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CaptainSarcastic posted:That pretty much amounts to Being experimental is the opposite of creative bankruptcy, and frankly it would have been anticlimactic if Booker got to chill in Europe. Half of the problem with the dlc is that it was focused on one of these lesser endings, and of course this reduction in scope left us feeling dissatisfied. Levine should have just let us defend New York while the Luteces tsked disapproving. Then we could have gotten something that delved into the meaning of the epilogue.
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Sep 7, 2014 05:50
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Wow, Burial at Sea started well but ended up being stupid as gently caress. Like Mass Effect 3 ending level stupid as gently caress.
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Sep 7, 2014 13:02
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Wow, Burial at Sea started well but ended up being stupid as gently caress. Like Mass Effect 3 ending level stupid as gently caress. It's really awful. Try to tell yourself (and 2k) that the superposition only collapsed locally, and that the dumbass paradox we're stuck with is a self correcting poo poo timeline.
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Sep 7, 2014 13:46
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Sithsaber posted:It's really awful. Try to tell yourself (and 2k) that the superposition only collapsed locally, and that the dumbass paradox we're stuck with is a self correcting poo poo timeline. I think it might actually be almost worse than ME3 in its own way. I mean ME3's ending was obviously written at the last second because the writing team was led by idiots, but Burial at Sea... Christ, it takes effort to write something that incoherent and inconsistent and stupid. It's like Ken Levine decided to burn the franchise down and piss on the ashes as a final tribute to the gaming community. I could name at least a dozen big drat plot holes but I'll stick to one: how the gently caress does Comstock keep getting resurrected in Episode 1 like Booker did in the main game when there's no more Comstocks out there? Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 13:57 on Sep 7, 2014 |
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Sep 7, 2014 13:55
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:I think it might actually be almost worse than ME3 in its own way. I mean ME3's ending was obviously written at the last second because the writing team was led by idiots, but Burial at Sea... Christ, it takes effort to write something that incoherent and inconsistent and stupid. It's like Ken Levine decided to burn the franchise down and piss on the ashes as a final tribute to the gaming community. Did the respawn lobby remain the same or was it just a blimp like what happens when you fall off a cliff? If there is a respawn lobby, I'd guess that the oversoul idea is still in play. If there's a blip I'd wager that the cat in the box is still in play but Elizabeth has been blinded. Sithsaber fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Sep 7, 2014 |
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Sep 7, 2014 14:06
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Sithsaber posted:Did the redrawn lobby remain the same or was it just a blimp like what happens when you fall off a cliff? It was the same "Booker wake up!" sequence with Elizabeth futzing around with a needle. Then at the end,  you were Comstock all along instead! Then in Episode 2 it's immediately established that Episode 1 Comstock was the last Comstock because reasons... which makes the resurrection mechanic in Episode 1 a gaping, goatse-like plot hole.
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Sep 7, 2014 14:10
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:It was the same "Booker wake up!" sequence with Elizabeth futzing around with a needle. Then at the end, It's totally retarded but I think the reasoning behind it is that since Burial At Sea Bookstock was from a dimension where the portal took off the head of the Anna he was trying to steal instead of just her pinky, there was no Elizabeth to show up at the end of the base game to drown him at the baptism with all the other dimension Elizabeths / Comstocks.
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Sep 7, 2014 15:47
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Episode 2's ending is fantastically stupid and managed to ruin Infinite, tried to taint BS1, and pretty much killed my enthusiasm for the series as a whole. They managed to take a cool plot point (sheltered girl turned killer is now God) and piss it away with a really half-assed storyline about a faceless Little Sister and a stupid and pointless sacrifice for the sake of ~drama~.
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Sep 7, 2014 16:39
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Burial at Sea: Ken Takes His Ball and Goes Home (the ball is a metaphor)
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Sep 7, 2014 19:22
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I'm just goddamn tired of "we don't have an ending? Kill the protagonist at the end, it's meaningful" as an ending to video games. It's so goddamn tiring to get to the end and get a minute long cutscene of the protagonist dying to sad music.
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Sep 7, 2014 20:49
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Honest question: who would've preferred it if the game offered the chance for Elizabeth and Booker being able to start again somehow and reconciliated as father and daughter, either as an alternate ending or the actual end?
