Bioshock Infinite

Counterargument: Rapture was far more develeoped and mysterious. Infinite isn't really focused on making you understand why Columbia became what it was, the story is character-driven and focused on Booker's slowly-returning memories. Bioshock is plot-driven, spoonfeeding you hints about Jack's identity, but focused on making the city seem as "real" and tragic as possible.

I suppose you're right. I would just find Rapture more intriguing because it's a lost paradise with a lot of effort put into explain it's origin, its history, and its fall, whereas Columbia is more a vague Bottle Episode with themes of ultra-nationalism and science-fiction scattered about.

You want to know how and why Rapture fell, and there are a lot of perspectives on why and creepy figures to learn that from. Columbia, you skip through 2-3 iterations of it, and the city's ultimate fate is only shown in a Bad Future.

I mean it's ok to think oppositely. It's just the first time I've ever heard anyone say Columbia grabbed them more than Rapture did. The version that we were introduced to in the first trailer, where things would be "wrong" with the city but the citizens were otherwise normal (until a sudden shift in reality occurred), I would have agreed. But we never really get to see that in the final game.

Having Elizabeth not be an Escort Mission was a valuable feature.

Edited by FOFD on Oct 14th 2020 at 5:17:03 AM

No, the ending doesn't make much more sense if you play the original Bioshock. I mean, you'll know what Rapture IS, but that's not quite the point the ending is trying to make.

I'm also on the 'Rapture is better' train. Rapture was a fully developed setting with a lot of work put into how the city came to be, how it functioned, and also work put into puncturing holes in the proverbial bubble to let the city come crashing down before the story can take place. It was interesting.

Columbia is... the worst of 1900s America BUT IN THE SKY. And then literally using Rapture as a crutch to justify different aspects of the setting; Why are the vigors akin to the plasmids? The inventor stole the idea and made it better. Why is Songbird like the Big Daddies? The inventor stole the idea but made it better. Etc.

I get that that's kinda trying to set up the whole muli-verse ending thing but... it's lazy and uncompelling world building. Columbia can do whatever as long as it has a Rapture equivalent and often to the detriment of, hey, let's veer completely off of Rapture's development path instead?

And before someone tries to tell me Columbia IS developed, no it's not. We only get the most barebones ideas of developing the setting. We got a lot of society structure cribbed from 1900s (i.e. Rich white guys on top, filthy "others" on the bottom, labor fighting for lower and lower wages in company towns, museums praising racist bullshit, etc.). But... could I really tell you anything significant about how that structure actually functions? Could I tell you anything about the people that live within that society? It's all fairly... surface level.

Contrastingly, Rapture had small moments of discussing what is or is not contraband in the city and why and how that created a smuggling ring in the docks. Or how, with the whole Objectivist society philosophy of ONLY THE GREATEST MINDS IN THE WORLD... no one wants to be the one to clean the toilets. You not only had the "Approved" surface level of that society, but what was growing in the underbelly and how the "Prohibited" (criminal, taboo, etc) society was able to grow despite being, y'know, not looked well upon.

I remember that first audio log of a woman just talking about her work day while sitting at a New Year's Party table far more than I remember any of the audio logs from Columbia.

Columbia only feels more because you're seeing it while it's mostly operating normally and has actual living people there.

Edited by InkDagger on Oct 14th 2020 at 8:19:51 AM

For whatever reason, just couldn't get into Rapture as much. Might have been atmosphere, might have been the gameplay. Could be a combination of things. Infinite seemed a bit more accessible for someone like me who has very little time for games and that surface level stuff just tickled my fancy enough to make me enjoy Infinite more.

Oh. I might have misrepresented myself.

It's totally ok if you prefer Columbia over Rapture. Personally, I'm a bit more into Columbia's architectural aesthetic and blue sky vistas of Steampunk vs. Raptures dark Art Deco Teslapunk.

I merely meant that Rapture is better established and better developed than Columbia is, which kinda more or less uses Rapture as a blue print and foundation to build off of rather than standing on it's own.

Sometimes I really wish we could sell ammo in these games, especially in Infinite, where it's given to you like candy on Halloween. As a serious scrounger, I'm always looking for those precious dollars, but in Infinite I always reach the ammo cap with little effort. It doesn't help that you can only carry two weapons at a time, and you can't ask Elizabeth to not hand you ammo and instead focus on health and salts. It's the big thing that kills that game for me (that, and the futility of the ending).

