Bioshock Infinite [MAJOR POSSIBLE SPOILER WARNING]

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cojo965

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Daystar Clarion said:
cojo965 said:
I don't know about you guys, but I was left disappointed and depressed by Infinite's ending because I was hoping that well worn trope of romance would happen. Partly because that is how these sort of stories are supposed to end, but mainly because Elizabeth, as a character, was someone I wanted to have that ending, which speaks volumes about her writing that I wanted that trope to come to pass. Everything else though I found to be great.
Romance?


You...

You do know the Elizabeth is Booker's kid, right?
Why do you think I was disappointed and depressed? Of course I know that.
 
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cojo965 said:
Daystar Clarion said:
cojo965 said:
I don't know about you guys, but I was left disappointed and depressed by Infinite's ending because I was hoping that well worn trope of romance would happen. Partly because that is how these sort of stories are supposed to end, but mainly because Elizabeth, as a character, was someone I wanted to have that ending, which speaks volumes about her writing that I wanted that trope to come to pass. Everything else though I found to be great.
Romance?


You...

You do know the Elizabeth is Booker's kid, right?
Why do you think I was disappointed and depressed? Of course I know that.
Oh, you didn't want them to be related to begin with?

Gotcha.

Still, that's a huge part of the story.
 

Dalisclock

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Sniper Team 4 said:
I did, and I do see that as a happy ending. It's just...Elizabeth never got to go to Paris. I'm always bothered when stories pull the whole 'erasing timeline' thing because, even though the bad things never happened, the characters don't get to see their dreams come true because they never had those dreams. Now, if Booker and Elizabeth/Anna happen to remember their adventures (like say when Anna turns twenty) and she does get to go to Paris, then I'd be okay with that.
I kind of hoped the same thing. I guess now she doesn't have to live her entire life in a tower, but really, if you think about it, when Elizabeth kills him at the end, she dies too. The Elizabeth that you get to know and like never exists at all. Anna lives, but Anna isn't the same Person as Elizabeth, because she'll have a totally different life. And it seems kind of sad, even if her Columbia life was really sad(and even worse, the future you see at comstock house, where she was completely broken).
 

Adam Jensen_v1legacy

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After I started playing the game again I found a couple of audio logs that I missed the first time. Very crucial to the story. Sheds new light on the entire game. I now have no gripes with the story. Should have explored every corner the first time around.
 

JaredXE

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There is heavy hinting that Booker and Comstock are the same man throughout. In the loading screens, you see all the vital information on Booker, including his date of birth. Later in the game when you travel to the Hall of Heroes, there is a timeline of Columbia. First thing on there is the date of Comstock's birth: 1874. Same as Booker's. Meaning they were both 16 at the Battle of Wounded Knee, and how many 16 year-olds do you think were in the 7th Cavalry?

That IS the one thing that bugs me though. Booker is 38 during Infinite, but Comstock is a white-bearded elderly man. Yeah yeah, dead, dies, will die and all that, but the ages just don't match up.
 

Giver

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So one of the biggest gripes I see about the story is along the lines of "It was all thrown in at the end..."

Well yes, the explanation was all thrown in at the end, just like the explanation for bioshock 1 was all thrown in the middle. The thing that Infinite did beautifully was tie in the explanation to everything that happened earlier in the story. Remember when you first enter the city and flip a coin and it's heads? And then you find out that their chalkboard says it's always heads? That's because Booker has been to Columbia many times before in other universes and always flipped heads.

Also people say parts of the game were "unecessary." This is just plain false. Think about it:

Part 1: Welcome to the City
- Get acquainted with problems in the city, who characters are, and getting used to the fact that you're in the fucking sky so that you can ignore that part when you're fighting baddies later

Part 2: Elizabeth (and freeing her)
- Meet and get used to the most important character in the game. Also, important character development that almost all games lack

Part 3: Fink Industries
- Introduce tears, start to explain them, introduce the vox populi

Part 4: Vox Revolution and Time Warp Shenanigans
- Starts using tears to seriously continue plot, establish that nobody is the good guy

Part 5: Comstock House etc.
- Explains family shenanigans (Lady Comstock), establishes future shenanigans, free Elizabeth

Part 6: Big Finale fight and Explanation
- better battle than end-of-bioshock1, explains the whole story
 

