Gripes About Bioshock Infinite

[Zeke63]

I really thought the combat was too frequent and took away from the immersive experience, as all my favorite parts were non pew pew sections. It really distracted from the narrative and pacing, an over saturation of shooting if you will. I wish they would have taken more risks with gameplay, having more exploration and/or puzzle elements and less shooting

 

[zumbledum]

If there is one single complaint about the narrative, its that the vigors make little sense in this game.
don't get me wrong, from a gameplay standpoint its extremely fun, and no one would consider making a "Bioshock" game without them, but from a narrative viewpoint, they don't make as much sense as the Plasmids did in the first Bioshock.
the Plasmids, were a large part of the whole "ADAM","Splicer" and "Little Sisters/Big Daddy" angle that played a very large part in the world of Rapture and its downfall as a whole.
and much of the point of Bioshock was about how you can make great advances in science in the absence of moral limitations of the research (stem-cell research taken to its "fear mongering" conclusion).

there was nothing in Colombia that justifies having "super powers in a bottle" to that extent.
and since there doesn't seem to be the same level of mental decay that splicing causes, there is no logic to having most of the population being "baseline" humans despite ready access to such powers.

they are imported from rapture through tears, as is the tech to make the songbird, you may have also noticed some very out f place music like the beach boys and some ac dc it all got harvested through tears. id go as far as to say salt is eve but yes it doesnt really account for how they harvest it in columbia.

I wouldn't sweat it man, literally everything except the Avengers gets called cliche on the Escapist.

Also while we've got this thread going, what the hell did the post-credits scene mean?

Well unless one of the devs steps up and tells us its largely down to personal view of the ending, personally i took it as proof that Elizabeth and Booker were pretty fucking stupid and dropped the ball massively and everything has just snapped back to where Booker sells his daughter.


some of my gripes

Where does the food come from?

there above the clouds and presumably stay there as the fixed height particle drives probably cant go up and down and no one on the earth has seen them. so how exactly do they get water?

Why is it so warm 20k feet up?

as you arrive there you see a bridge , it has its underground supports , they would be load bearing on a ground based tension bridge but i think in this airborne scenario they would snap the bridge like a twig.

there are kids playing with a water hydrant, so these fractured city clouds have water pressure from where exactly?

why does the "sea" in battle ship bay have waves going up the shore?

Elizabeth- 20 years in near isolation only ever seen Lutece and songbird

how does she know the way out?

how is she so amazingly well adjusted. id expect her to be screaming and freaking out in battleship bay but this firecat goes off for a dance! 20 years in isolation to that....

she claims to not be able to open tears to anywhere she wants anymore, but she opens a tear across time and space to a Paris where return of the Jedi is on the cinema just fine! and we see from the chart at the bottom of the siphon facility her power levels are back to her previous child hood spike anyway, and she starts doing it again near the end.

How about instead of opening a portal to Columbia where Lin isn't dead why not open one to a Columbia that had a peaceful revolution and is now a Utopian picture of racial harmony that bounces around the majour cultural centers of the world (and Paris) on a cheese and whine tasting binge?

why does she do another portal to a place where the tools are not in place when , oh just see above for every bad choice they make re tears.

If liz gains her ability with tears from being from another plane , why don't we? Booker isn't native to the plane we start in and even less to the second and third and fourth and ...

its an infinite multiverse where all choices are possible and play out, except its impossible to not hand over Elizabeth.

Why choose erasure? at the end she has become a weaver of dimensional lines bringing a whole subset together to be affected by one choice. well first off its a bit rude to not go back further and save all the people we murdered at wounded knee, in the boxer rebellion (not sure we went there or not slate and comstock both hint we did but its vague) and as our time as a paid killer in the pinkertons.

Why not change some other decisions pre wounded knee and instead have a normal happy life with a well adjusted booker and wife?

in an infinite multiverse there was close to an infinite number of better choices to make !

 

[codeg]

The only annoyance for me was the lack of a map. The levels are very linear so I can understand why they left it out but later on it's a pain in the ass to navigate the market district without spamming the magical navigator arrow-thingy.

In regards to the complicated story, having listened to (maybe?) all of the recordings, everything is explained throughout the course of the game. My second run through the game was maybe more fun than the first if only because of all the hints I found, that lead up to the shocking ending.

Also, you can tell a game is amazing when everyone's problems with it are just nitpicks regarding difficulty and minor plot holes.

edit: Oh! I almost forgot about the absolute randomness of your loot. Sandwich in a box of chocolates anyone?

 

[daveman247]

You kidding? That thing had the health of a bloody juggernaught.

And after you kill your first patriot it's literally a case just of getting behind everyone, clearing out the men and then shocking the patriots and shooting their gears with the crank guns until they blow up.

I had about 70% of the ships health to spare on that one.

The handymen sequences were the absolute cock of the game. No gun seemed to have more than a glancing effect. And if there wasn't a skyline to hand you were going to die. No matter what you did, you were going to die.

... Atleast on Hard. Can't speak for anything else.

I found the last sequence not too bad either, quite forgiving actually!