While you never run out of ammo in a general sense, you are definitely forced to switch weapons because of it from time to time, and that's irritating when I've maxed out, say, the carbine, but have no choice but to switch to a weapon that I have no upgrades for.

There are also some areas in the game where ammo is relatively scarce, although I almost never run out entirely. Ammo management is an essential part of shooters but it never ceases to annoy me at times.

Oh yeah! That annoying mechanic. I would be picking up the spoils of war and then suddenly: HERE, CATCH! And my 'pick up' button suddenly turned into the 'CATCH' button. Also in the middle of battle too, which was DETRIMENTAL sometimes.

About the whole daisy and "two are the same" I can get what they want it: a awfull system create people who are opress and do and awfull retribution campain, it haven plenty of times in history and more with the vox being left presented as many revolurionary turn dictorial.

BUT and here is the deal, it chose the wrong background to presented: america never really have to deal with that, at least as serious issues, therefore it come as bothsiding, specially since the solution to comstock, fitzroy and all that is just....be erase with booker.

The bigger problem comes from not having the weapon that you just got ammo for, and this piles up frequently. The worst offender by far is the Vox Repeater, which you can get an instant refill of its entire reserve from a single pickup, contrast with the sole reasonable example in the Founders' Triple R, where you get five bullets from the guns proper and a reasonable amount of ammo from usual loot pickups.

Pretty much. I hated the Bothsidesism even if I didn't understand the exact feeling I was having at the time.

Just... Daisy turns evil between timeline jumps and she threatens a kid to prompt Liz into her development... which is later RETCON'D into a Sacrifice For The Greater Good as Lutece apparently put her up to it? As though that's any better.

"The oppressors can be evil and terrible dictators, enslave people, deny them rights, justice, and a sustainable society to live in, possibly even go as far as allowing that population to be freely raped and murdered, but UH-OH, THE REBELS MIGHT HAVE KILLED SOMEONE SO THEY'RE BAD BECAUSE VIOLENCE = BAD".

I hated that false dichotomy. Just as much as I utterly loathe the 'Kill them you're just as bad as them' concept. No, sometimes evil needs to be put down. The fuck do they think war is? I'm sorry, did France or England suddenly become as bad as Germany because they fought a war against Germany? No, no they didn't. Am I a bad person if I take abuse from my SO and push them off me from further abusing me? No, no I wouldn't be.

Not everything is equal and opposite.

Bigger problem I had with that was how Fitzroy got all this buildup as the secondary antagonist of the game in both pre-release material and in the chapter she's featured in...and is then killed off rather early.

That's probably more to blame on the cluster fuck of development behind the scenes. They proudly described cutting maybe 3 games worth of content during development (oh boy does that statement have a different tune these days) and I believe they cut an entire level in the 11th hour and had to patch it over (No, I don't think they've ever said where the level was nor could I really guess since there are a lot of likely moments).

I mean, Fitzroy and Comstock both changed looks and designs multiple times in game. Daisy was a white Irish woman the first go around.

This is one of those games where I kinda think the development tells a more interesting story than the finished product.

Honestly, the turn of the Vox into being just as bad as the people they fought against isn't exactly historically inaccurate. Without a democratic system to control the rate of change, slaves turned masters are frequently no better than the masters they replace, especially if a violent revolution is led by a single charismatic leader.

This isn't a ham-handed "both sides" argument, it's the harsh lessons of history.

What irritated me more than anything was the DLC retcon turning Fitzroy into a plaything of the Luteces, removing her agency as a character. There wasn't any need to explain that.

As for Comstock, the final level where Booker kills him contains a few narrative elements and dialogue lines that seem to hint at some sort of connecting level that went walkabout, but as noted it's hard to place where it would have fit in. I'd have to replay or rewatch it to list them out, but I noticed them over and over.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 15th 2020 at 7:04:17 AM

It's ham handed because it's an incredibly sudden, forced, and contrived development in the game's narrative. Daisy turning evil isn't prompted by any natural turn in character or events; it happens because the game says we're suddenly in a universe where the circumstances allow that to be true without the writers needing to justify it. And to suddenly pivot Daisy into a villain for Elizabeth to kill and facilitate her character development and nothing more. A development which has NOTHING to actually do with Daisy herself and everything to do with simply Elizabeth taking a life.

