BioShock Infinite's Big Daddy Substitute Gets a Name

[Outright Villainy]

A nemisis/Dahakha style enemy would indeed be a great way of invigorating it. In the original Bioshock the vulnerability against big daddies soon evaporated once you were armed to the teeth with proximity mines, trip wires and armour piercing machine gun rounds. The initial fights where I hid in fear was spectacular, I really hope they can recreate that.

 

[z3rostr1fe]

Wow... I will "buy" (*wink wink*) it once I get a new PC... Oh wait... 2012 release? Damn... God help us all... I still wanna play!

 

[Internet Kraken]

Ah, that sounds interesting. Like the Hunter in Dead Space. I hope that's what they do, the Big Daddy's image was kinda sullied after you killed about 20 of them.

You play the game on the hardest difficulty? That you actually had to set up traps and such to actually beat the damn thing.

Actually I found Big Daddies, and Bioshock in general, to be way to easy even on hard mode. The first few Big Daddies you fight are difficult only due to a lack of plasmids and ammo, but after that they become incredibly easy. Mainly because the game has a number of cheap and easy ways to beat them, such as;

-Electric attacks. You can effectively stunlock Big Daddies using electric attacks, preventing them from attacking you. So long as you have enough ammo (which is easy to come by when you have a lot of money and use Invent-it machines effectively), you can kill the Big Daddies without them touching you. Electric buck's only disadvantage is the reload, but simple use of cover negates that problem. Electric gel is just a constant stream of pain for the Big Daddy. You can just sit there and watch its health bar slowly melt away with no input beyond holding down the fire button.

-Security Bullseye, which is definitely the easiest provided the Big Daddy stumbles in front of a camera. Big Daddies don't care if you sling this plasmid at them. They won't attack you. Which means you can keep triggering alarms on them without fear of getting hurt. An endless stream of attack drones will assault the Big Daddy. All you have to do is watch.

-Hypnotize Big Daddy, which is the most entertaining and again requires almost no input from the player. Just hypnotize a lone Big Daddy and engage another Big Daddy in combat. The two of them will kill each other in a big battle that you just need to stand away from. Either your Daddy wins, or the other one wins but is heavily wounded so you easily finish it off.

So yeah, I don't fear Big Daddies on hard difficulty. In fact, I am glad to fight them. As soon as you harvest the Little Sisters, lone Big Daddies will show up which means I can hypnotize more of them. I viewed Big Daddies as friends rather than enemies, which is a problem in a horror game. While the hypnotize Big Daddy plasmid is fun it probably shouldn't be in the game because all feelings of horror subside when you have a guy wielding a massive drill following you. Not that I really need him though, since I've been beating all of the Splicers to death with the wrench. There's a massive abundance of health packs so it's not like I'm in any danger. Bioshock is one of the easiest games I've ever played.

 

[The Austin]

So Handyman is going to be what The Big Sister should have been? As in, SINGULAR?

Good.

 

[VanityGirl]

Handyman>Crabman

 

[Zef Otter]

I wish they did a Thin man

 

[Mariakitten]

Thats cool and all but heres one thing the bothers me. In Bioshock 1 the Big Daddies made sense because they were made with diving suits so they can operate underwater and still be menacing. But in Bioshock infinite from what I can tell the "Handymen" are big, heavy, and lumbering, like the Big Daddies. But wouldn't that be a disadvantage on a airship? Stress on the ship and no environmental benefit like the diving suit had, it seems its a excuse to make them like the Big Daddies instead of thinking up something new. Now I understand all of this is subject to change and I could very well be wrong but these are just my concerns, my two cents.

 

[wellhereiam]

I hope we're not going to be hearing about this every month for the next couple years. Because after a certain amount of time waiting for a game to be released I just stop caring about it no matter how good it sounds or how much it's hyped.

 

[Druyn]

You know if they are going for a new direction, I don't see why they need to drag the Big Daddy along with them. It's really the only thing that still bothers me about Bioshock:Infinite.

Well, think of how out of place the Big Daddy's would be here. Infinite takes place decades earlier, in a floating city with a western theme, where Little Sisters and Adam dont exist yet. How out of place would a lumbering giant in a dive suit and drill be in there? Seriously, even the charge could just send one of them out the window. And without Little Sisters to protect, why would they need to be there at all?

 

[Billska]

Wow. If there is only 1 handy man in the game I just thought up of an awesome way to kill him.