As for the handymen, yes they are tough. The weakspot is their heart on the front which does double damage. The heart is very small and the handymen - smartly- like to cover them up. Difficult enemies to take on all the way through. Much more than big daddies - who just became waaaay easy about half way through the game (on hard too). I still like the look of the big daddie more though

 

[daveman247]

Also, you can tell a game is amazing when everyone's problems with it are just nitpicks regarding difficulty and minor plot holes.

edit: Oh! I almost forgot about the absolute randomness of your loot. Sandwich in a box of chocolates anyone?

No kidding, its a great game. But i think a game which tries to accomplish so much - the minor gripes stand out all the more.


So much bin-diving for food! My booker was basically very ill and overweight by the games end XD

- Reminds me of the cyanide and happiness bear-grylls vid.

 

[unstabLized]

I played on hard. I was very worried about ammo, and i had to switch out weapons sometimes, since one of mine was almost empty. I kept wishing for a vendor machine to be around the corner sometimes. I really really really really liked the story. Liked, really. It hit very close to da feels, and i bawled for 5 minutes when credits were rolling. In regards to Elizabeth tossing you things, I've noticed that she does that once every few so minutes. It's fairly balanced, for me at least. Kept up a challenge, but gave you a way out, but if you still messed up, then you'd die. The game was at a perfect challenge level for me on Hard.

As for saves, yeaaah it would've been nice to have manual saves, but I don't really care. Never really had a problem with it. If you want to replay parts later on, there's a Load Chapter option, so that's good. I love this game

 

[sumanoskae]

I didn't take issue with the content of the ending, just the execution. I got pretty attached to Booker and Elizabeth so...

Spoiler

She's just gonna drown him totally straight faced? no grieving, no distress just "Whelp, you're Comstock so you gotta die! Oh well" and then cut to black. I thought ya'll were friends! I mean, if she was angry that he gave her up, that didn't really come across either.

It wasn't even cruel, it was indifferent, and it made the whole thing feel unsatisfying.

I also found it too vague. Once again, the content is pretty interesting, but you're not gonna be able to absorb it while you're playing the game. You can piece it together after the fact, but it loses it's impact that way.

I know some people enjoy stories that are impossible to understand while you experience them, but to me that just undercuts their potency. It's not as though the story would have to be less complex, just less convoluted and obtuse.

Multifaceted information is not the same thing as confusing information.

As for the rest of the game, I thought it was pretty good, not quite great but I enjoyed it. I don't think the story ever came to a thematic conclusion; it illustrates what's wrong with Columbia but it never really explains explores what makes it appealing.

I think the difference between Rapture and Columbia can be summarized as such.

When I first saw Rapture, despite the fact that it was hell on earth, I could understand the good intentions that paved the road to hell.

"Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?"; it's a reasonable question and I understand why it's appealing.

When I first saw Columbia, despite the fact that it was a bustling populace, I knew it was a horrific place as soon as I saw it. You're greeted with statues depicting political figures as anointed prophets; this place is founded on dogmatic idolization and it's going straight to hell.

The things that are wrong with Columbia should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of intellect, so I can't really relate to the people making those mistakes.

 

[unstabLized]

If there is one single complaint about the narrative, its that the vigors make little sense in this game.
don't get me wrong, from a gameplay standpoint its extremely fun, and no one would consider making a "Bioshock" game without them, but from a narrative viewpoint, they don't make as much sense as the Plasmids did in the first Bioshock.
the Plasmids, were a large part of the whole "ADAM","Splicer" and "Little Sisters/Big Daddy" angle that played a very large part in the world of Rapture and its downfall as a whole.
and much of the point of Bioshock was about how you can make great advances in science in the absence of moral limitations of the research (stem-cell research taken to its "fear mongering" conclusion).

there was nothing in Colombia that justifies having "super powers in a bottle" to that extent.
and since there doesn't seem to be the same level of mental decay that splicing causes, there is no logic to having most of the population being "baseline" humans despite ready access to such powers.

they are imported from rapture through tears, as is the tech to make the songbird, you may have also noticed some very out f place music like the beach boys and some ac dc it all got harvested through tears. id go as far as to say salt is eve but yes it doesnt really account for how they harvest it in columbia.

I wouldn't sweat it man, literally everything except the Avengers gets called cliche on the Escapist.

Also while we've got this thread going, what the hell did the post-credits scene mean?

Well unless one of the devs steps up and tells us its largely down to personal view of the ending, personally i took it as proof that Elizabeth and Booker were pretty fucking stupid and dropped the ball massively and everything has just snapped back to where Booker sells his daughter.


some of my gripes

Where does the food come from?

there above the clouds and presumably stay there as the fixed height particle drives probably cant go up and down and no one on the earth has seen them. so how exactly do they get water?

Why is it so warm 20k feet up?

as you arrive there you see a bridge , it has its underground supports , they would be load bearing on a ground based tension bridge but i think in this airborne scenario they would snap the bridge like a twig.

there are kids playing with a water hydrant, so these fractured city clouds have water pressure from where exactly?

why does the "sea" in battle ship bay have waves going up the shore?