It's also "commentary" from an era that constantly bemoaned political conflict as "BOTH SIDES ARE BAD!" rather than any actual critical or in depth discussion on the topics at hand. An era that would rather write off everything because it made things easier. And look where we are now.

As for the "historical accuracy" of revolutions rising up and becoming as bad as their oppressors, that's hardly true and I know there are more than a few revolutions that, while horrifically bloody as revolutions tend to be, didn't suddenly become "insanely evil" or such nonsense. The idea that peaceful resistance is the only possible and successful way to positively change society and government is honestly very little more than a modern platitude that tries to demonize anyone that fights back or "isn't the bigger man" and otherwise extremely untrue of vast swaths of history.

Edited by InkDagger on Oct 15th 2020 at 4:29:32 AM

I'm similar. I ran into this problem with Evil Within, Bioshock, and Last of Us funny enough. If you don't blast everything, or if you sneak right, you can usually avoid ammo depletion on the non-sadist difficulties. It's not necessarily a bad thing, makes me feel pretty excellent, but games like Metro 2033 let you use ammunition as actual currency, which is kind of neat.

I don't mind revolutionaries not out for "freedom" but just to get revenge. Honestly, there's no reason to suggest they aren't entitled to their revenge or that it won't be ugly or nasty. Obviously, that doesn't apply to American fights for Civil Rights but....well, this is not that.

I thought a major part of the story was that Elizabeth does not KNOW Daisy Fitzroy. Neither do the player.

She's an enemy of Comstock but that's it.

Apparently one of the early ideas was that Daisy was Comstock's illegitimate daughter and the revolution was just her taking back her rightful place as ruler of the city—the revolution being a means to an end. I think that would have worked much better.

Yes, but why are you insisting that the revolutionaries be portrayed as perfect victims? Why should they be good guys? What makes it so they don't have a right to murder everyone in the street? Destroy Columbia. Leave no survivors.

Who are you to tell them not to?

I mean, the story they're telling is that Columbia is an ugly evil place. It does not make good people. It should burn and be gone.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 15th 2020 at 5:22:00 AM

In general, I'd say the 'problem' of sorts with Bioshock Infinite for fans of the first game is that Columbia is very much a Spiritual Antithesis to Rapture as opposed to a Spiritual Successor most people were expecting (such as the way Bioshock's setting was to System Shock 2's).

This isn't just aesthetic either, as setting is very important to a "Shock-like" game and it has dramatic impacts on the tone and gameplay.

For example, Rapture was a claustrophobic and abandoned area where you're Late to the Tragedy, filled with enemies who are crazed, animalistic mutants. They're not all on the same team, and not every monster is automatically opposed to you. Because the area is abandoned, there's a lot of room to scavenge and the like. This allows for and encourages less directly-aggressive playstyles and being more of a scavenger/hackery character. It also sets a distinctly horror tone. It also helps you play an archaeologist of sorts, as much of what happened in Rapture is learned through audio recordings or the environment.

By contrast, Columbia is very much a living place, and the story is happening right before eyes. Your enemies are not monsters except in the spiritual sense. They're organized and very humanlike. As the place is not quite yet dead, scavenging feels a bit odd in this city. The place is also wide-open, making the more subtle elements like sneaking around and hacking impossible (indeed, hacking itself is largely gone). A much more aggressive playstyle is encouraged as a result of all of this.

There's also the not-inconsiderable fact that Booker is a psychopath.

I mean, a major part of the game is that both Bookers are monsters and savage killers.

Their first, last, and middle response to any situation is violence. We're supposed to feel Mood Whiplash that he resorts to violence so quickly.

More properly, we see two halves of Booker's personality. He's a killer no matter how you look, but on one side he's The Atoner, seeking penance for his awful behavior even while wallowing in it, and on the other side he's a true believer in his own absolute righteousness.

One way gets us Comstock, a megalomaniacal tyrant who manipulates religious hysteria to his own ends. The other gets us Booker, a man who practices self-destruction the way some people practice riding a bike. What's the factor that connects them? Elizabeth... or rather, Anna. She is the actual protagonist of the story.

Her solution to the problem of the infinite Columbias is to cut the knot where it began. She weaves the realities together to form a closed loop. In every timeline in which Booker becomes Comstock, a version of Booker who did not kills him and then kills himself before he can accept the baptism. This erases that branch of reality completely, leaving only those paths in which Booker rejected the baptism. In at least one of those, he had Anna and lived a troubled but not completely horrible life with her.

