I’d say play the first one. It absolutely stands up, and it’s one of those genre defining games you shouldn’t miss.
I’m not sure about XBox, but the PS3 version comes with Bioshock as an on-disc bonus. So why not play both?
I only had problems with that the time
in the bank when you’re coming out of the vault. Shortage of ammo was a real problem there, since there wasn’t much to scrounge in the vault. Generally speaking, I just ignored the guys she was spawning and just concentrated on her. An upgraded carbine/handcannon did good damage to her.
What I think hurt me in the last third of the game was that I really didn’t put much into my vigors. It was hard for me to choose spending $1500 on one vigor upgrade when I could easily get three weapon upgrades for the same price.
Yeah, money is kind of hard to come by. I rack up about a grand and I’m thinking I’m loaded until I sidle up to one of those vigor enhancing vending machines then I’m like “damn, I’m poor.”
Oh… huh, I guess I did have it on hard mode. What happened was I started it on hard but switched it to normal. Then I quit the game, but the thing was, I quit before the next checkpoint, so when I resumed I was back before I switched to normal. I kept asking myself “sheesh, if enemies absorb this many bullets on normal I can’t imagine what it’s like on hard.”
My strategy was the upgraded Charge vigor. That thing is nasty, temporary invincibility and free shield recharge. That thing with a shotgun and enough salts around makes you pretty hardy.
Lady Comstock is still a total pain in the ass though. Is it just me or was she a complete and utter bullet sponge? I went through 3 full guns of ammo on her.
I was really thorough, but apparently missed about 12 voxophones and a similar number of movies/telescopes. I have no idea where they could be.
There’s a voxophone that reveals Fink created the Songbird after discovering, through a tear, a way to turn someone irreversibly into something else. Kinda the same way the Big Daddies were created in Rapture. So the Songbird might have been a human originally.
I really enjoyed Bioshock Infinite. Best game of the series IMHO - and I loved how they tied it in with the other games, too.
Loved the setting, the philosophical aspects of it, and thought the graphics were breathtaking.
One of the things I really liked about the game was that it had civilians in it who weren’t trying to kill you. The first two Bioshock games were very lonely experiences; everything had turned to custard by the time your character showed up and nearly all the entities you encountered wanted to kill you. It was a refreshing change to encounter people in what seemed like an “alive” city, rather than being completely surrounded by crazy enemies.
One thing about the plot during the game that did make me think “Hang on a minute…” though:
[spoiler]When Booker and Elizabeth take the First Lady Airship, Booker - who is carrying guns, hundreds of rounds of ammo, and the skyhook - has already killed hundreds of people and, thanks to the vigours he has ingested, has the ability to make people do his bidding and them kill themselves afterwards as well as shoot lightning out of his hands or unleash a murder of crows at anyone who displeases him. And he can top up his vigorous powers from mundane items like coffee and soft drinks.
I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be too hard for him to use these powers to deal with the people to whom he owes money - meaning if Elizabeth wants to go to Paris, sure, why not? What are the people he owes money to going to do about it?
In other words, had Booker said “Sure, Paris is good, let’s go there” then things would have been a lot easier for both of them, I’d imagine.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]My interpretation is that there are realities where Booker DeWitt never went anywhere near the Baptist preacher (perhaps he had made peace with his involvement at Wounded Knee, wasn’t at the battle, or something like that) and subsequently never ended up making the choice which would set him on the path the events in the game.
With the Comstock multiverse erased, Booker DeWitt’s consciousness auto-adjusts (for one of a better term) and leaps to a universe in which he has his daughter, Anna and seems to be doing alright for himself, all things considered.[/spoiler]
Another question: is there anyway to change what is your active objective? Mine seems stuck on an optional one so I no longer get a pointer when I hit N. Googling only found other people asking the same question with no answer. Is it a bug maybe?
Can’t you do it when you bring up the menu?
Not the “Game Options,” menu, but the more in-game menu, that has your gear, what upgrades you have, etc…
It’s “Select” on PS3, don’t know what button it is on PC/360.
Edit: In my “Controller Settings,” it’s listed as the command for the “Gameplay Menu,” as opposed to the “Pause Menu” which is the one that has the graphics/audio options, quit/load game, etc…
Try moving to a different area. I had a similar issue when I was close to a side quest, but after walking around I got the main quest to show up again.
I think what happened was Elizabeth went back to “Comstock prime” and drowned the Booker that became Comstock. Thus the only timeline left is the one where he didn’t take the baptism. However, since Comstock never existed, Mr. Lutece and Comstock never bought Anna, and so in all the new timelines non-baptized Booker gets to live with Anna.
That’s one plausible interpretation, however my understanding is
[spoiler]The timeline in which Booker didn’t take the Baptism is the one he was living in when the events of the game unfolded - the point he made a choice whether to take the baptism or not split the timelines.
Thus, with an entire timeline completely erased at that point, Booker would revert to an earlier save point (so to speak) - a point where he never encountered the preacher and thus never made a choice to have the baptism or not in the first place.
I do, however, agree that in the “new” timeline Booker gets to live with Anna, so in the end, things have worked out OK. There were no betting chits on his desk, but there was a gun and (I believe) his Pinkerton ID, so clearly in that timeline he’s not struggling wtih the demons of his time in the military and appears to be making an OK-but-not-great living as a private investigator. [/spoiler]
Also I thought Columbia actually seemed like a pretty cool place in many respects*, so in some ways I didn’t particularly want to help the Vox Populi because I knew the power would go straight to their heads and make things worse in the long run, although I had hoped there’d be some way to find a compromise between the two sides instead of, you know, destryoing the entire city.