Elizabeth- 20 years in near isolation only ever seen Lutece and songbird

how does she know the way out?

how is she so amazingly well adjusted. id expect her to be screaming and freaking out in battleship bay but this firecat goes off for a dance! 20 years in isolation to that....

she claims to not be able to open tears to anywhere she wants anymore, but she opens a tear across time and space to a Paris where return of the Jedi is on the cinema just fine! and we see from the chart at the bottom of the siphon facility her power levels are back to her previous child hood spike anyway, and she starts doing it again near the end.

How about instead of opening a portal to Columbia where Lin isn't dead why not open one to a Columbia that had a peaceful revolution and is now a Utopian picture of racial harmony that bounces around the majour cultural centers of the world (and Paris) on a cheese and whine tasting binge?

why does she do another portal to a place where the tools are not in place when , oh just see above for every bad choice they make re tears.

If liz gains her ability with tears from being from another plane , why don't we? Booker isn't native to the plane we start in and even less to the second and third and fourth and ...

its an infinite multiverse where all choices are possible and play out, except its impossible to not hand over Elizabeth.

Why choose erasure? at the end she has become a weaver of dimensional lines bringing a whole subset together to be affected by one choice. well first off its a bit rude to not go back further and save all the people we murdered at wounded knee, in the boxer rebellion (not sure we went there or not slate and comstock both hint we did but its vague) and as our time as a paid killer in the pinkertons.

Why not change some other decisions pre wounded knee and instead have a normal happy life with a well adjusted booker and wife?

in an infinite multiverse there was close to an infinite number of better choices to make !

SPOILER SPOILER. SHOO IF YOU DON'T WANNA SEE.

-Anyway, the thing I took away from the post-credits was that even though everything was reset, there was at least one universe where Booker and Anna get to live a normal and happy life together.

-Food is probably grown and made somehow, considering Colombia has good weather, living conditions, etc.

-Warmness, not too sure about that.

-Bridge... Ehhh kinda nit picking, I didn't really think about it. It's a game, so..

-As for water, at least for the beach part, there's a room you can go into that doesn't really have anything in it, but there are pipes and pulleys and contraptions moving around. Elizabeth remarks on how "the water looks so real, yet it's just a clever set up of pipes and pulleys" or something like that.

-Regarding Elizabeth, I figured that after living in a tower for 20 years, she would know the building inside out, and she looked through each keyhole or something.

-Also, I think she claimed that she's not able to create worlds. As in, her worlds. The scene in Paris was pre-existing, she didn't create that theatre or the roads or the ambulance, she just opened a tear into that world.

-The reason why she couldn't make a tear to go to a peaceful post-revolution Colombia was simply because a Colombia like that doesn't exist. As long as Booker was alive, Comstock would be made, and Comstock would make Colombia. In some cases, Chen Lin would die. In other cases, Vox Populi would be supplied with guns. However, Fitzroy's thirst for blood would always lead to a massacre. That's why Colombia burned every time. So you either had a demolished city or a Comstock city. There would never be a peaceful Colombia.

-I guess, regarding Liz's founding of powers, she's just somehow special. I mean, besides Booker, other people travelled through different universes too. Comstock himself, the Lutece "twins", etc. but they didn't gain any power.

-If Booker doesn't hand Elizabeth over, then I think Comstock would've just taken her by force, or he would be stuck with "the debt". The only scene where he keeps Anna with no troubles is in post-credit.

-A mistake that everyone makes when it comes to this game is that Booker and Elizabeth aren't time travelling. They're universe travelling. They can't go back, they can only go to a universe where some stuff hasn't happened yet. So yeah, in some universes, they might've been able to stop some people from getting murdered somehow, but what about all the other universes?

-Booker's wife dies giving birth to Anna.

 

[Carnagath]

My gripes:

1) Limited weapon and vigor slots.

Yes, for vigors you can use the radial menu, but it's inconvenient. I would have loved to see a more PC-optimized UI. As for the weapons, on hard mode, 2 slots was a problem for me. I basically couldn't use situational weapons like the RPG or the sniper, because I often found myself in situations where my machine gun was empty, there was no vendor around and I had to charge in the middle of 5 enemies to try to pick up another weapon, and THEN die. So basically I was forced to use 2 weapons with high magazine size and high dps, like the machine gun and the repeater or the burster, and NOTHING else. Why?

2) Poor performance.

This was probably not noticeable for people with real gaming desktops, but on my laptop (i5 2.3, 4g ram, GT540M) the overall framerate hovered around the 20's for the outdoor areas (which are like 80% of the game), and the main problem was that it didn't improve at all by lowering the graphics. I ended up playing on options between medium and Ultra (Ultra for textures and stuff), with antialiasing on, because turning everything down to low basically did not improve my framerate. That was freaking weird and made the game much less enjoyable. I thought Unreal engine games are supposed to scale well?

3) The physical Premium Edition is tiny, low on extras and really sucks compared to the massive, amazing Bioshock 2 CE with vinyl soundtracks, posters and huge artbook. And it cost about the same. Boo.

