/boss fights).

 

 

 

I think the game is trying to make a parallel between it's investigations and its predecessor's. Also, it's not for nothing that the places we visit in Rapture in that quick pit-stop are scenes that would immediately precede the beginning of the first game (notice the splicers picking at the dead Big Daddy?). So, in an ending that is trying to point out the cyclical nature of violence, we are transported from the final explosion of Columbia to the beginning of the end for Rapture's creator. 

And also I agree that the final fights of this game are awful and repetitive. Not Bio 1 awful, but def needed them to go away in those last few hours. 

[soggybagel]

This will be a spoiler response to savdec449 and its all about the ending so beware folks who haven't finished the game. Also its late as hell and I just finished so I may be incoherent as well.

 

 

 

I am not asking for a tight compact happy ending as we ride our zeppelin to Paris. But as I look back at the experience I just had, I can't help but be disappointed in how it all sprawls out. Now of course any game that is ambitious like this will do well at the beginning. A game like Grand Theft Auto 4 was almost scary the first hour or two as the city revealed itself because you don't totally understand the game systems and there is so much to explore its daunting and scary. Much as Infinite is. You are put in the middle of a world you know nothing about and the possibilites seem endless as the game systems haven't yet been open to you. As you stroll through the town and view things like a parade and people chatting you only get inklings of what may or may not happen. This is what a good game does. This is a good game.

 

What is interesting to me though is how the (pardon the use of this phrase as it is thrown around a lot regarding the game) game and the world you are in uses 'American Exceptionalism' of Columbia early on and in a strong very interesting way, but within hours it seems that the game all but nearly drops that. I thought there were much more interesting ideas that could have been explored but post confrontation with Slate its all but dropped in favor of the all encompassing Comstock cult of personality...which is fine. But by the end of the non-stop fighting it really started to feel like window dressing. HEY REMEMBER THOSE PRESIDENTS, WELL HERES MORE OF THEM (patriots) that you have to fight.

 

I'm less interested in having a fair ending. I didn't feel like I wasted my time. But I felt vaguely deceived. The alternate or more accurately endless realities that continued to splice off no matter how hard you tried to fix them is a somewhat interesting idea. The conclusion when you don't think too hard about the logistics of alternate realities is fine too. But, and I cannot articulate completely, but the feeling at the end wasn't of relief or sadness for me. It was merely being somewhat befuddled. I thought the ending was botched because it was handled poorly. I felt like the camera was pulling away and I was left to see that actually this was all somebodies dream (or say, an autistic child's vision in a snow globe). I'm tired so I'll come back tomorrow and maybe make more sense.

[Badfinger]

I liked the game a lot. Maybe not 10/10? But I enjoyed it a great deal, as evidenced by the fact that I finished it the day it came out (or at all frankly for me these days).

I wasn't put off by the ending. I enjoyed it. There was a bit in the credits that gave me goosebumps, frankly. I also feel like I mostly understand it, while at the same time if I mused on the plot twist early in the game I didn't guess it "a third of the way through" like I've seen people in other places claim. Full disclosure, I never beat either of the previous Bioshock games and apparently there is fiction in other genres similar to this that I've never read or seen. So I wasn't put off because of sameness either.

I do wish some if the plot elements fit together better. I love the Luteces. If you think you might like this game you probably will. The God Only Knows cover is absolutely stellar, I want this soundtrack.

[Noyb]

To steal a phrase from the podcast, the looting system in this game is some goofy shit. Nitpicking follows.

 

Am I missing something or does Booker only take everything or nothing from a container (apart from ammo)? He always eats everything in the box I'm looting when all I want are the coins. Even when he's at full health. Even when the food is *rotten*.

 

I get that one button streamlines looting, but the implementation constantly leads to these contrived situations where the player chooses to temporarily give up on some loot because he wants to save some food for later or avoid losing health from bad food, but can't trust the player character not to eat it.

