Bioshock Infinite Spoiler Thread

Wait-- At which point does she drown the Songbird? I don't remember that bit at all (it's been a couple months since I last played Binfinite).

Spoiler:

When she teleports you to Rapture.

Ah, I was so blown away by that location that I have completely forgotten what happened at that point. I've been looking for an excuse to finish my second playthrough...

CheezePavilion wrote:

Just finished--was actually going to skip the game until I read the 'quick and dirty' review on this site, so I'm a bit late to the party, I guess, but I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere outside of a brief reference in one comment in this thread:

Scratched wrote:

I've seen it said Elizabeth is the primary protagonist in the game and not Booker, it diminishes the player's role and pretty much says "try to keep up", which I guess is one way to do it, but doesn't seem to be for everyone.

I'm wondering where you saw that, because that's the impression I got. Which maybe fixes a lot of the problems people had with redemption and choice? If the twist in the first Bioshock was WYK, maybe the twist here is that you're not the main character. You thought you were the main character because you shot lots of guns, but it's Elizabeth that has the character arc while you just keep slaughtering people like you always have. 1984 Elizabeth saves your Elizabeth with that note, right? After you do your usual killing, she has the big moment with Lady Comstock while you just find a nice, cinematic angle to watch it all from, as far as I remember. When it comes to the main characters, Daisy kills Fink, then Elizabeth kills Daisy. Elizabeth keeps telling you she is the one who needs to end things with Comstock, but you jump in. You spend the whole game figuring you're going to have to fight Songbird, probably as a final boss, but she drowns Songbird. Right before she also drowns the secret final boss--you.

I really like this idea. What do you think Elizabeth would have done regarding Comstock?

concentric wrote:
CheezePavilion wrote:

Just finished--was actually going to skip the game until I read the 'quick and dirty' review on this site, so I'm a bit late to the party, I guess, but I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere outside of a brief reference in one comment in this thread:

Scratched wrote:

I've seen it said Elizabeth is the primary protagonist in the game and not Booker, it diminishes the player's role and pretty much says "try to keep up", which I guess is one way to do it, but doesn't seem to be for everyone.

I'm wondering where you saw that, because that's the impression I got. Which maybe fixes a lot of the problems people had with redemption and choice? If the twist in the first Bioshock was WYK, maybe the twist here is that you're not the main character. You thought you were the main character because you shot lots of guns, but it's Elizabeth that has the character arc while you just keep slaughtering people like you always have. 1984 Elizabeth saves your Elizabeth with that note, right? After you do your usual killing, she has the big moment with Lady Comstock while you just find a nice, cinematic angle to watch it all from, as far as I remember. When it comes to the main characters, Daisy kills Fink, then Elizabeth kills Daisy. Elizabeth keeps telling you she is the one who needs to end things with Comstock, but you jump in. You spend the whole game figuring you're going to have to fight Songbird, probably as a final boss, but she drowns Songbird. Right before she also drowns the secret final boss--you.

I really like this idea. What do you think Elizabeth would have done regarding Comstock?

I really don't know. Maybe because she's written such that *she* didn't know exactly what she was going to do when she finally got there? I guess because dealing with Comstock is not just about killing him but also finding out what Comstock actually did. Since what Comstock did is the key to her finding out what she actually is.

Checking out the scene again on YouTube, there was this line from Comstock that's another one of those that only makes sense later on:

Spoiler:

"You've come to wipe your slate clean, False Shepard - but time will walk backwards before you find redemption. Some sins can't be forgiven"

GoldenDog wrote:

In fact, humans are already creating tears in the Universe using the Large Hadron Collider. And while it's true that any possibility does simultaneously exist at the same time in different universes (Schrödinger's cat), two atoms at the same frequency cannot occupy the same space in the same dimension at the same time. Basically it's like this:

IMAGE(http://www.blastr.com/sites/blastr/files/styles/blog_post_media/public/images/Timecop_RonSilver.jpg?itok=goqUejJX)

aka the Time Cop Paradox.