4) I know this is a common gameplay (lengthening) element of all Bioshock games, but I really got tired of shifting through trashcans for money. If you don't do that, you basically can't afford many upgrades. It felt especially tiresome in Infinite, where you constantly enter new amazing looking areas, and are like "OMG, this looks so amazing, can't wait to explore it, but first 20 minutes of searching the trashcans". It really crippled the experience. I'd rather have them make an 8 hour game, than a 15 hour game where half the time is spend pixel hunting the environment, or replace that with something more enjoyable maybe?

5) A little bit more random banter between Elizabeth and Booker would have been cool and it would have helped break the monotony of trashcan hunting. It felt like there barely was any. Just a bit more dialogue instead of Elizabeth's "Ohhh"s and "Uh"'s would have been great.

That's about it. Apart from those points, the game was pretty much perfect.

 

[Carnagath]

And that damn ***** of a siren. Summons a million fuckers and is pretty much invulnerable for 90% of the time.

I didn't notice any point where she was invulnerable, she's just THAT much of a bullet sponge But yeah, I also found myself completely out of ammo during the fights with her. In the bank I actually had to reload checkpoint and ignore the hordes (no reason to fight them), I just found some cover, put shock traps everywhere around me and unloaded 210 rounds of machine gun and 80 rounds of repeater on her and barely managed to kill her. Fun times.

 

[zumbledum]

SPOILER SPOILER. SHOO IF YOU DON'T WANNA SEE.

-Anyway, the thing I took away from the post-credits was that even though everything was reset, there was at least one universe where Booker and Anna get to live a normal and happy life together.

-Food is probably grown and made somehow, considering Colombia has good weather, living conditions, etc.

-Warmness, not too sure about that.

-Bridge... Ehhh kinda nit picking, I didn't really think about it. It's a game, so..

-As for water, at least for the beach part, there's a room you can go into that doesn't really have anything in it, but there are pipes and pulleys and contraptions moving around. Elizabeth remarks on how "the water looks so real, yet it's just a clever set up of pipes and pulleys" or something like that.

-Regarding Elizabeth, I figured that after living in a tower for 20 years, she would know the building inside out, and she looked through each keyhole or something.

-Also, I think she claimed that she's not able to create worlds. As in, her worlds. The scene in Paris was pre-existing, she didn't create that theatre or the roads or the ambulance, she just opened a tear into that world.

-The reason why she couldn't make a tear to go to a peaceful post-revolution Colombia was simply because a Colombia like that doesn't exist. As long as Booker was alive, Comstock would be made, and Comstock would make Colombia. In some cases, Chen Lin would die. In other cases, Vox Populi would be supplied with guns. However, Fitzroy's thirst for blood would always lead to a massacre. That's why Colombia burned every time. So you either had a demolished city or a Comstock city. There would never be a peaceful Colombia.

-I guess, regarding Liz's founding of powers, she's just somehow special. I mean, besides Booker, other people travelled through different universes too. Comstock himself, the Lutece "twins", etc. but they didn't gain any power.

-If Booker doesn't hand Elizabeth over, then I think Comstock would've just taken her by force, or he would be stuck with "the debt". The only scene where he keeps Anna with no troubles is in post-credit.

-A mistake that everyone makes when it comes to this game is that Booker and Elizabeth aren't time travelling. They're universe travelling. They can't go back, they can only go to a universe where some stuff hasn't happened yet. So yeah, in some universes, they might've been able to stop some people from getting murdered somehow, but what about all the other universes?

-Booker's wife dies giving birth to Anna.

well its about 15 celsius at 20k feet too cold for beach wear imo! most people wear ski clothing up those sort of heights, we dont see any live stock of fields of wheat a city of the size would need a very substantial area of fields for crops and grazing and what not , and i think its too cold and dry for most of it to grow,

the water point was two fold , as rain clouds typically form in the 6 to 20k feet department how exactly is rain hitting columbia? and if they can lower teh city which is doubtful (because of the drives that hold the city up) we have the other problem of it must remain above clouds at all time or it would be discovered.

but yes very nit picking points that "because game" works fine for me really , its just if you make an alternate environment i like it when they pay attention to details.

Elizabeth does know the shape of her rooms , but she didn't know she was in that big tower even, the only hole is the roof where songbird comes in , there are some 1 way windows but she cant see out of them , there's no real way for her to divine the outside.

And true she may not be able to create worlds , or she may , if she cant the whole bit with her mother is a bit hard to explain but that wasn't my point. they used her loosing power through the siphon as a plot device as to why she can only open tears across dimensions and not space or time, and that she can only use a tear which is already their in its nascent form. BUT she creates a tear in front of a picture of Paris that crosses not just dimensions but space and time.

Of course that version of Columbia existed, its an infinite multiverse. there are ones which crashed, exploded got hit by an asteroid, Comstock dies every day in a million different ways from tripping getting out of bed to left eye aneurysm any number or tears could of let in some influence leading to a peaceful movement theres an infinite number of possibiites that are never considered. there are ones where comstock sees the error of his ways and welcomes the false shepherd , there are ones .. you get my point its an infinite multiverse not a convenient few and fitting the criteria provided verse.