Imagine that he is the last boss battle. You repeatedly shoot his "weak spot", being the glass around his heart. Just when the glass is about to shatter he charges at you and picks you up and shakes you about. He then proceeds to throw you into a wall. As he walks to you slowly you look around for a weapon and find a wrench lying next to you. As he picks you up again you smash his glass heart cage with your wrench. /Get the girl and roll credits.

 

[Funkysandwich]

There's a massive abundance of health packs so it's not like I'm in any danger. Bioshock is one of the easiest games I've ever played.

Not to mention there's no penalty for dying so it hardly matters if you do die.

I gave up on Bioshock halfway through the first game. At the time I was running out of hard drive space, so I uninstalled to make way for something entertaining. The only redeeming feature is that one of my friends is called Andrew Ryan.

 

[Internet Kraken]

You know if they are going for a new direction, I don't see why they need to drag the Big Daddy along with them. It's really the only thing that still bothers me about Bioshock:Infinite.

Well, think of how out of place the Big Daddy's would be here. Infinite takes place decades earlier, in a floating city with a western theme, where Little Sisters and Adam dont exist yet. How out of place would a lumbering giant in a dive suit and drill be in there? Seriously, even the charge could just send one of them out the window. And without Little Sisters to protect, why would they need to be there at all?

Yeah, which is exactly why them dragging the Big Daddy into this game bothers me. The Handyman just looks and feels like a Big Daddy substitute.

There's a massive abundance of health packs so it's not like I'm in any danger. Bioshock is one of the easiest games I've ever played.

Not to mention there's no penalty for dying so it hardly matters if you do die.

You'll rarely die anyways though, since you're going to constantly be tripping over med kits. And when you're not, you'll have so much money you can buy a ton of them.

 

[Druyn]

You know if they are going for a new direction, I don't see why they need to drag the Big Daddy along with them. It's really the only thing that still bothers me about Bioshock:Infinite.

Well, think of how out of place the Big Daddy's would be here. Infinite takes place decades earlier, in a floating city with a western theme, where Little Sisters and Adam dont exist yet. How out of place would a lumbering giant in a dive suit and drill be in there? Seriously, even the charge could just send one of them out the window. And without Little Sisters to protect, why would they need to be there at all?

Yeah, which is exactly why them dragging the Big Daddy into this game bothers me. The Handyman just looks and feels like a Big Daddy substitute.

I agree with you there, no doubt. It will be impossible to look at them without thinking about Big Daddies.

 

[Funkysandwich]

You know if they are going for a new direction, I don't see why they need to drag the Big Daddy along with them. It's really the only thing that still bothers me about Bioshock:Infinite.

Well, think of how out of place the Big Daddy's would be here. Infinite takes place decades earlier, in a floating city with a western theme, where Little Sisters and Adam dont exist yet. How out of place would a lumbering giant in a dive suit and drill be in there? Seriously, even the charge could just send one of them out the window. And without Little Sisters to protect, why would they need to be there at all?

Yeah, which is exactly why them dragging the Big Daddy into this game bothers me. The Handyman just looks and feels like a Big Daddy substitute.

There's a massive abundance of health packs so it's not like I'm in any danger. Bioshock is one of the easiest games I've ever played.

Not to mention there's no penalty for dying so it hardly matters if you do die.

You'll rarely die anyways though, since you're going to constantly be tripping over med kits. And when you're not, you'll have so much money you can buy a ton of them.

True. But rushing constantly out of a vita chamber into a pack of enemies armed with only a wrench was about the only interesting thing to do. And that gets old fast too.

 

[b3nn3tt]

I hope to see a universe tied together with this new game - possibly a young Ryan? Maybe even Fontaine - no one said he mightn't have affected his aging with ADAM.

The problem with that would be that it wouldn't fit in with the story of Bioshock. Plasmids were invented in Rapture, if Infinite exists in the same universe then you'd have to rewrite the history of the first two games

Personally, I'd like to see it exist as a completely separate entity, in its own universe. To me, that makes it OK to make it similar to Bioshock 1 & 2 because it doesn't encroach on their stories

I also very much like the idea of the Handyman existing as a unique enemy, rather than thtere being a load of them. The Big Daddies were terrifying the first time I encountered them, but when you realise how many of them there are and how easy they were to kill they lost all of their scare value. The problem with it being a unique enemy is that I fear it would lead to a final boss battle, and when they did that in the first game it felt like a letdown