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Sep 7, 2014 21:41
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raditts posted:It's totally retarded but I think the reasoning behind it is that since Burial At Sea Bookstock was from a dimension where the portal took off the head of the Anna he was trying to steal instead of just her pinky, there was no Elizabeth to show up at the end of the base game to drown him at the baptism with all the other dimension Elizabeths / Comstocks. Since Anna was born after the baptism, the whole ending of the main game is an idiotic time-travel paradox failure. If Booker dies at the baptism then she will never be born so she can't time-travel back to drown him to prevent her own birth. It's the whole "grandfather paradox" playing out. Not to mention that it makes zero sense that Booker somehow goes back in time to take the place of younger Booker while multiple future Anna/Elizabeths drown him. Where is original timeline Booker, and how does future Booker take his place and get him out to the baptism location with nothing but a whole bunch of Anna/Elizabeths and no preacher dude and company. It is ham-handed and lazy writing. Generally-speaking I think time-travel is a literary device best avoided, and Bioshock Infinite's sieve-like plot is a good example of why.
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Sep 7, 2014 21:42
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CaptainSarcastic posted:Since Anna was born after the baptism, the whole ending of the main game is an idiotic time-travel paradox failure. If Booker dies at the baptism then she will never be born so she can't time-travel back to drown him to prevent her own birth. It's the whole "grandfather paradox" playing out. I don't think that was time travel. I think that was a symbolic depiction of metaphysical purgation.
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Sep 7, 2014 22:20
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Sithsaber posted:I don't think that was time travel. I think that was a symbolic depiction of metaphysical purgation. It was a "metaphysical purgation" in the sense it was the writer taking a literary poo poo all over the plot, perhaps.
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Sep 7, 2014 22:32
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CaptainSarcastic posted:It was a "metaphysical purgation" in the sense it was the writer taking a literary poo poo all over the plot, perhaps. It worked as a book-end/ framing device.
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Sep 7, 2014 22:41
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I somehow managed to completely miss that Episode 2 was out and just finished it, and I will never forgive myself for doing it. I don't know whether the worst part was the train-wreck plotting that is so bad it has to be deliberate, or the fact that they took fifteen minutes of plot exposition and built five hours of filler gameplay around it.
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Sep 7, 2014 23:02
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I haven't even finished Burial at Sea pt 2 yet. The whole thing is a giant clusterfuck and their backpedaling with Daisy made me cringe hard - so loving hard - among other constant gently caress ups. I still don't regret playing it for the levels - returning to Rapture and Columbia was still fun for me. It still made for the best GTA IV mod, tho: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sku4Hzk2UzI
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Sep 7, 2014 23:26
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Literally Kermit posted:I haven't even finished Burial at Sea pt 2 yet. The whole thing is a giant clusterfuck and their backpedaling with Daisy made me cringe hard - so loving hard - among other constant gently caress ups. I still don't regret playing it for the levels - returning to Rapture and Columbia was still fun for me. Wait until you get to and near the end. 
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Sep 7, 2014 23:52
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Going back and watching all the old trailers for BI really makes me sad we didn't get the commentary on American exceptionalism, xenophobia, hypocritical Christian values, greed, and the effects of white washing parts of history. I imagine the Vox Populi would have had a story of more of the dangers of fighting monsters can lead to becoming a monster kind of deal instead of a South Park "Both sides are bad the truth is in the middle" but we got Levine's inflated ego's diaper contents The part the bothers me the most about the Vox Populi is when you first get to Columbia you see how immigrants and African Americans are treated horribly. We see how they're seen as invading unclean subhuman hoards who will kill white people and their kids just to kill and only by keeping them under the heel of white people can they be trained correctly. Than once the revolution starts ....they become exactly like the oppressors say they would act. They dress up as devils, scalp and mutilate bodies, pillage and kill people, and their leader literally ends up covered in blood screaming about how children must be slain. I know the DLC supposedly takes care of that but showing the oppressed rise up just to act exactly like those oppressing them said they would act is pretty loving vile Dr. VooDoo fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 01:23
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Dr. VooDoo posted:I know the DLC supposedly takes care of that Does it buggery. Ken Levine's hands are made of ham.
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Sep 8, 2014 01:48
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Dr. VooDoo posted:Going back and watching all the old trailers for BI really makes me sad we didn't get the commentary on American exceptionalism, xenophobia, hypocritical Christian values, greed, and the effects of white washing parts of history. I imagine the Vox Populi would have had a story of more of the dangers of fighting monsters can lead to becoming a monster kind of deal instead of a South Park "Both sides are bad the truth is in the middle" but we got Levine's inflated ego's diaper contents How did Haiti treat its former masters? Didn't the French chop off a bunch of heads after throwing off the yokes of the other two estates? Orgies of violence tend to happen when rage is bottled up for centuries.