Frotality

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it was the best multi-verse ive seen, but still has the same problems of every other multi-verse story. the thing is, once you introduce the fact that everything you ever do in not only your entire life but your entire UNIVERSE is just a worthless grain of sand on a beach of millions, you kind of have to make the original conflict live up to that scale. yeah, comstock and all his realities never happen, but that means the entirety of the game never happened and neither the booker nor elizabeth we got to know experienced any development. when prince of persia did that, it was somber because it was ultimately just a man realizing the girl he loved was better off never knowing him, and it was all about his character development.

in this, its a man afflicted with inter-dimensional psychosis being murdered by his daughter so he never sells/ imprisons her. maybe its just me, but i dont really feel booker's end quite matched his growth as a character. that is probably because, as weve all said, everything happens to fast. the revelation of his amnesia-thing and being comstock happens so quickly it doesnt feel like its his choice to kill comstock, it feels more like anna tricked him into going back to where comstock was born to kill him and help herself because her dad does horrible things to her in both realities... i mean, what would you do if you found out your dad sold you as a baby to YOUR DAD, who then imprisoned you for 20 years studying you, pursued you to the point of going into other realities where you are returned to YOUR DAD AGAIN who tortures and abuses you until you have no will left to be anything other than exactly what he wants? a lot of girls have daddy issues, but lizabeth settling for drowning that bastard is an amazing act of restraint. there is NO reality where her dad wasnt fucking awful to her.

still, the end was trippy and open to all kinds of interpretation, and everything up to it was awesome and MOSTLY foreshadowing. a 10/10 for breakthroughs in character and narrative alone.
 

Therumancer

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Alright some basic info for those reading this:

I have been following "Bioshock: Infinite" since it's very early development, and decided to wait on picking it up to see how it was going to turn out, and will be getting it shortly. I did want to address some of the complaints in this thread though and perhaps clarify a few things, which oddly I can, since it seems a lot of people weren't following the pre-release development. This thread has a spoiler warning so I doubt any of this will be a huge thing.

What you should have known going in:

From pretty early on, it was made obvious that this was going to be even less RPG-centric than the previous Bioshock entries as they were making promises of streamlining, focusing on action, and the "coolness" involved in ziplining and such, along with gameplay footage showing that it was a little more action oriented than the previous games which involved more careful creeping through cooridors and/or setting up ambushes and such (or at least the way most people played). This was one of the things I expected, but was waiting to see how it developed. I'm not sure if claiming things are "dumbed down" compared to Bioshock can be considered a fair complaint at this point, because it was telegraphed a hundred miles away. I don't much care for it, but you take what you can get. I think the whole "1999 mode" was intended as a sort of compromise for those who wanted a more difficult experience as well.

To be fair while I used the term "RPG" since it'se largely associated with this, I honestly don't think that is a good term for it. At the end of the day Bioshock was basically a survival horror game, going with a grim enviroment, and making part of the game the scavenging and management of resources. On a lot of levels I think it's fair to say that Bioshock was like say "Resident Evil 1 and 2" where Infinite is more like when the series once it hit 4+, albiet it changed enviroment in doing so, going more towards science fiction than aiming for the same kind of horror.

-

When it comes to the plot, I admit I'm somewhat disappointed with the ending. I waited for spoilers largely because I heard ahead of time the ending was going to be craptastic. The "Infinite" part of the title referring to a time loop since the developers couldn't think of anything else to do with it was an early rumor. Shades of the old "Critical Miss" comic about how "Give her a paradox, bitches love a paradox" which is pretty much exactly the kind of game writing we saw here. That said apparently it wasn't so bad that it wound up being universally reviled to the point of ruining the rest of the game, which is why I decided to give it a go. That said, those complaining should have expected something like this, since it's been a concern for well... a long time.

A side point to this is that "Bioshock: Infinite" was also designed to pimp DLC, being one of the games going so far as to try and get you to pre-order it. I'd imagine what parts of the story are mostly understandable but have huge holes in them were designed to be filled in with DLC. Say a campaign where you play as Comstock or something similar which answers a lot of the questions by showing certain events from that perspective.