Liz and powers, LIz and Dewitt and the only two who are not native to their plane though , comstock fink and various others in columbia use tears to get stuff but they are still in their dimension. and Lutece most definitely does get power they are free wheeling and outside normal space time. they have re run this last experiment over 120 times.
lets just say skipped a generation ?

maybe comstock could of talked lutece into abducting maybe not but thats not the point as the story would of changed and choice would of been made. its an infinte multiverse thing you cant allow all possibilities then realize one doesn't fit and just smudge it.

Bookers wife doenst die in childbirth in an infinte number of planes. this is the problem with infinte multiverse no one ever thinks it out.

In the infinte universe tree amongst the infinte branches one splits off and down the path to earth being formed, a near infinte number of branches along this never see humans appear. in the near infinte number of branches down this tree in nearly all booker wont be born neither will his wife, if we prune the tree to the branches where they do meet and marry there is still an infinte number of outcomes. ones where Booker isnt a murdering racist and they live happily she dies in some of childbirth before that in many and never in a lot to. there are only a tiny few branches of Booker deWitt's fights in wounded knee. there are millions of events and infinite combinations of ways for them to play out in his back story to lead to anything happening , hes president in one, a doctor with the skill to save his wife from the complication that she doesnt get in this branch in only one in 8 will all 3 be the right sex for the story.


Not time traveling? open to debate frankly. its not clear ill grant you. but Elizabeth is talking before you go there she isnt happy with just killing this comstock she wants every comstock in every world gone and the only way that she picks is to get all of her versions from these branches and they drown booker. for this to erase all comstocks the effect has to occur back in time, just killing one booker then and there will have just as little effect as killing the one comstock did. whether they time travel or not it is clear through what she is aiming to to achieve she can now weave this shit like a tapestry affecting infinite number of branches and pulling any number of selcted strands together to be affected by one choice.

This of course will now lead me straight back into its an infinite universe rant. there are an infinite number ot better ways to deal with the problem and self erasure is plain stupid.

 

[unstabLized]

SPOILER SPOILER. SHOO IF YOU DON'T WANNA SEE.

-Anyway, the thing I took away from the post-credits was that even though everything was reset, there was at least one universe where Booker and Anna get to live a normal and happy life together.

I don't get how people think the unvierse's got reset. That's not how the multiverse works. She'd simply have created an alternate timeline in which nothing happened. All of the other timeslines have to still exist by virute of how the multiverse works. And the timeline she created must already have existed anyway.

I've seen people say that she was smooshing the timelines together and that's why there were loads of her at the end. The culmination of all the relevant timelines. But there are still an infinite amount of times. The events must still unfold in some of them.

-I guess, regarding Liz's founding of powers, she's just somehow special. I mean, besides Booker, other people travelled through different universes too. Comstock himself, the Lutece "twins", etc. but they didn't gain any power.

I think it's because she literally has a finger in 2 realities.

-A mistake that everyone makes when it comes to this game is that Booker and Elizabeth aren't time travelling. They're universe travelling. They can't go back, they can only go to a universe where some stuff hasn't happened yet. So yeah, in some universes, they might've been able to stop some people from getting murdered somehow, but what about all the other universes?

Except we see atleast 3 instances of time travel. In some fashion.

Booker sees New Yorks future, as does Comstock (it's also questionable as to whether Comstock coming and taking Bookers daughter was from the future or just parallel timeline.)

And finally Future Elizabeth takes Booker from his present, plonks him 30 or whatever years into his future and then plonks him an undisclosed amount of time into her past which also still happens to be his future.

It's really hard to make sense of everything I guess, but what I meant by saying it's not time travel is that I thought the universes aren't necessarily synced. Some are at close timelines yes, but I thought that perhaps one universe can be at the time where New York is burning, while the other timeline are still somewhere else. It's hard to explain.. and hurts my head..

SPOILER SPOILER. SHOO IF YOU DON'T WANNA SEE.

-Anyway, the thing I took away from the post-credits was that even though everything was reset, there was at least one universe where Booker and Anna get to live a normal and happy life together.

-Food is probably grown and made somehow, considering Colombia has good weather, living conditions, etc.

-Warmness, not too sure about that.

-Bridge... Ehhh kinda nit picking, I didn't really think about it. It's a game, so..

-As for water, at least for the beach part, there's a room you can go into that doesn't really have anything in it, but there are pipes and pulleys and contraptions moving around. Elizabeth remarks on how "the water looks so real, yet it's just a clever set up of pipes and pulleys" or something like that.

-Regarding Elizabeth, I figured that after living in a tower for 20 years, she would know the building inside out, and she looked through each keyhole or something.

-Also, I think she claimed that she's not able to create worlds. As in, her worlds. The scene in Paris was pre-existing, she didn't create that theatre or the roads or the ambulance, she just opened a tear into that world.

-The reason why she couldn't make a tear to go to a peaceful post-revolution Colombia was simply because a Colombia like that doesn't exist. As long as Booker was alive, Comstock would be made, and Comstock would make Colombia. In some cases, Chen Lin would die. In other cases, Vox Populi would be supplied with guns. However, Fitzroy's thirst for blood would always lead to a massacre. That's why Colombia burned every time. So you either had a demolished city or a Comstock city. There would never be a peaceful Colombia.