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Sep 8, 2014 03:26
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Sithsaber posted:How did Haiti treat its former masters? Didn't the French chop off a bunch of heads after throwing off the yokes of the other two estates? Orgies of violence tend to happen when rage is bottled up for centuries. True yes, but there is literally no reason why Irish and African Americans would loving scalp people. The issue isnt with them being violent, its how they act like stereotypical savages and wildmen, despite being entirely made up of urban and industrial people.
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Sep 8, 2014 03:50
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Also by that point the game has stopped really caring about the political dimension to the setting / plot, so the revolution gets a much more cursory treatment in favour of the universe hopping stuff.
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Sep 8, 2014 03:51
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Communist Zombie posted:True yes, but there is literally no reason why Irish and African Americans would loving scalp people. The issue isnt with them being violent, its how they act like stereotypical savages and wildmen, despite being entirely made up of urban and industrial people. Didn't all the factions have a fighting tradition that came from the veterans of the Indian wars? I think some otl blue bellies had a thing for quid pro quo scalp snipping.
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Sep 8, 2014 03:58
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Dr. VooDoo posted:Going back and watching all the old trailers for BI really makes me sad we didn't get the commentary on American exceptionalism, xenophobia, hypocritical Christian values, greed, and the effects of white washing parts of history. I imagine the Vox Populi would have had a story of more of the dangers of fighting monsters can lead to becoming a monster kind of deal instead of a South Park "Both sides are bad the truth is in the middle" but we got Levine's inflated ego's diaper contents Seriously, I would've loved for the entire game to focus on this instead of the shift to quantum physics bullshit in the second half. I loved the first part of the game when it was all about that, but then you hop into a portal at the theater and that entire plotline disappears in favor of a dumb plot that was clearly over Levine's head. 
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Sep 8, 2014 10:59
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closeted republican posted:Seriously, I would've loved for the entire game to focus on this instead of the shift to quantum physics bullshit in the second half. I loved the first part of the game when it was all about that, but then you hop into a portal at the theater and that entire plotline disappears in favor of a dumb plot that was clearly over Levine's head. These was so much poo poo that was just sloppy and tearing holes in the narrative. Booker kills Comstock, bashing his head into the fountain. So here we see two different versions of the same person co-existing in the same period, completely different people. The Luteces, despite being two versions of the same person (one has a Y chromosome), gallivant all over the place together, including after their deaths in one of the "prime" Booker/Elizabeth universes. So then, at the end, when "prime" booker is surrounded by all the Anna/Elizabeths, how the gently caress is he supposed to be the "original" Booker before the MacGuffin of the Baptism? This runs counter to everything they have shown in the changing timelines and multiple versions of people co-existing at the same time and place. Not to mention the paradox that, in their Star Trek time-plot circus, if the Annas drown the new super-Booker who can magically take the place of his younger self in the timeline, it would mean that she would never be born, and thus never be able to be stolen by Comstock and released by Booker only to eventually drown him. If Booker had killed his earlier self, and continued to exist since he was from a different universe entirely, that would've worked. I also thought that for a bad ending, when Booker realizes he really was Comstock all along, that one of the Lutteces suggests to him that he pick up where his other self died, and take over Columbia for himself. How he had played up to then could determine if this was an option to take. I mean, really, there were a lot of ways they could've gone with it, and they went for lazy linear nonsense instead.
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Sep 10, 2014 13:38
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its' a better game if you imagine his name is "booger" instead of "booker"
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Sep 10, 2014 14:05
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If you're gonna play Bioshock Infinite on steam, be sure to load it up about an hour ahead of time, because you're getting a 5 gigabyte update. The update provides language support for italian and french or some such thing. Why all of us have to download 5 gigs of data for the 1% who want that, I have no idea.