Schmutzli wrote:
trichy wrote:
Schmutzli wrote:
kazooka wrote:
Schmutzli wrote:

Also, is it possible Songbird is yet another Booker, maybe one Comstock captured previously? It would explain the protective instinct and tenderness Songbird shows toward her. It would also be a tidy trinity where every version of Booker opposes himself.

That's a really good theory, particularly as the baptism theme shows up again in the Songbird's death.

The Songbird is really a big mystery, all things considered. I kept expecting to see a big reveal with it, but we never got any sense of who or what was inside of the machine, leading us to do nothing but speculate.

Ha, also it would mean every version of Booker dies by drowning...

No, only the Bookers that accepted baptism (becoming Comstock) died by drowning. The ones that refused were never dunked in the first place, so they survive.

I was referring to the Songbird, Comstock (in the fountain, murdered by Booker) and Booker himself at the end--following my trinity comment quoted above. I think you might be referring to timelines or something, I'm talking about in the actual story we see, Booker drowns 3 times, if he is also the Songbird.

I was watching the Rev3 Spoiled Games discussion with Adam Sessler, Jeff Gertsmann and Kevin Vanord, and they mentioned that one of the voxophones talks about how Fink created the songbird because he saw the Big Daddies in one of the tears, and it inspired its design. Doesn't necessarily discount that there might be a person inside of it though.

I finished this yesterday. Loved it. Loved nearly everything about it.

It's also probably my most screen-shotted game ever. I felt like a tourist. The scenes and setting blew me away, and it's the first game I've played through with my fancy new vidya card (the game was set to highest everything - I got about 60 fps on the benchmark tool). I put some of my favorite screenshots into an album:

This contains the heaviest of spoilers, of course. That's why it's private.
http://imgur.com/a/vMqF3

Clash in the Clouds has dropped!

I am excited to see where the DLC takes the universe. I wonder if they will respond to the post-release reactions to the game in some fashion? It would be kind of cool if Bioshock became sort of a weird metaphysical dialogue between the makers and the players.

EDIT: Looks like arena challenges only.

Did you see the previews for Burial at Sea? (The second and third DLCs)

Looks like they are running with the multiple parallel universe scenario. Booker and Elizabeth as they would have fit into Rapture.

heavyfeul wrote:

Clash in the Clouds has dropped!

I am excited to see where the DLC takes the universe. I wonder if they will respond to the post-release reactions to the game in some fashion? It would be kind of cool if Bioshock became sort of a weird metaphysical dialogue between the makers and the players.

EDIT: Looks like arena challenges only. :(

There's a bit in the other thread. At least give Clash in the Clouds a try. I think it's awesome. The Blue Ribbon Challenges are fun, the sense of upgrade progression is very fast. The first arena at least is very interesting from a sky hook perspective.

I'm working on 1999 mode right now, and then I'll give the DLC my full attention.

Good interview with Ken Levine on today's Nerdist podcast; very spoilery
http://www.nerdist.com/podcast/nerdist/

Michael wrote:

I finished this yesterday. Loved it. Loved nearly everything about it.

It's also probably my most screen-shotted game ever. I felt like a tourist. The scenes and setting blew me away, and it's the first game I've played through with my fancy new vidya card (the game was set to highest everything - I got about 60 fps on the benchmark tool). I put some of my favorite screenshots into an album:

This contains the heaviest of spoilers, of course. That's why it's private.
http://imgur.com/a/vMqF3

I love the Teleportation plasmid advert in the second Rapture screenie.

Pulled from spoilers in the non-spoiler thread.

complexmath wrote:

This has got to be my biggest beef with game design, where a designer makes a game that requires constant violence, for example, and the meta commentary is that violence is bad and the only way to win is not to play. If you really want to show that violence isn't the answer, just make a really awesome game with no violence. The self-critique approach just suggests that I'm somehow at fault for playing the game as it was designed. For Bioshock, at least the meta-commentary is pretty easy to ignore. I'll never play Far Cry 3 because they throw this same issue in your face.

It's definitely a thing, and I am tempted to say it's symptomatic of a certain somewhat dated political mode, where pointing out a problem (and maybe stating loudly that it is a problem) is considered enough, rather than offering a solution or an alternative.

