Bioshock Infinite

I feel like a sucker just for buying the game itself.

This review by Campster sums up a lot of the issues I had with this game;

edited 29th Jun '13 5:50:25 AM by Talby

I have similar feelings about the game.

Mostly, I thought the game was biting off more than it could chew, and trying to disguise it's inadequacies with false depth. So instead of being viewed as shallow, it comes off as pretentious.

I agree with most of it, except that I preferred Infinite's stripped-down combat mechanics to the original Bioshock's because it let me get away with using guns more. Honestly, I don't like using powers that aren't hotkeyed for instant use (this is much worse on a console than on a PC, obviously, and I'm thankful I played Infinite on PC). I find having to frantically equip different plasmids or vigours or whatever during combat an annoying distraction rather than a gameplay enhancement.

edited 3rd Jul '13 11:42:29 AM by pagad

I can see where he's coming from most of the time but his criticism that Columbia is "less like a city and more like Main Street USA in Disneyland" odd because that's basically WHAT IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE: it was created for a World's Fair, so it's supposed to be utterly artificial looking.

An understandable mistake: I for one didn't know about the world fair thing. Reminds me of Steam Boy...

Its been four months and still no sign of any DLC.

How well did the game sell?

Smelling a strong Bio Shock vibe here. Looks like the boys took some inspiration.

Battle mode expansion. Ken says they're trying to move back toward the more resourceful, "hear the enemies coming and plan your attacks" style of combat from Bioshock 1.

edited 30th Jul '13 6:09:21 AM by JakesBrain

Two volumes, the first premiering soon. Another perspective (another timeline?) on the fall of Rapture... as seen through the eyes of a contemporary Booker and Elizabeth. Both of whom will be playable characters.

edited 30th Jul '13 5:45:36 AM by JakesBrain

Well, it's about time we got news about the DLC.

edited 30th Jul '13 5:59:32 AM by strawberryflavored

GOD DAMN AM I PSYCHED.

... Well, damn. I am actually excited.

Seeing Rapture before the fall?

Elizabeth as a sultry and savvy 1950's noir heroine?

Playable Elizabeth?

Yeah. Okay. I'm more excited for this DLC then I was the actual game.

It's literally right before the fall though, so I don't expect to see Rapture in its prime for long. I think they kind of want to keep some mystique around it, but then again there was a novel set during civilized Rapture.

This DLC is a huge spoiler for those who haven't played Infinite yet :/

Why the heck would you play dlc before the base game?

Alright, copy-pasted from another forum. Spoilers every which way to Sunday for the original game, of course.

Okay, my current best projection of the plot of Burial At Sea is as follows:

• The first scene is Booker in his office in Rapture in 1958, establishing himself as a private eye who knows that this "utopia" is about to fall apart, and therefore wants to leave, but, of course, can't, thanks to Ryan's rules. Femme-Fatale-Elizabeth enters and offers him a way out, but leaves in a rush before she can give specifics. Booker immediately exits his office and sees a Big Daddy and a Little Sister harvesting ADAM from a corpse, disgusting him.
• Booker explores Rapture for a bit, commenting on the current state of things. He eventually joins back up with Elizabeth; this is where the cigarette-lighting scene we saw in the trailer is. Booker and Elizabeth discuss plasmids, which leads Elizabeth to explain that she has something even better than plasmids that she can use to get both of them out of Rapture: tears. However, she cannot use tears to their full potential, and therefore cannot use them to make an escape, because Ryan has built a machine, the Rapture Central Anomaly Inhibitor, which is constantly acting as a parasite, draining her powers.
• Over the course of the game, we learn more about each of our leads. This version of Booker is under the impression that a girl he knew named Anna died fighting Ryan, and he blames himself for not warning her to avoid stirring up trouble. This version of Elizabeth alludes to a mysterious past: her stated motivation for coming to Rapture in the first place is "curiosity", but she wants above all else to leave. She's entangled with Atlas's uprising, but she feels used by him and would rather leave Rapture than help reform it. The one word to describe her is "knowing"; she seems to know an awful lot that she's not saying, and she's certainly not saying [I]why[/I] she knows all of this. Booker wonders aloud what will happen when the people on the surface find out what happened down in Rapture. Elizabeth tells him not to worry about it. During the game, the 1959 New Years' Eve uprising happens, too, but it's oddly... underwhelming. Atlas's forces seem to be losing, reasonably rapidly, and it's hard to imagine how they could ever take down the city. Our protagonists eventually meet Atlas, and learn that he is actually helping Elizabeth with her goal of destroying the Rapture Central Anomaly Inhibitor, even though Elizabeth has made it explicitly clear that she only intends to leave Rapture once she's done so. At some point during the game, the episode switch happens, and therefore the player is controlling Elizabeth, rather than Booker.
• The protagonists finally get to and destroy the Rapture Central Anomaly Inhibitor which is, as it turns out, just another siphon. It was also giving Ryan better control of people's plasmid use, therefore making the suppression of revolutionary activity quite easier, and as soon as it's destroyed, it's obvious that the worm has turned and Atlas's forces will inevitably win. Elizabeth, now omnipotent, as at the end of Infinite, reveals quite a few things to Booker:
• First, she takes him back to where the game started. There is no door there. Booker De Witt's Private Investigations is simply not a business that exists in Rapture. She waves her arms and through the magic of tears *makes* a door there... but she opens it not to Booker's office, but to Columbia. She slowly reveals that the opening scene of the game did not happen. There was actually an instance of Elizabeth in Columbia, who Booker was trying to get to Paris. After visiting a world where the Vox revolution succeeded, this version of Elizabeth decided to escape from Columbia altogether, and entered through the first tear to a non-Columbia world she found. This is where Booker got the quote "I can show you a way out of this mess, if you'll just follow me" from the opening of the game from. This was a standard Booker-from-Columbia who decided to follow Elizabeth into an easy way out, and got hit with tear sickness again, and hard.
• The Elizabeth who brought Booker into Rapture was, upon entry into Rapture, immediately being effected by two distinct siphons. Consequently, she became very sick and was killed by splicers; she was the corpse you saw being harvested at the beginning of the game and she is where you got your memories of "Anna dying" from. In fact, pretty much all of Booker's preconceived memories and opinions of Rapture are mutated from his memories and opinions of Columbia, right down to his instinctive hatred for isolated visionary cities and idealistic populist revolutions.
• The Elizabeth who you've been playing with for the entire game is an entirely different one who exploited Booker's tear sickness and adaptable memory to get him to help her. Turns out that sometimes, after destroying the siphon and going to Rapture, the Elizabeth from the main game decides to explore some of the doors connected to Rapture's past, to see how it fell. But when she does that, she winds up getting stuck, because one of the oldest structures installed in Rapture is the RCAI, a siphon, and if Elizabeth visits any time and place with a working siphon, she's no longer the free, omnipotent Elizabeth that we see at the end of B:I and Burial At Sea. So this Elizabeth spent over a decade stuck in Rapture with few powers, her energy being exploited for the purposes of Rapture's researchers, helping them to develop plasmids, tonics, artificial intelligences, and other strange technology.
• This Elizabeth actually isn't as powerful as the omnipotent Elizabeth at the end of B:I, because she's been exposed to a stronger siphon for a longer period of time. So she cannot stop Booker from being taken to "the place where all who come out of Rapture go": Finkton MFG, where Fink is busily overseeing experiments on all sorts of extra-universal technology, much of it from Rapture. He sees Booker as a free test subject, and Elizabeth watches as he is lowered into a pool of toxic chemicals at the heart of an aerial robot, being baptized into Songbird. Elizabeth goes through a tear to weep alone in the long-abandoned spaceship Von Braun.
• Elizabeth is eventually retrieved and consoled by a group of alternate Elizabeths. They guide her to the drowning of the main B:I Booker, which she joins in to partake in, immediately vanishing as the breath leaves Booker.

edited 30th Jul '13 1:29:19 PM by DAStudent

No offense, but could you please spoil that? Accurate speculation is just as dangerous as actual spoilers in my book.

It's all spoiler-tagged now, then.

Thanks a lot! :)

Probably should have been spoiler-tagged anyways thanks to the main game spoilers, but until someone specifically called for tags, I just figured it wasn't worth the effort. I feel bad now.

Wow a horde mode and a story set in Rapture the dullest choice they could of made good game irrational

Hey, I find it to be quite a fascinating decision. Plus, it's cool to get to see Rapture again.

Part of me wishes they'd gotten some of the IP rights to System Shock.

I'd personally be a bit into seeing SHODAN again.

Except it's a different Rapture than was seen in the other games. This is Rapture before things went to hell.