-I guess, regarding Liz's founding of powers, she's just somehow special. I mean, besides Booker, other people travelled through different universes too. Comstock himself, the Lutece "twins", etc. but they didn't gain any power.

-If Booker doesn't hand Elizabeth over, then I think Comstock would've just taken her by force, or he would be stuck with "the debt". The only scene where he keeps Anna with no troubles is in post-credit.

-A mistake that everyone makes when it comes to this game is that Booker and Elizabeth aren't time travelling. They're universe travelling. They can't go back, they can only go to a universe where some stuff hasn't happened yet. So yeah, in some universes, they might've been able to stop some people from getting murdered somehow, but what about all the other universes?

-Booker's wife dies giving birth to Anna.

well its about 15 celsius at 20k feet too cold for beach wear imo! most people wear ski clothing up those sort of heights, we dont see any live stock of fields of wheat a city of the size would need a very substantial area of fields for crops and grazing and what not , and i think its too cold and dry for most of it to grow,

the water point was two fold , as rain clouds typically form in the 6 to 20k feet department how exactly is rain hitting columbia? and if they can lower teh city which is doubtful (because of the drives that hold the city up) we have the other problem of it must remain above clouds at all time or it would be discovered.

but yes very nit picking points that "because game" works fine for me really , its just if you make an alternate environment i like it when they pay attention to details.

Elizabeth does know the shape of her rooms , but she didn't know she was in that big tower even, the only hole is the roof where songbird comes in , there are some 1 way windows but she cant see out of them , there's no real way for her to divine the outside.

And true she may not be able to create worlds , or she may , if she cant the whole bit with her mother is a bit hard to explain but that wasn't my point. they used her loosing power through the siphon as a plot device as to why she can only open tears across dimensions and not space or time, and that she can only use a tear which is already their in its nascent form. BUT she creates a tear in front of a picture of Paris that crosses not just dimensions but space and time.

Of course that version of Columbia existed, its an infinite multiverse. there are ones which crashed, exploded got hit by an asteroid, Comstock dies every day in a million different ways from tripping getting out of bed to left eye aneurysm any number or tears could of let in some influence leading to a peaceful movement theres an infinite number of possibiites that are never considered. there are ones where comstock sees the error of his ways and welcomes the false shepherd , there are ones .. you get my point its an infinite multiverse not a convenient few and fitting the criteria provided verse.

Liz and powers, LIz and Dewitt and the only two who are not native to their plane though , comstock fink and various others in columbia use tears to get stuff but they are still in their dimension. and Lutece most definitely does get power they are free wheeling and outside normal space time. they have re run this last experiment over 120 times.
lets just say skipped a generation ?

maybe comstock could of talked lutece into abducting maybe not but thats not the point as the story would of changed and choice would of been made. its an infinte multiverse thing you cant allow all possibilities then realize one doesn't fit and just smudge it.

Bookers wife doenst die in childbirth in an infinte number of planes. this is the problem with infinte multiverse no one ever thinks it out.

In the infinte universe tree amongst the infinte branches one splits off and down the path to earth being formed, a near infinte number of branches along this never see humans appear. in the near infinte number of branches down this tree in nearly all booker wont be born neither will his wife, if we prune the tree to the branches where they do meet and marry there is still an infinte number of outcomes. ones where Booker isnt a murdering racist and they live happily she dies in some of childbirth before that in many and never in a lot to. there are only a tiny few branches of Booker deWitt's fights in wounded knee. there are millions of events and infinite combinations of ways for them to play out in his back story to lead to anything happening , hes president in one, a doctor with the skill to save his wife from the complication that she doesnt get in this branch in only one in 8 will all 3 be the right sex for the story.


Not time traveling? open to debate frankly. its not clear ill grant you. but Elizabeth is talking before you go there she isnt happy with just killing this comstock she wants every comstock in every world gone and the only way that she picks is to get all of her versions from these branches and they drown booker. for this to erase all comstocks the effect has to occur back in time, just killing one booker then and there will have just as little effect as killing the one comstock did. whether they time travel or not it is clear through what she is aiming to to achieve she can now weave this shit like a tapestry affecting infinite number of branches and pulling any number of selcted strands together to be affected by one choice.

This of course will now lead me straight back into its an infinite universe rant. there are an infinite number ot better ways to deal with the problem and self erasure is plain stupid.

I see your points. I don't know, after 2 playthroughs, I thought that in the end, only two types of universe could exist. One where Booker took the baptism, and one where he didn't. Since they both screwed stuff up, they had to erase everything from the root. It's still hard to wrap my head around everything..

 

[Averant]

some of my gripes

Where does the food come from?

there above the clouds and presumably stay there as the fixed height particle drives probably cant go up and down and no one on the earth has seen them. so how exactly do they get water?

Why is it so warm 20k feet up?

as you arrive there you see a bridge , it has its underground supports , they would be load bearing on a ground based tension bridge but i think in this airborne scenario they would snap the bridge like a twig.

there are kids playing with a water hydrant, so these fractured city clouds have water pressure from where exactly?

why does the "sea" in battle ship bay have waves going up the shore?