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Sep 11, 2014 02:03
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I just played this, gotta agree that the plot became marginally less interesting when it started to be about dimension-hopping instead of exploring the racism of American exceptionalism in a floating dystopia, here's some questions: 1. Why did getting baptized turn Booker into some kind of ultra-racist super-patriot? 2. Why did the twins help Comstock steal his own baby from the past or whatever when they seemed totally chill while loving around as quantum ghosts? And what were they supposed to get out of that deal? 3. Why couldn't anyone think of a less dumb old-timey name than Booker DeWitt? 4. Who thought it was a good idea to make you backtrack across an empty city where you already killed everyone while hunting ghost mom's memories? And to add to that, who thought it was a good idea to have a ghost mom? 5. Speaking of ghost mom, they use that to imply Elizabeth isn't just able to bounce between worlds but also create them whole cloth if she feels strongly enough. Why doesn't she just create a world where everything works out? Did they forget that she had this power? 6. Has anyone ever seen a time/dimension-traveling plot with a twist where the twist isn't that the main character is a future/alternate version of another character? Like, literally ever? 7. Was Fink's character stripped out of the plot? Why did he just disappear? Also, why did they literally just use those weepy Benjamin Franklin guys twice? Were they also cut? And if so, how did a game with so much cut content also feel so padded? Thanks in advance! I will never play the DLC. Wolfsheim fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Sep 12, 2014 |
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Sep 12, 2014 05:31
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With the first one, Comstock took the 'now go forth and sin no more' part of the baptism to mean 'you are utterly incapable of sinning ever again'. With that in mind, he decided that anything that offended him was sinful, therefore floating city. For number six, Back to the Future? The Terminator? Bill and Ted? The Time Machine? There's a ton of them if you look about. As for the last point, they said that they cut out enough material to make another 4-5 games, so any time anything doesn't make sense, just assume it's sitting in a discarded document file somewhere.
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Sep 12, 2014 05:41
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Kaboom Dragoon posted:For number six, Back to the Future? The Terminator? Bill and Ted? The Time Machine? There's a ton of them if you look about. Back to the Future and the Time Machine don't have twists. I never saw Bill and Ted. Kyle Reese is sent back to be his boss's father, which is close enough.
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Sep 12, 2014 05:45
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Wolfsheim posted:7. Was Fink's character stripped out of the plot? Why did he just disappear? Daisy Fitzroy killed him, remember? It was just before she took that random child hostage and Elizabeth went all heart of darkness on her rear end. Wolfsheim posted:5. Speaking of ghost mom, they use that to imply Elizabeth isn't just able to bounce between worlds but also create them whole cloth if she feels strongly enough. Why doesn't she just create a world where everything works out? Did they forget that she had this power? She can't do it on that big a scale because the siphon is sapping her powers, which is why they have songbird kamikaze into the tower at the end, to destroy it. After that she becomes a handholding exposition machine and then the game ends because she does suddenly have that power. CJacobs fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Sep 12, 2014 |
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Sep 12, 2014 06:08
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CJacobs posted:Daisy Fitzroy killed him, remember? It was just before she took that random child hostage and Elizabeth went all heart of darkness on her rear end. I just thought that was some random bourgeois scum, he doesn't have any lines and you don't see his face  quote:She can't do it on that big a scale because the siphon is sapping her powers, which is why they have songbird kamikaze into the tower at the end, to destroy it. After that she becomes a handholding exposition machine and then the game ends because she does suddenly have that power. That is an unsatisfying answer/ending!
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Sep 12, 2014 06:46
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Wolfsheim posted:That is an unsatisfying answer/ending! Bioshock Infinite! Don't worry, the DLC makes it worse, so be glad you don't want to bother.
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Sep 12, 2014 06:46
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Wolfsheim posted:[...] Mind you, if you imagine a version of this story with Rosalind as the main character, it gets a bit more interesting. You have a brilliant woman who's frustrated by the conservatism and sexism of Victorian/Edwardian society, so she emigrates to America to find the opportunity denied to her. She finds it in spades with Comstock, who gives her the resources to do everything she's always dreamed of doing. However, her great flaw is that she's so consumed with her work that she never really notices what kind of man her benefactor is. She eventually brings the male version of herself to her world, a version of "herself" that didn't have to struggle. However, because he was privileged, he didn't have to take the first opportunity to come along, but could pick and choose, and he clues into Comstock's nature far faster than Rosalind did. Unfortunately, by the time Rosalind smells the coffee, she and Robert are scattered among the time streams. In a way, I suppose the secret story of B:I is the redemption of Rosalind Lutece. Certainly I like it more than Booker's. 3. You think that's bad? Go see Madame Butterfly. The lead in that is an American named Benjamin Franklin (or "B.F." to his friends) Pinkerton, a name I love because it is simultaneously the most American name ever and a name that no American, anywhere, ever, would give their child. 5. That's the great flaw of parallel universe stories: if you don't impose strict limitations, the story will evaporate, because every problem can be resolved by grabbing the solution from another universe. The player's investment in Columbia basically dies in the middle of the game. After flipping between three versions of the city in rapid succession, it feels like a copy of a copy of a copy, and there's no reason to care about the politics, since you can just go to a universe with different politics. 7. Regarding Fink, I don't know every iteration the story went through, but at this point it's safe to assume there was more about everyone that was cut. Personally, I feel like there was never a clear idea of what B:I was supposed to be, so the team just kept drawing and building and creating into a void with only vague ideas of how everything would fit together. Now I have a question of my own: why does B:I feel so shackled to the original Bioshock? I mean, it was cute in the beginning with the lighthouse that goes up instead of down, but as the game progresses, it always feels like Columbia is being haunted by Rapture. By the end and in the DLCs the first game seems to have become this consuming vortex that tears apart Infinite and melds its pieces into the holy narrative of Jack Ryan. Is this an obsession with Levine or the team, an admission of their failure to build Columbia, or soemthing else?