CptGlanton wrote:

Finished a replay on Normal. First, Normal is absurdly easy. I made it through the entire game without dying in combat ( I did walk off of ledges two or three times). Second, all of my previous thoughts were confirmed. I still think they did a great job of creating the world, and I think it works as a commentary on a dream of self-creation and agency common to both gaming and American culture(s). The lines of dialogue equating Fink and the labor organizers still make my skin crawl. And the game still has a deeply reactionary politics running underneath its rosey anti-racist exterior.

One of the most interesting games of the generation.

Related, for those who haven't seen it:

lostlobster wrote:

Finished the game last night and then spent the next three hours reading the threads here, hashing it out. My take is that the combat got in the way of telling a good story. Had there been about 1/3 less fighting, I'd have loved the game unreservedly. Too many repetitive fights that don't do anything to move the story forward. Combat in games like this one should be handled like songs in musicals: they should be about something, and move the plot forward. Too many times it just felt like "here's the obligatory fight sequence."

That said, I loved the story and how it was told. This was the first Bioshock where I scoured every nook and cranny for the recordings/movies because I wanted to KNOW what was going on. I loved the ending. I'm a bit surprised that, from what I read, nobody has said what I felt about it which was

that, ultimately, Booker DOES get redemption. The final baptism does, in fact, kill the old Booker and give him a second chance, as per the bit at the end of the credits. His reaction to hearing the baby is consistent with someone who has gone through the story, and suddenly found himself back in his apartment/office, not believing what he's hearing. Presumably he's learned from his experience — he wanted Comstock dead and didn't fight his drowning when he discovered it was him — and has gotten a second chance.

I like this. I don't know how well it shows up in other Christian traditions, but the revivalist stuff that Comstock builds from certainly has lots of stuff like "your ego has to die in order for you to attain true freedom."

Demosthenes wrote:
TempestBlayze wrote:

From Reddit regarding the trailer:

"However, these ideals would not hold up, turning into a dystopia; and on the eve of 1959, a civil war broke out, leaving much of Rapture's population dead."; In the beginning of the trailer the calendar states that its 31. December 1958. You play on the day Rapture went down. f*ck. Yes.

And un-sold. Sorry, I just played a game about a city coming apart at the seams with way too much combat. I really don't need another one that is even less likely to have much to say meta-wise on gaming as a whole. :P

The rioting factions in both Rapture and Columbia could conceivably be used for making team-based multiplayer. I'm thinking like the recent Transformers games. That'd be sweet.

Revisting Rapture would be cool... except we're doing it in a time that has already been laid out and explained via the Bioshock book. This wasn't suddenly an all out war, it was a three party siege with each side going downhill almost from the beginning... Plus, we know where it's headed. Would be cool to see Bill if he was there, but that'd be about it for me, and he's not THAT interesting a character... especially as I know what happened to him as well.

@WS

CaptGlanton:

The lines of dialogue equating Fink and the labor organizers still make my skin crawl. And the game still has a deeply reactionary politics running underneath its rosey anti-racist exterior

seems to forget that Booker was a Pinkerton and he was speaking as someone who broke up labor protests (If I remember correctly who spoke those lines). Would it be realistic for Booker to be a big labor sympathizer? Plus if the narrative is that labor is always the good guys (independent of what you think of management), well I find that simplistic.

Really though, what is reactionary about the politics of the game? Pointing out that revolutions like the one depicted can be more horrible and bloody than the ones they replaced? History is chocked full of examples, the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks, Mao's China, the Khmer Rouge, etc.

One of the points is that there are no "good guys" in most situations. Or as I put it before when discussing the final scene, it is about seeking redemption when one is inherently flawed:

One interpetation of Baptism in the Christian context is the burial of the old man of sin in the water and the birth of the new man under the covenant of God.

What is intresting in this depection is you have a Godlike being baptizing you, killing the old man (Comstock) and creating a new life giving you the gift of her presence in your life under a new or renewed relationship.

Looking over the story, one could say it is the story of Esau and Jacob in reverse with Booker as a triumphant Esau and Comstock as a defeated Jacob (Jacob and Esau being twins none the less). Indeed it follows the same themes one can pick out throughout the New and Old testaments; the selling of what is most precious for naught, the seeking of redemption, and eventual forgiveness.