Elizabeth- 20 years in near isolation only ever seen Lutece and songbird

how does she know the way out?

how is she so amazingly well adjusted. id expect her to be screaming and freaking out in battleship bay but this firecat goes off for a dance! 20 years in isolation to that....

she claims to not be able to open tears to anywhere she wants anymore, but she opens a tear across time and space to a Paris where return of the Jedi is on the cinema just fine! and we see from the chart at the bottom of the siphon facility her power levels are back to her previous child hood spike anyway, and she starts doing it again near the end.

How about instead of opening a portal to Columbia where Lin isn't dead why not open one to a Columbia that had a peaceful revolution and is now a Utopian picture of racial harmony that bounces around the majour cultural centers of the world (and Paris) on a cheese and whine tasting binge?

why does she do another portal to a place where the tools are not in place when , oh just see above for every bad choice they make re tears.

If liz gains her ability with tears from being from another plane , why don't we? Booker isn't native to the plane we start in and even less to the second and third and fourth and ...

its an infinite multiverse where all choices are possible and play out, except its impossible to not hand over Elizabeth.

Why choose erasure? at the end she has become a weaver of dimensional lines bringing a whole subset together to be affected by one choice. well first off its a bit rude to not go back further and save all the people we murdered at wounded knee, in the boxer rebellion (not sure we went there or not slate and comstock both hint we did but its vague) and as our time as a paid killer in the pinkertons.

Why not change some other decisions pre wounded knee and instead have a normal happy life with a well adjusted booker and wife?

in an infinite multiverse there was close to an infinite number of better choices to make !

1. They probably grow the food up there.

2. They collect rainwater. And for the record, this isn't Booker's universe, it's Comstock's. EVERYONE down below knows of Columbia, so I imagine they get some imports that way, as well.

3. It's 15k feet up, not 20. There's enough of a difference that it's habitable. Probably should be colder, but eh.

4. Not an engineer, no idea.

5. Same as above, probably each has its own system.

6. There's a system of pumps that simulate waves. The water is rainwater, probably mixed in with salt to make it seem like the ocean.

7. Well, the path out of the tower isn't exactly an open road. She only had one way available to her.

8. No accounting for different reactions, I suppose.

9. True, she can't. She can only open a tear where one exists already.

10. She's getting older, it's a form of wish fulfillment, so there may be multiple tears in any given place, but she sees only the ones she needs, and when the syphon gets destroyed she has all the syphoned power back.

11. See above. She needs the weapons back, so that's the only tear she sees.

12. Because if the tools aren't in the impound, that means they're back in the shop. That's all they were thinking about.

13. Liz has her powers because she has a finger in a different universe, literally. So she is in 2 different universes at once, giving her the ability to destabilize it to a high degree.

14. That is what the end scene is about, a reality where Booker never sold elizabeth.

15. Erasure is the only way to ensure that Comstock dies for good. The entire reason the whole Columbia deal is such a mess is because Comstock fucked with the multiverse. All elizabeth would be doing is fucking with it even more and creating endless problems, like more people with bloody noses and confused brains. Not to mention none of it is her responsibility, and if she fixes WK, she might as well fix every single tragedy in human history. Once again, not her responsibility.

16. Booker likely met his wife AFTER wounded knee. You fuck with Wounded Knee, you fuck with Elizabeth's total existence, not just part of it. Besides, he was probably drafted. You can't get out of that without being branded as a coward.

17. That's not what the ending was about.

 

[Traun255]

Just finished up my first playthrough and felt like voicing some complaints. I'll get the spoiler ones out of the way first.

Spoiler: About the ending...

I enjoy a good mental warp as much as the next, but good god did that ending come out of left field. Maybe it's because up to that point I had read the foreshadowing well enough to predict pretty much every major plot point in the game...that is until you get to Comstock Home. Truly that is THE place of nightmares!

But seriously, can't say I was expecting a good ol' Darth Vader "No, Elizabeth....I am your father!" moment. Well, it's the same type of revelation, just a different delivery on it. But if you ask me it was a bit contrived...I'm still not entirely certain how Comstock and Columbia came into being at all. My biggest question is specifically what sins was Booker trying to rid himself of at the Baptism? When you first arrive there during the ending, Booker says it was right after the Battle of Wounded Knee. That leads me to believe that he was washing away all the horrors he committed during the wars. But if that's the case, then he was reborn as Comstock before Booker had Anna. And if THAT'S true, how could Booker have Anna for Future-Booker/Comstock to rip open a hole and steal? Or am I simply thinking too hard about this and just fill in all the blanks with "quantum mechanics, they just found one of the infinite worlds in which Booker never became Comstock" which - since I fully admit I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to such things - basically equates to good ol' fashioned magical science.

Alright, that's more of a question than a ccmlaint. Just something I couldn't really wrap my head around, but hell, that was one doozy of an ending. A genuine gripe is that they never reveal just what the hell the deal is with Elizabeth. Why is she able to see and open tears?