That said the whole "Booker Is Comstock" thing wasn't really a big twist, I'm pretty sure a lot of people following the game knew that one to begin with. Indeed I'm pretty sure the devs spelled it out at one point. I know one other poster here mentioned figuring this out despite not really following it. In my case I can't remember where I heard it, but I've though that the pre-order "Comstock Shotgun" pre-order item was kind of clever to begin with since Booker having it made an odd kind of sense since he's Comstock... etc... Indeed I've thought it was so well known up until this thread that I figured that was kind of the point of calling the item that, as opposed to just giving him a non-referential shotgun.

That said the biggest thing I'm happy about is that apparently Elizabeth wasn't an annoying AI partner, which is pretty much what I was primarily concerned about and why I decided not to pre-order, and wait and see how things turned out.

The gist of this post is that some of the quibbles people are making are things they probably should have expected unless they bought the game in a total blind. We also should all have known (or suspected) the ending was going to be a mess, the big question was mostly whether it was going to be a game ruining one like Mass Effect 3 or not. Mostly it's just an attempt by writers out of their depth to be profound in the most lazy way possible by rendering everything pointless with an infinite paradox. Someone mentioned it invoking memories of "Donnie Darko" and I guess that's kind of the problem, it would have been awesome if "Donnie Darko", "The Butterfly Effect" and a hundred other people hadn't done the same basic thing. Which is kind of the gist of the old "Critical Miss" strip I mentioned. In the end the final word on the "Infinite" ending I guess is that while some people really like it, it mostly gets by as being bad, disappointing, but inoffensive, much like most attempts with games that write/design themselves into a corner and start groping to find some way to end on a profound note before puking out the Paradox card.

Such are my thoughts from all that has been said and done. I'll probably start my own thread once I play/finish it if I wind up with radically differant thoughts afterwards.
 

Il_Exile_lI

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Therumancer said:
Alright some basic info for those reading this:

I have been following "Bioshock: Infinite" since it's very early development, and decided to wait on picking it up to see how it was going to turn out, and will be getting it shortly. I did want to address some of the complaints in this thread though and perhaps clarify a few things, which oddly I can, since it seems a lot of people weren't following the pre-release development. This thread has a spoiler warning so I doubt any of this will be a huge thing.

What you should have known going in:

From pretty early on, it was made obvious that this was going to be even less RPG-centric than the previous Bioshock entries as they were making promises of streamlining, focusing on action, and the "coolness" involved in ziplining and such, along with gameplay footage showing that it was a little more action oriented than the previous games which involved more careful creeping through cooridors and/or setting up ambushes and such (or at least the way most people played). This was one of the things I expected, but was waiting to see how it developed. I'm not sure if claiming things are "dumbed down" compared to Bioshock can be considered a fair complaint at this point, because it was telegraphed a hundred miles away. I don't much care for it, but you take what you can get. I think the whole "1999 mode" was intended as a sort of compromise for those who wanted a more difficult experience as well.

To be fair while I used the term "RPG" since it'se largely associated with this, I honestly don't think that is a good term for it. At the end of the day Bioshock was basically a survival horror game, going with a grim enviroment, and making part of the game the scavenging and management of resources. On a lot of levels I think it's fair to say that Bioshock was like say "Resident Evil 1 and 2" where Infinite is more like when the series once it hit 4+, albiet it changed enviroment in doing so, going more towards science fiction than aiming for the same kind of horror.

-

When it comes to the plot, I admit I'm somewhat disappointed with the ending. I waited for spoilers largely because I heard ahead of time the ending was going to be craptastic. The "Infinite" part of the title referring to a time loop since the developers couldn't think of anything else to do with it was an early rumor. Shades of the old "Critical Miss" comic about how "Give her a paradox, bitches love a paradox" which is pretty much exactly the kind of game writing we saw here. That said apparently it wasn't so bad that it wound up being universally reviled to the point of ruining the rest of the game, which is why I decided to give it a go. That said, those complaining should have expected something like this, since it's been a concern for well... a long time.

A side point to this is that "Bioshock: Infinite" was also designed to pimp DLC, being one of the games going so far as to try and get you to pre-order it. I'd imagine what parts of the story are mostly understandable but have huge holes in them were designed to be filled in with DLC. Say a campaign where you play as Comstock or something similar which answers a lot of the questions by showing certain events from that perspective.