This should have been the end of it, but of course the DLC had to declare the event asymmetrical and preserve Elizabeth as her own version of The Atoner, sending her on a path in which she screws up and gets murdered pointlessly for her trouble.

On that Fitzroy thing, seriously... the moral is that hate begets hate, violence begets violence, and The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized. Columbia sowed the seeds of its own destruction with its violent racism. The Vox Populi were the inevitable result, and Fitzroy was just its face. If not her, it would have been someone else. Maybe it was in some of the infinite other timelines. Ultimately, she's a vehicle to drive the conflict and for Elizabeth to blood herself: commit a premeditated murder for the first time.

The DLC made that explicit, but I much prefer it when Fitzroy chose that path herself. It fits everything else we see.

Frankly, the "fix" ticks me off for reasons I had to sit down and think about. Eventually I got my answer.

1. In the original presentation, Daisy Fitzroy is a bad person. She hates Booker complicates the narrative of being a revolutionary martyr and she plans to murder Fink's child because he'll grow up to be another rich white oppressor or just to spite the slaver. Many people take this as a nasty portrayal of revolutionary heroes against oppression.

Fair enough.

2. However, the retcon makes Daisy Fitzroy SUBSERVIENT to Elizabeth's narrative. That she's a willing martyr to a white girl doing her magical revenge against her father versus her own revolution. That she's willing to die to be another supporting cast member and "teach Elizabeth a lesson about violence."

I actually think the first one is much better, bad child killing person or not, Original Daisy Fitzroy is her own woman with her own motivations and plot.

So I shouldn't be playing the DLC then?

Daisy is subservient to Liz's narrative in both versions; base and DLC. Just one is just implicit structure and the other is explicitly textual about it, probably in an attempt to correct the problem by "No, she wasn't suddenly an awful for no reason! She was just setting Liz up for the character development she needed!" as though that's much better.

Look, let me put it this way. I don't mind the idea of Revolutions getting out of hand and becoming the monsters. Fine. You can do a compelling narrative there. I do mind when it's forced into that model without any narrative build up to the idea of it to shoe horn the results into a larger plot it just doesn't make sense within. And I especially don't like it when it's clearly meant to be political commentary, but has a fundamentally flawed argument. And Daisy does represent a real group of people that did exist; minorities exploited by American Ideology, Manifest Destiny, and Capitalistic Greed. A fight that continues right now. To demonize their fight as "Oh, well, they'll just go mad with power and kill everyone and be equally terrible" feels... in poor taste.

Liz could have killed anyone. She could have killed a Handy-Man who had kicked Booker around. She could have killed Songbird. She could have killed literally anyone. Because the 'who' isn't the important part to that plot point, but the action in of itself.

I actually think Liz killing Songbird earlier in the narrative and it taking the role of Fitzroy would be the more compelling move since there's an established and developed relationship between Liz and Songbird, one the audience is invested in understanding, and Liz's horror at not only pulling the trigger on something but something she genuinely cares... it makes the moment meaningful. Especially if we ensure that we still have Liz's willingness to sacrifice herself to Songbird to protect Booker before she is pushed to killing him.

Its death in the game, while played as sad and is, does feel a bit undercut by a few factors. Songbird has been utterly absent from the narrative by that point so killing him when we do feels... more like tying up a loose end and shooting the guard dog rather than what I think the moment could have been. And it's further undercut by the sudden plot twist of being in Rapture which the player is probably going to be more... ahem, enraptured by than the Songbird's death. I also feel the need to note that Booker plays no role in Songbird's death which feels like a miss considering the relationship otherwise has a triangular relationship so I feel like he should be in the picture somewhere.

This is the thing: the vox populi arent just a minority rising up, they are based in anarchist comunism cell who have a nasty habit of blowing up people and imposing dictatorial comunism on everyone, this is as far as experimental trailer, back them when fitzroy was irsh american you can hear a guy saying "your stuff belong to us, your family belong to us, all belong to the vox" which kinda set the tone of the vox.

I will said again the problem is setting this in america were most protest are peacefull and people are not revolucionary(in the sense of overthrowing order) but integrationist: neither BLM or Antifa want to kill trump and governt america.

And I will said this as venezuelan but just as bothdisim is bad, this "revolucion are inherely good" and "when there is evil we have to stop it and it didn make us like other" the first is hilariously untrue and the second kinda border into "good guys are not bad guys because they are good guys" kind of level.

that being said it seen infinite drop is permise of columba to focus on multiverse shaningans.