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Sep 12, 2014 08:10
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I got the impression that Booker became Comstock because the baptism forced him to cling ultra-hard to whatever forgiveness he could find. God forgave him, and any lingering feeling of guilt is externalised and made the rest of the world's fault. America committed the massacre, but Booker was forgiven so he did nothing wrong so America was right and any of this modern 20th century guilt is an enemy of true patriots. Basically he became a fundamentalist lunatic because otherwise he'd have to accept what he'd done.
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Sep 12, 2014 10:21
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From the universe where Booker is the lead singer for Coldplay
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Sep 12, 2014 11:17
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And also wears titanium briefs.
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Sep 12, 2014 11:24
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Finished the game again tonight, to get the achievement for completing in 1999 mode. It was mildly tougher, and I still somehow missed a telescope or videoplayer (whatever they're called). Filled in a bunch of other achievements, though. Knowing how the game ends, it was really frustrating to see all these points in the narrative where they could have crafted real Bioshock endings, and instead just pissed it all away on the extra-stupid exposition-fest they went with instead. The stupid little post-credits bit tacked on just feels like an admission that their ending sucked, so here is a really lame attempt at "THE END.............or is it?" I'd already played both episodes of Burial at Sea, and am not sure I am going to do them again in 1999 mode. Those feel a little insulting, particularly with the alternate Anna-abduction scene and further mangling of their already inane time-travel/parallel universe schlock. In the main game, they totally could have let Booker play as a villain, and get an ending where he is bombing New York, not for some religious zealotry, but for profit. Hell, he could've had Anna scoop up other Bookers from alternate realities and amass an army of himself, rather like how Rosalind Luttece brought her male version over. They could have taken the story so many different ways, and instead they drove it into the ground and invoked an asinine "grandfather paradox" to end it with. The Booker/Elizabeth story reads like an overly complicated tragedy, and the obnoxious hubris is the idea that they can redeem themselves, when the plot states that they clearly can't, so the only way to deal with it is to kill them all, except maybe Super Elizabeth, and the Rapture Booker, because gently caress it, we need DLC. To then try to justify Elizabeth's existence by her setting in motion the events of Bioshock 1 just struck me as weak, frivolous, and an insult to that game's much better and more original storyline. So many missed opportunities, because like I have said, I actually really like the gameplay in Infinite, otherwise I wouldnt've spent 71 hours in the game so far. It is just a serious disappointment to see a great franchise sink to postmodern cheese and abandon player agency in the narrative. CaptainSarcastic fucked around with this message at 11:42 on Sep 12, 2014 |
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Sep 12, 2014 11:39
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Wolfsheim posted:I just played this, gotta agree that the plot became marginally less interesting when it started to be about dimension-hopping instead of exploring the racism of American exceptionalism in a floating dystopia, here's some questions: 2. I just thought the Lutece's were run of the mill rear end in a top hat scientists who were more into tests then they were into the eugenics techniques they were testing. 5. A version of her probably did. The Metaself is beyond cause, effect and consequence. She's basically lived forever once she can "see all the doors". 6. "The time traveller" is the archetype of this genre and its twist involves a false utopia rather than a derp confrontation with cynicism and the loss of your ideals. Read up. Sithsaber fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Sep 13, 2014 |
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Sep 13, 2014 01:39
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