Also, for that matter, I wish they would have explained what the hell the deal was with the Vigors. I'm not saying they had to do like the first two games and have the entire story revolve around the developement of super powers, but just as it was nice to know that plasmids came from a substance secreted by sea slugs, it would have been nice to know what technology or discovery led to people being able to throw flocks of ravens, do a good ol' vanguard charge, levitate everything in front of them, and catch frickin' bullets. Just a simple recording of some scientist describing the discovery would have sufficed, just for a "Well now you know" type of deal.

And this one can't really count because I've only beaten the game once and therefor don't yet have a basis for comparison, buuuuut it seems to me the choices you make don't really matter. Yeah, yeah, that good ol' ME3 complaint. But honestly, does it make a difference if you pick the Bird or Cage pendant?

Spoiler: I picked the Bird, using this for anyone that picked cage in case things ARE different depending on your choices

I just wonder if the decisions affecting the ending take place much earlier in the game than you'd think, since during the entire ending sequence you're not given any choices at all (I'm assumin that no matter what way you go when you're walking between the lighthouses, you'll always find out that you're Comstock and therefor have to kill yourself to save Elizabeth). The reason I think this is because ater picking Bird and calling Songbird to destroy the Siphon, I got the achievement "The Bird or The Cage?" Which leads me to believe that if you pick the Cage pendant, you'll instead preserve the Siphon and quite possibly lead to an alternative ending.

Or do all roads lead to Comstock living unless Booker kills himself?

Now for some non-spoiler, basic mechanic gripes. For starters, I didn't like the fact that you couldn't save your game at any point. This means that if you're part-way between checkpoints and have to leave, you've got to start over from the last checkpoint you reached. I liked being able to save where I wanted and when I wanted, like in the first two games.

Also...what the hell happened to the map? One of those would have come quite in handy...especially when trying to find all the locked chests and Vox Secrets.

Maybe it was just that I was playing on Medium, but it seemed like you pretty much have infinite ammo during combat. I was able to take the first sniper rifle and first RPG you find in the game all the way to the end. I only changed my sniper rifle for the shotgun in Comstock house because I discovered the joys of Charge-Shotgunning people, up until then I had been using the Bronco and easily sniping the helpless fools out of the air. But no matter what gun you're using, whenever you get low, Elizabeth is there - for the most part - to throw you some more ammo. Same thing with health, though it doesn't necessarily save you if you're getting your ass handed to you, but if you're hurting here comes a free medkit out of nowhere. Just seemed that it made the combat a little easier to deal with than it was in the first two games.

And finally, I miss Booze Hound and having an ice power.

All in all, I loved the game. As most people rave, it's got absolutely fantastic story telling and the world is truly beautiful. My favorite thing about the game is that it's a living, breathing world, and a damn beautiful one at that. You get to see the city BEFORE the shit hits the fan, unlike arriving in Rapture to find an already dead and destroyed world. The funny thing about the ending is that I feel like I don't understand it...and yet at the same time I do. If you've beat the game you should know what I'm talking about...I think my nose is bleeding...

P.S. The most money Elizabeth flipped to me in a single coin was $275...that's a big coin.

P.S.S. Fucking hate those god damn Sirens.....

I don't know how to do the spoiler box, but what I'm about to say is a spoiler.

When it shows her pinky getting cut off by the tear is how she got her ability to open tears because part of her was still in a different world

 

[The White Hunter]

Elizabeth trapped me in the corner of a room once.
She wouldn't get out of the way, I couldn't PUSH her out of the way, and I couldn't jump over her.
I had to reload from the last checkpoint save, and lose a whole lot of gameplay. I wasn't too happy about that.

More games should copy COD2: Have any and all friendly AI move the fuck out the way if you point your rifle at them.

OT: Hmmm bump the difficulty up if you found it too easy, it was an adequate challenge on hard. And the lack of an ice power was fine by me because the ice power was mostly just the shock power but less useful in the previous games. The lack of more vigors is fine because they pretty much covered all the most useful functions of the old plasmids. Bees? Check, Fire? Check, explosive traps? Check, Pull and Push? Check, Stun? Check, etc

I find the ending kind of weird, I really like it, it's a fantastic ending and I really don't know quite how to feel about it.

It'd odd, got me thinking a lot...

 

[VoidWanderer]

It seemed like a more ... pompous version of the Sands of Time trilogy...

FPS game where the main character is on a quest of redemption for his own fault (how big a fault is debatable). They even tried to invoke the same feeling any players of the Two Thrones felt when they realized who the big bad actually was and the accompanying 'OMFG that was brilliant'. Since this took a multi-dimensional approach I could feel my own mind wrping to try and figure how they could figure out how the hell they knew which dimension they were in. Last time I checked body parts not attached tend to decompose...

I will probably be getting a refund on this game which was on par with the original Bioshock and was sliding downhill.

Also FPS developers, please stop having 'protect the macguffin' missions. They are like RPG escort quests, I can shoot guys while I wait for the elevator top walk down the stairs, but if I have to protect the thing I am standing on or will Chernobyl the area, I will stop caring for the game.