That said the whole "Booker Is Comstock" thing wasn't really a big twist, I'm pretty sure a lot of people following the game knew that one to begin with. Indeed I'm pretty sure the devs spelled it out at one point. I know one other poster here mentioned figuring this out despite not really following it. In my case I can't remember where I heard it, but I've though that the pre-order "Comstock Shotgun" pre-order item was kind of clever to begin with since Booker having it made an odd kind of sense since he's Comstock... etc... Indeed I've thought it was so well known up until this thread that I figured that was kind of the point of calling the item that, as opposed to just giving him a non-referential shotgun.

That said the biggest thing I'm happy about is that apparently Elizabeth wasn't an annoying AI partner, which is pretty much what I was primarily concerned about and why I decided not to pre-order, and wait and see how things turned out.

The gist of this post is that some of the quibbles people are making are things they probably should have expected unless they bought the game in a total blind. We also should all have known (or suspected) the ending was going to be a mess, the big question was mostly whether it was going to be a game ruining one like Mass Effect 3 or not. Mostly it's just an attempt by writers out of their depth to be profound in the most lazy way possible by rendering everything pointless with an infinite paradox. Someone mentioned it invoking memories of "Donnie Darko" and I guess that's kind of the problem, it would have been awesome if "Donnie Darko", "The Butterfly Effect" and a hundred other people hadn't done the same basic thing. Which is kind of the gist of the old "Critical Miss" strip I mentioned. In the end the final word on the "Infinite" ending I guess is that while some people really like it, it mostly gets by as being bad, disappointing, but inoffensive, much like most attempts with games that write/design themselves into a corner and start groping to find some way to end on a profound note before puking out the Paradox card.

Such are my thoughts from all that has been said and done. I'll probably start my own thread once I play/finish it if I wind up with radically differant thoughts afterwards.
Why in the world would you wait for spoilers before playing a story focused game? It's one thing to wait for reviews, but to read about the entire story before playing, I just can't comprehend that decision. Why even bother playing the game now? The whole sense of discovery, mystery, and exploration will just be gone. Also, I don't know how you can judge something without having experienced it first hand. Your opinion on this game is about as useless as humanly possible. You can read all the plot details you want, but without actually playing it, you have no credibility to call it "bad" or "disappointing". Everyone I've talked to at length that has actually played the damn game has loved it.

If you play the game and still don't think it's great, fine, you'll be in the minority, but at least you're opinion will have some credibility.
 

Therumancer

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Il_Exile_lI said:
[

Why in the world would you wait for spoilers before playing a story focused game? It's one thing to wait for reviews, but to read about the entire story before playing, I just can't comprehend that decision. Why even bother playing the game now? The whole sense of discovery, mystery, and exploration will just be gone. Also, I don't know how you can judge something without having experienced it first hand. Your opinion on this game is about as useless as humanly possible. You can read all the plot details you want, but without actually playing it, you have no credibility to call it "bad" or "disappointing". Everyone I've talked to at length that has actually played the damn game has loved it.

If you play the game and still don't think it's great, fine, you'll be in the minority, but at least you're opinion will have some credibility.
Well, you have two seperate things to say here so I will adress them one at a time.

For starters, my reasons for waiting for "spoilers" so to speak is due to having been burned heavily so many times with games, especially recently. I pretty much decided that I'm not going to put myself through another "Mass Effect 3" ending debacle. We've gotten to the point where a truely bad ending can not only destroy a game, but the entire series to which it belongs to. I am not going to sit down and put 40-100 hours into another game only to run into the equivilent of Starchild. You might not get it, and that's fine, for my part, I refuse to support companies that pull crap on the level of ME3 with my money, and the only way I can do that is with spoilers (so to speak). Yes, that DOES make games less enjoyable, but that's just another thing I can thank the modern game industry for.

As far as the rest goes, I recommend you go back and re-read what I actually wrote, since you obviously didn't. As I pointed out the ending is not bad enough in this case to prevent me from getting the game. I have the information I wanted. That said it is a good game, with a crappy ending, that just happens to not be crappy enough to wreck the rest of the game. That's incidently not a minority opinion, it's a pretty bloody common one. It goes beyond this forum, but even here you see the general consensus that the ending was lacking even if the game itself up to that point was awesome. With a few people who have more extreme thoughts of either loving it or hating it. My final opinion might be differant, I'm just pretty much going with what was said.