 

(minor details and mechanical spoilers from the first seven hours, building off mjukis' post)

I was also surprised when the game introduced the concept of stealing several *hours* in as an explicit UI element -- red "steal" text replacing the usual description -- when the design and scripting is so inconsistent about its use. Church donations, hot dogs sold by a sidewalk vendor, a till in a store run on the honor system while the shopkeeper's out, a pile of coins dug up by kids at the beach : not stealing according to the UI. There's a boat on the docks where the NPCs accuse you of intending theft, then turn hostile if you loiter on it for too long. But if you're quick you can rob them in plain daylight without them caring. In the slums, there are a few NPCs hanging around an alley by a major upgrade canister: they warn you for loitering, but turn hostile as soon as you touch it. The bartender in the slums pulls his shotgun when you walk behind the bar (full of goodies explicitly marked by the UI as owned), but doesn't care if you rob his basement.

 

I don't necessarily mind inconsistency in reaction -- it's neat that different characters react to you invading their personal space differently -- but these hand-crafted, scripted situations makes the default behavior -- total apathy to theft -- look goofy.

[tronhound]

Good game

 

Ending spoilers

 

the ending is cheap, but I simply don't like time travel endings in general, they are always cheap. May as well end it with Booker waking up and it was all a dream

[mjukis]

Fin. (dont click that spoiler if you care about finding out yourself)

 

Just kidding, here's the lighthouse from Bioshock. Multiverses & Time Travel! *Ken Levine takes off like a rocket*

 

I kinda liked it.

 

edit: Though it does tread a ground that I'm not fond of right now. The "look at what you did, isn't that kinda fucked up?" plot/point that seems to have been a evolution out of the original Bioshock narrative.

[savdec449]

On the influx of American history:

So it felt to me like we were supposed to take Comstock as an allegory for a certain kind of President machismo-narrative-building. Like he is a figure similar to Teddy Roosevelt, a kind of wimpy guy who at some point realized he needed to be manly, and so went out and did manly things for people to see. The Rough Riders had their publicist with them. So in that sense it kind of fits with the idea that Booker's identity and goodness is also a construct of his mind? This one might be harder to tease through cuz you and soggybagel are right imo. They do just kind of drop the American imagery, except for Southern Baptism.

[soggybagel]

Minor request. I wish this game let you from the menu (not in game) review all the audio logs and rewatch all the news reel stuff. Just for fun!

[tronhound]

Minor request. I wish this game let you from the menu (not in game) review all the audio logs and rewatch all the news reel stuff. Just for fun!

 

Agree, there's some that I want to listen to again but I can't because the game only has autosave and I started a new game.

[Max Ernst]

This game is really, really good but Booker and Elizabeth's dialogue is super corny. It reminds me of shitty screenplays I wrote when I was a teen. Trite witticisms and awful attempts at anguish really take me out of the game. Which is really strange, considering how good the world building story is. The opening to this game is pretty fucking incredible. Might be the best I've ever seen.

 

Also, the food thing is still goofy as hell. "Going to eat this hotdog I found on this corpse to heal my bullet wounds!"

 

Shantytown also makes no fucking sense in a nationlist utopia.I wonder why it was put back into the game considering that they originally cut it and it caused a lead artist to quit. Even in that Polygon profile from January 2013, it mentions the section being cut. It was right to be cut, too. It makes no sense.

 

That said, loved the game. Big ups.

[singlespace]

Late(?) game story stuff, confusion.

 

What the shit is going on?

Booker is dead/in a quantum mechanically confused state (and bleeding out of his nose)

Brother Lutece was found in a grave, his sisters grave was empty

Not far from the siblings grave there is a white suited Liberty Statue headed corpse

 

Who does booker owe money? Related question, who can give orders to the lutece twins? Surely someone/an entity with INTERDIMENSIONAL travel dont take no guff from anyone.

Why is booker/lutece special cases?

What's the deal with the black and white closet/room? Is this lutece for whatever reason preventing booker from dying (you know except for keeping the game going)?

 

 

I just finished and here are my thoughts on your questions:

 

Who does booker owe money?

It doesn't matter. Comstock, after using the tears frequently for years becomes sterile, but is obsessed with having an heir, so he tell the Rosalind Lutece to find him one from an alternate world. By this point, Rosalind had already been in contact with Robert Lutece, who finds Comstock in his universe, who by this point has become an alcoholic and gambler with an immense debt, but does indeed have a daughter. Robert acts as a mediator for Comstock, and arranges for Booker's debts to be paid in exchange for his daughter.