Tenebrous wrote:

@WS

CaptGlanton:

The lines of dialogue equating Fink and the labor organizers still make my skin crawl. And the game still has a deeply reactionary politics running underneath its rosey anti-racist exterior

seems to forget that Booker was a Pinkerton and he was speaking as someone who broke up labor protests (If I remember correctly who spoke those lines). Would it be realistic for Booker to be a big labor sympathizer? Plus if the narrative is that labor is always the good guys (independent of what you think of management), well I find that simplistic.

Really though, what is reactionary about the politics of the game? Pointing out that revolutions like the one depicted can be more horrible and bloody than the ones they replaced? History is chocked full of examples, the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks, Mao's China, the Khmer Rouge, etc.

One of the points is that there are no "good guys" in most situations.

Lemme pull part of my post from the non-spoilers thread then, too:

I think there's a more subtle message here. Remember that Rapture in the original Bioshock was not supposed to be a strict analog of America--it was supposed to be a funhouse mirror twisted version of America if there was no social safety net. Columbia is the same. Not that America was happy fun land at the time, but the history of America is a lot different than that of Columbia. Consider what was going on in America at the time:

The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest, and West for most of the 20th century. Some historians differentiate between the first Great Migration (1910–1930), numbering about 1.6 million migrants who left mostly rural areas to migrate to northern and midwestern industrial cities, and, after a lull during the Great Depression, a Second Great Migration (1940 to 1970), in which 5 million or more people moved, including many to California and other western cities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_M...

Contrast that with the all-but-in-name slavery of Columbia. The game takes place in 1912, right? Consider this:

The Harlem Renaissance is generally considered to have spanned from about 1919 until the early or mid-1930s. Many of its ideas lived on much longer. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, was placed between 1924 (the year that Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance) and 1929 (the year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_...

I cannot possibly imagine Columbia is only a decade away from anything like that. So what I think the game is actually about is how oppression provokes an equal and opposite resistance. When society has safety valves and the hope and promise of things getting better, the flow of history is more peaceful. When the oppression is brutal, the reaction is brutal. In fact, there's a curious line about the Vox Populi choosing the color red beyond just the Russian Revolution, and something much closer to home:

The Red Summer refers to the race riots that occurred in more than three dozen cities in the United States during the summer and early autumn of 1919. In most instances, whites attacked African Americans. In some cases groups of blacks fought back, notably in Chicago, where, along with Washington, D.C. and Elaine, Arkansas, the greatest number of fatalities occurred.[1] The riots followed postwar social tensions related to the demobilization of veterans of World War I, both black and white, and competition for jobs among ethnic whites and blacks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sum...

Columbia is not America. Columbia is a plantation in the sky. I'd say the story in a nutshell is that the worse the oppression, the worse the liberation, much like the original Bioshock's story of fascism vs. social welfare.

Also, that poster asked this question before they left: "There is nothing radical about a story in which the end of a society is depicted as a pretty white girl being held against her will, and One Man With A Shotgun being the only one who can save her."

At first I kept thinking about this (NSFW):

But then I got to thinking: it's a story where well-meaning but naive outsiders trying to fix a problem by throwing more guns at it doesn't turn out as planned. Not radical maybe, but a bit more nuanced than just another tale of false equivalence.

Demosthenes wrote:

Revisting Rapture would be cool... except we're doing it in a time that has already been laid out and explained via the Bioshock book.

I seriously doubt the only connection to Columbia and the ending of Binfinite is going to be the presence of Booker and Elizabeth. Given the mind-screwiness of the ending I find it hard to believe that things are going to go down exactly the way you expect, except Booker and Elizabeth are there for some reason. There will probably be timeline differences.

I'm looking forward to seeing the Luteces show up in Rapture.

Columbia is also in very literal terms a floating monument to the American West, whose culture included such aspects as the doctrine of manifest destiny and the depiction of non-white people as subhumans genetically incapable of progressing at the same rate as whites. It also represents the fulfillment of Booker DeWitt's bizarre fantasies; and DeWitt, let us recall, is a man born at the absolute tail end of a particularly racist strain of frontier culture who as Comstock wishes to return society to an idyllic (in his view) past that never existed.