As far as the rest goes, it's based on what was known about the game to begin with (again, read what I actually said). A lot of these reveals were never really "reveals" since this game got telegraphed pretty heavily ahead of time. A big part of my point is that this "paradox" ending was mentioned quite a while before the game's release, as was the fact that the dev team apparently had trouble wrapping things up in initial planning. That's a big part of why I wanted the spoilers because it seemed like it could be another ball-dropping on the level of "Mass Effect 3", which this was apparently not, it was just bad, without being of the "so bad, it effectively undoes everything else that was good about the game". Even the haters are not getting all psyched up to lead a crusade against the developers.
 

Brutal Peanut

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JaredXE said:
There is heavy hinting that Booker and Comstock are the same man throughout. In the loading screens, you see all the vital information on Booker, including his date of birth. Later in the game when you travel to the Hall of Heroes, there is a timeline of Columbia. First thing on there is the date of Comstock's birth: 1874. Same as Booker's. Meaning they were both 16 at the Battle of Wounded Knee, and how many 16 year-olds do you think were in the 7th Cavalry?

That IS the one thing that bugs me though. Booker is 38 during Infinite, but Comstock is a white-bearded elderly man. Yeah yeah, dead, dies, will die and all that, but the ages just don't match up.
Rosalind Lutece's audio diaries clear that up.
During Comstocks race to find an heir, he used their contraption many times looking for a Booker Dewitt with a child. It 'aged' him physically to that of an elderly man who was riddled with tumors (Comstock's diary claims these tumors are a sign and he feels gods love running through them). Rosalind remarks that it's interesting how, of the subject, one can be so old and sick (Comstock) and the other version can be so fit and healthy (you); while they are still technically the same age.
 

I am Harbinger

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Samus Aran but a man said:
Upon finishing the game, I reacted really negatively to the ending. If I can remember correctly I screamed "WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK?!!" and threw my controller across the room.

It was mind-blowing and clever, yet suffered the same fundamental storytelling flaws that Mass Effect 3 (and to a lesser extent AC3) did.

It's a complete deus ex machina, introducing major plot elements in the last minute that do not correlate properly to the preceding game (albeit despite flashes of foreshadowing). All development of the world and characters is dropped in favour of an over-ambitious, genre-changing, "look how clever we are!" stab at the audience. Everything is ultimately erased, with all the themes of racism, religion, capitalism v. communism, slavery and patriotism completely and utterly abandoned.

The ending is less BioShock and more Mass Effect 3. Besides, Phillip Pullman did it better. The developers felt that, in order to please the high expectations of fans, they had to make the ending overtly transcendent. To quote the Bard, this was a case of "Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself, and falls on t'other side."
I disagree. You're fully entitled to your own opinion, as everyone is, but I really don't see how you can place this ending along side that debacle. As for deus ex machina, not really. If you do the scavenger hunt for audio logs (as I've now done in my second playthrough) pretty much every piece of the end is hinted at and foreshadowed to a certain extent.
 

I am Harbinger

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Lopende Paddo said:
I am Harbinger said:
Exterminas said:
... and I would be happy if people helped me understand it...
Here's how I understood it:
snip

As to why Elizabeth can do what she does, well, they never say, but through a few things I noticed, and think I can hazard a guess. Early on in the game you can find a recording of Lutece talking about Elizabeth, and how 'some part of her remains' where she came from. At first I thought this was some metaphysical mumbo jumbo, but, if you'll recall, a part of Elizabeth was indeed left behind, her pinkie. In theory, this could very well be the cause of her tear-manipulating abilities, presumably because the multiverse doesn't like that she is basically in two places, universes, at once. We are talking about quantum physics, of which I know very little, though, so I really can't say any of this is really true.
That explaines it to me! i also found that recording and gave it little attention but with the way you put it it makes perfect sense!

OT: I found the story awesome and nearly crapped my pants due to bewilderment when the subtitles rolled! WANT MORE!! :D
Also, if you like these kind off story's check out the book "The Paradox Men" by Charles L. Harness it's also a mindblow!
Well, again, I claim to know about as much about quantum mechanics as a fish knows about breathing air, but that's what came to my mind when the pieces settled into place.

In theory, again, Elizabeth/Anna could actually already possess the ability to manipulate the tears, but it was only in a tear-rich environment like Columbia that that ability was able to be expressed with any level of reliability. I do like my first theory better, there's more evidence for it, but I'm more putting this up as a way of saying 'I might be totally wrong, and I'm okay with that.'