 

Who can give orders to the Lutece twins?

Comstock. Rosalind Lutece works for Comstock and has been experimenting with machines that cause tears. At first she's only able to open tears that give her glimpses of other worlds, but eventually succeeds to communicating through the tears and eventually travelling as well. The person she contacts in these other worlds are the various incarnations of herself, of which Robert is one. Rosalind and Robert are not twins. They're the same person from alternate realities.

 

Surely someone/an entity with INTERDIMENSIONAL travel dont take no guff from anyone.

Elizabeth's abilities have been severely hampered by the syphon for years. There's a couple graphs on blackboards in the statue that show her power increase over age and show the syphon being introduced to keep her powers under control.

 

The many Lutece's working for the many Comstock also have the ability to form tears via their machines, but currently no longer need the machines and aren't following any orders but their own. They feel responsible for what happens to Elizabeth, hence take things into their own hands by bringing Booker to Rosalind's original reality to take back his daughter.

 

Why is booker/lutece special cases?

The two Lutece are special because Comstock has Fink kill the two by sabotaging their tear machine. Instead of killing them, it causes all the Lutece to disappear from all realities, giving the Lutece caught in the sabotage the ability to appear in any reality at any time and place. Booker isn't a special case.

 

What's the deal with the black and white closet/room? Is this lutece for whatever reason preventing booker from dying (you know except for keeping the game going)?

The first time you see a full world tear, you run across some police officers who are having complete breakdowns from remembering what happened to them in the world before Elizabeth opens the tear. When someone shifts they have memories of both the reality they came from and the one they shifted into, but there are problems. At the end of the game, Robert mentions that people moving through tears will invent memories to cover those lost from the trauma of the shift, which he notes he himself underwent when moving into Rosalind's reality.

 

Here's the thing: the Lutece aren't preventing Booker from dying, they're replacing him. The black and white room is Booker's apartment/office and every time a Booker dies, the Lutece grabs a suitable Booker who shares pretty much the same past as the original Booker from 1893 and moves him into Rosalind's reality at which point he remembers everything the previous Booker's did. Both the Lutece and Elizabeth note that Booker has died many many times, with Elizabeth alluding to the fact that Booker has never succeeded.

 

The room is black and white, as is Booker at first, because he's from an alternate reality just like the things Elizabeth pulls from other realities.

[mjukis]

At the time I hadn't finished the game but your efforts are applauded sir! 

[singlespace]

At the time I hadn't finished the game but your efforts are applauded sir! 

 

Your applause is appreciated dear sir and congratulations on completing said game!

[Scipio]

Finished it the other day.

 

don't read unless you've finished i guess!

There was a bunch of specific stuff in there I really liked, but for some reason I'm not enamored with the game as a whole. I feel like they wrote a good, boardering on great, story about a father/daughter relationship (which I feel like is a narrative pretty underrepresented in a lot of media) but then lost interest exploring that theme. But I also have no idea on what you would change in that story to bring the focus back on what I wanted it to be on. So I don't know I guess. Pretty as fuck though.

[Laxan]

One thing I was disappointed with was the lack of Elizabeth interacting with the world. From the single trailer I saw (I think Liz puts a funny mask on at one point) I got the impression that if I stood near something cool long enough, she's come over and say some quip or tell me a bit about it. While it did happen a handful of times, as the game progressed she increasingly became some insane person who is only interested in picklocks and maybe coins.

 

While I could imagine a version where Liz's constant quips and chatter could become annoying, I felt the dial on that environmental interaction stuff was set a bit too low.

[Brannigan]

At the same it wouldn't have made much sense to get all whimsical about something when shits getting real

[Laxan]

She does do it a bit in the late game, and is more sombre when shit gets real. I don't expect whimsical lore stories in the middle of a battle, just some remark about a ruined statue or some other world building stuff during the downtime. I was just sad that everything past a certain point was all main quest related or OOH A LOCKPICK.