*Besides the racism, xenophobia, religious fervour and quasi-slavery, obviously - but the game is set in 1912, after all.
So some things have been left a bit unclear. Shall we speculate about what might have happened…
Let’s start with, in between Comstock’s babtism that split the multi verse and his becoming the prophet of Columbia. It seems a bit strange to me that by trying to atone for wounded knee, he would so readily adopt such racist, xenophobic ideals.
The motivation of the lutteces also seems vague. Obviously at first Comstock is bankrolling female luttece’s scientific experiments, leading to the floating city technology, and eventually to multi verse tech. But why are they so willing to help him take Anna? Is it just more scientific curiosity? And what about their motivation for putting events in motion by bringing Booker to Columbia?
[spoiler]I’m not entirely clear on their original motivation for abducting Anna, except perhaps because Comstock is bankrolling them, but the logs spell out their motivation for Booker fairly clearly.
The Lutece “twins” saw through their tears what Comstock+Elizabeth would do to the world (burning New York etc) so they tried to get Anna (now Elizabeth) back to Booker. Comstock killed them for this around their machine which caused them to become distributed throughout the multiverse.
Now, fueled by revenge and still fearful of what Comstock will do in the future, they offer Booker a chance to get Anna back – basically to save the US and just to give Comstock the finger.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]I don’t think the twins are the same person. I think they’re more appropriately referred to as siblings, whose mother gave birth to a boy in one timeline and a girl in another. Madame Lutece refers to the male Lutece as her brother in several voxphones, and while they’re both genius physicists, it’s clear that they approach problems differently from one another and experience different breakthroughs.
It was actually the cumulative effort of both twins that allowed Madame Lutece to develop the necessary quantum time-travel technology in her timeline. Up until they found a way to transport themselves into eachother’s worlds, which occurred after Lady Comstock sabotaged Madame Lutece’s experiment, they communicated via quantum mechanics, which is likened to morse code in one of the voxphones. The technology was developed as a team, even though their method of communicating the results of their experiments was very rudimentary at the beginning.
Plus, how could they not be siblings with the way they constantly squabble.[/spoiler]
With respect to Elizabeth and the ending,
I’m assuming she ceases to exist?
I viewed the ending a little different from some/most of you:
[spoiler]I assumed that DeWitt doesn’t have his daughter until AFTER he rejects the baptism in his timeline. Comstock gets baptized does his stuff, goes sterile (and childless) from the quantum experiments and Lutece, in her research into the tears, discovers Anna – and likely that Anna is “Comstock’s” daughter. Comstock wants her and arranges through channels to purchase her from DeWitt and it goes from there.
Otherwise why would Comstock need DeWitt’s Anna when he has his own natural born Elizabeth? And Mrs. Comstock accused Lutece of having an affair with Mr. Comstock with the (probable) assumption that Elizabeth-Anna was Lutece’s own daughter. Lutece though says that Elizabeth was “created” in the tears.
Murdering newly baptized Comstock ends that branch of the tree and, although non-baptized DeWitt & Anna continue in their time line, Elizabeth effectively ceases to exist since she’ll never go through the things that made her Elizabeth.[/spoiler]
That was all just my initial impression. I could have missed something along the way.
That’s how I viewed it. I was probably unclear. In fact, I think everything you said was pretty blatantly spelled out.
In fact, I think it’s implied that when Anna’s finger gets cut off, that’s when she gains the ability to create tears.
Or I misunderstood someone else’s comments in here. Anyway, good to know we’re on the same page 
[spoiler](I typed this and realized I was sifting things through my brain via text as much as anything; this isn’t directed at any specific person here)
I assumed that the baptism came before Wounded Knee, not as a result of it. The one military commander in Columbia whose name I forgot complains that Comstock has stolen the glory of Wounded Knee without having been there (apparently by taking DeWitt’s history and claiming it as his own).
Wounded Knee was 1890 and B:I takes place in 1912. During the 22 year gap, Anna is born and is in her (late) teens when the story takes place. I’m guessing DeWitt returns from Wounded Knee messed up, gets with someone who gets pregnant and dies in childbirth. A broken and indebted DeWitt makes the regrettable decision to sell Anna rather than raise her. Although I suppose it would be easy to rationalize having Anna go with a wealthy family to be raised.
It seems that DeWitt should look older than he’s depicted both in the promotional art but also the few times you see him in game (Vox poster and the Decoy tear). I’d think he’d be in his 40s by that time. Comstock looks older but there’s a lot you can do with a big-ass prophet beard to make yourself look old.
I found the ending very satisfying after reflection. It was sad to see Elizabeth no longer exist since you meet and come to know her as a fully formed person but there was no way for her to exist without going through what she went through, an experience she describes as worse than death. Removing that timeline from her existence and having her be purely Anna is probably the kindest thing you can do for your daughter. I’d like to think that reformed New York DeWitt will unknowingly take Anna to Paris one day.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]I think the promotional art makes DeWitt look exactly the correct age, especially on the cover of the game. His hair has started to gray and he looks fairly grizzled. Depending on the artist, his hair has either a fair amount of silver (as shown in the cover) or it’s relegated to his five o’clock stubble, but it’s still there. The Vox posters are the only time he looks younger than he should.
As for Comstock, I get the impression that along with sterility, his experiments with Lutece has prematurely aged him, which is why his hair is completely white.[/spoiler]
Upon review, I agree with you.