Just finished the game for the second time. Man, but it leaves me feeling down. It's a fantastic game, and it's a bittersweet feeling, but my wife is on an overnight shift at the hospital so I can't even snuggle up to her in bed! And again I find myself not wanting to play other games because there is no companion quite like Elizabeth to keep me company.

It's so hard to objectively view the themes and ideas in the game when you just finish it, but once again I applaud Irrational for putting together such a deep, intelligent game that actually has things to say about history and the human condition.

4xis.black wrote:

Columbia is also in very literal terms a floating monument to the American West, whose culture included such aspects as the doctrine of manifest destiny and the depiction of non-white people as subhumans genetically incapable of progressing at the same rate as whites. It also represents the fulfillment of Booker DeWitt's bizarre fantasies; and DeWitt, let us recall, is a man born at the absolute tail end of a particularly racist strain of frontier culture who as Comstock wishes to return society to an idyllic (in his view) past that never existed.

Not just the West. It captures the US as a whole, wrapped up in a confusing amalgam of roughly 1870-1910. Labor organizers and workers' rights movements (generally conflated with "bomb-throwing anarchists" in a linguistic move that assumed all bomb throwers were anarchists and all anarchists were bomb-throwers) were the common political boogeyman by the late 1880s.

Still working on 1999 mode as a second playthrough. I did enjoy the bit of foreshadowing at the factory where Elizabeth says something like "I guess it runs in the family." after stabbing Daisy with the scissors. You then see Booker raise his right hand a bit so that his A.D. scar is in clear view. Nice.

Burial at Sea Public Service Announcement

If you are playing on PC with mouse and keyboard, make sure you have a key mapped to 'switch weapon'. I just had the scroll wheel mapped to switch between the two weapons (not sure if this is default) and could not figure out how to bring up the weapon wheel for the longest time. Have to hold down the switch weapon button, which you can't do for mouse scroll wheel.

Not even skimming.... just coming directly here to leave a note, and then leaving before I read anything that I don't want to.

I'm playing through this game finally, and the moment in the bar basement in Shantytown where Booker picks up a guitar and plays, while Elizabeth sings and convinces a little boy to take an orange is one of the most beautiful and unexpected moments in gaming, ever.

AndrewA wrote:

Not even skimming.... just coming directly here to leave a note, and then leaving before I read anything that I don't want to.

I'm playing through this game finally, and the moment in the bar basement in Shantytown where Booker picks up a guitar and plays, while Elizabeth sings and convinces a little boy to take an orange is one of the most beautiful and unexpected moments in gaming, ever.

Maybe it was just me, but as nice as it was, it also felt completely random and out of place.

Demosthenes wrote:

Maybe it was just me, but as nice as it was, it also felt completely random and out of place.

I agree with this but stuff like that tends to be some of the more memorable moments in gaming. Like the coffee break in Earthbound.

Demosthenes wrote:
AndrewA wrote:

Not even skimming.... just coming directly here to leave a note, and then leaving before I read anything that I don't want to.

I'm playing through this game finally, and the moment in the bar basement in Shantytown where Booker picks up a guitar and plays, while Elizabeth sings and convinces a little boy to take an orange is one of the most beautiful and unexpected moments in gaming, ever.

Maybe it was just me, but as nice as it was, it also felt completely random and out of place.

It was. Which is why it was so amazing to me. It was so completely dissonant with everything that was going on at the time, that I was unprepared for it and thus affected more so than if I experienced that moment in a vacuum.

In other news: I finished the game last night.... still digesting that ending - but, what a ride. I'm a little disappointed that the themes of racism and class were basically discarded around the midpoint of the game, but at least the game took a stab at some tough issues, as opposed to most other AAA titles, which stay far far away from real controversy.

Something I guessed wrong: I thought Elizabeth had portaled out of the womb as a child and killed the wife.

I thought Booker was going to end up being made into the Songbird.

It's been a while since I played so I can't remember all the twists exactly, but I guess there's the possibility that some version of Booker was made into the Songbird...?