The Songbird was underutilized in general. It interacts with the player in mostly scripted sequences, which goes strongly against the Bioshock ethos.

I'd also argue they should actually have gone with it being a 'final boss'-type enemy, because...well, that's obvious. It's cliche, sure (and IIRC they said something along these lines when justifying their decision not to have the player fight it: "It'd be too much like a video game").

However, I'd argue it's cliche in a good way: every time I saw it, I was like "oh man, I can't wait for the big boss fight!" and was disappointed when there wasn't one.

On a sidenote, reading the YMMV page for this game, I agree with something written there: The game had too many good ideas. For example, the class warfare and politics largely takes a backseat to quantum shenanigans.

Actually, I think the quantum shenanigans are generally Bioshock Infinite's weakpoint in so much that they make the plot hard to follow, and also make what you do seem a bit irrelevent as you'll tend to just jump to a world where things are going as the plot happens anyways. This actually interferes with the politics and such too, as it makes the political developments hard to follow.

With the False Equivalency between Fitzroy and Comstock, I get what they were trying to do, but they pulled it off poorly. The thing is, Fitzroy is ultimately a well-intentioned extremist. Comstock, however, is not.

This is one of the big differences between Comstock and say, Andrew Ryan: Columbia's dystopian elements are pretty much 100% intentional. It isn't like he tried to build a utopia and failed to account for human nature, he was just a racist tool all along.

They probably should have dropped the racism angle and made him more of an equal-opportunity fascist (the guy already did away with sexism, after all). Heck, that could even be justification for his nationalism: if he did away with racism by indoctrinating everyone into his cult, he might believe his society is superior to all others. In fact, it even makes sense motivation-wise, given what event caused him to become Comstock anyways. He could see his ultimate goal of taking over the world as something he has to do to redeem himself for the sins he committed.

Admittedly, this might make him a little too sympathetic, though Columbia as a society still has plenty of flaws even without racism (such as totalitarianism, cult worship of state leaders, literal demonization of political enemies, rabid militarism, out of control capitalism, a master plan that likely involves slaughtering many millions of people en masse worldwide, and allowing children to smoke). I could see someone still finding Fitzroy more sympathetic.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Oct 16th 2020 at 9:17:06 AM

The racism fits Comstock's character, though. Remember that the catalyzing event for most of Booker DeWitt's self-loathing was the Battle of Wounded Knee, in which he literally slaughtered unnumbered Indian civilians in a frenzy of combat madness.

We don't get the sense that he harbored any particular racial animosity at the time, but look at the aftermath. In the timelines where he rejects the baptism, he also internalizes the hatred against himself. He isn't a racist in that scenario... at least not any more than baseline for early 20th century America.

In the timelines where he takes the baptism, he suffers a kind of psychotic break and decides that it not only absolves him of sin, but makes everything he does and has done without sin. The Indians deserved to die because they were savages, inferior. Later on, the Chinese deserved to die for the same reason.

In building Columbia, therefore, he appealed to the kind of person who would find that a compelling argument. "We're better than the Indian, the Chinaman, the Negro. Your fear and hatred are justified. Come live in the sky where you can be with other like-minded people."

That cult we find that worships John Wilkes Booth and reviles Lincoln is no accident. Those people, or people like them, existed and still exist to this day, waiting only for the right combination of dog whistles and charismatic leadership to assume their "rightful place" in society and deal with all those "inferior people".

If you think that's unrealistic... yeah... no, it isn't at all. It's all too scarily real. A city flying around on suspended quantum particles, tears in reality between timelines: that's nonsense. But a totalitarian, religious, racist society birthed from early 20th century America is all too believable.

Columbia's society is a reactionary movement against progressivism. I can't think of any other example of that relevant to modern times. *cough*

Regarding Songbird, I'm actually quite happy that we got a subversion of the usual "final battle with previously unbeatable uber-foe" trope. We can wallow in what-could-have-beens until we drop dead, but what we got was really satisfying in a narrative sense. Songbird is unbeatable. He always stops Booker, in every reality. He's too powerful. The only way to win is to take control of him. That version of Elizabeth who gives Booker the secret is throwing a straw through a jet turbine in the hope that it makes it through and allows just one version of her past self to break the cycle of defeat.

It's a marvelous feat of storytelling.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 16th 2020 at 12:32:31 PM