Yeah, I get a kick out of games that let me do some thinking for myself, story wise, but I usually end up thinking wayyyy to much.
 

I am Harbinger

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Daystar Clarion said:
cojo965 said:
Daystar Clarion said:
cojo965 said:
I don't know about you guys, but I was left disappointed and depressed by Infinite's ending because I was hoping that well worn trope of romance would happen. Partly because that is how these sort of stories are supposed to end, but mainly because Elizabeth, as a character, was someone I wanted to have that ending, which speaks volumes about her writing that I wanted that trope to come to pass. Everything else though I found to be great.
Romance?


You...

You do know the Elizabeth is Booker's kid, right?
Why do you think I was disappointed and depressed? Of course I know that.
Oh, you didn't want them to be related to begin with?

Gotcha.

Still, that's a huge part of the story.
I will be honest, going into the game the first time, I half expected a romance-style relationship to form, but just from the way Elizabeth and Booker acted and reacted to each other, I immediately knew it wasn't going to go that way.
 

AgentNein

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Loved it. In the spoilers a couple of reasons why that I haven't seen mentioned...

I loves me some obvious-in-hindsight foreshadowing. Once I realized that Booker was Comstock a lot of things really fell into place for me. For instance, we've got a hero and a villain who carry the same tragic flaw! They're both big picture men to a fault. Both are willing to do whatever they can in service of the big picture, and it leads both to making some pretty horrific decisions. With Comstock those things are fairly obvious. Killing his wife, framing his innocent servant, killing the Lutice "twins", imprisoning the adopted daughter he ostensibly loves and cares for, etc... None of these actions seem to be done by a cackling evil n' loving it asshole, in fact when we finally meet him face to face he seems fairly loving of his adopted daughter, albeit in his own severely unhinged manner. With Booker (Comstock Prime?) it's less obvious. But I mean, clear as day right? He's willing to kill pretty much every freakin' body for the job, long before there's any real bond between him and Elizabeth. How many people does he straight up murder before it even becomes about anything other than some obscure debt? Even by the end of the game he's looking at the big picture. Before he walks through that final door he's totally willing to smother an innocent baby in it's crib!

Comstock and Booker aren't all that different at all to me. One's just found religion to delude and enable his horrendous actions.

It's an interesting commentary on religion isn't it? The game (to me) is saying that a bad man doesn't magically become a good man when finding religion, in fact sometimes religion can outright enable and exxagerate those dark elements of a person. Suddenly with God on your side you might not analyze what feels "right" to you as much as you used to.

Also an interesting subtext we've got at the end, the (potential) baptism of Booker being his damnation, and his (assisted) suicide being his one and only salvation?

So yeah, I dug it. Dug it very much. I could go on but I'm typing this at my girlfriend's on my iPhone and I've honestly only got so much patience.
 

Innegativeion

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People seem so depressed by this ending, but I feel like a lot of people didn't wait through the credits, and likely missed an important detail in the final scene.

WHY THE ENDING IS NOT WITHOUT PURPOSE, WHY THE ENDING IS NOT SAD:

After the credits, booker Dewitt reawakens in another universe, likely the only one in which he doesn't even go to the priest to be baptized at all, since it's now impossible for him to live through such a scenario. This is consistent with chen ling, and random mooks, whose minds just hopped to a living version of themselves whenever they die.

He hears Anna crying, and goes to find her, calling her name.

This universe was made possible when Booker cancelled out the existence of Comstock, normally that would erase him as well, but, slightly paradoxically, this also prevents Comstock from making Anna's kidnapping an issue at all, allowing Dewitt for one last chance to live a good life. The game ends there, with the possibility that Dewitt fucks it all up again with alcohol and gambling, but the choice is up to him now. The player's role is finished. Hopeful. Not sad.

AN IMPORTANT, EASY TO MISS DETAIL ABOUT ELIZABETH:

It is already established that Lutece exists outside of causality and physical dimensions. They can, and do, do what they wish without real consequence. They go where, and affect what they wish.

Elizabeth, after the siphon is destroyed, exhibits similar power. It is not outrageous to say that Dewitt's drowning didn't effect her at all.

And now for the evidence: The necklace. You know, the one you picked out for her. She's not wearing it. At least, not any of the Elizabeths who drown you. Not-a-one of them. Strange, considering she's kept it on through nearly being blasted to bits, being tortured, and changing clothes. She wears it all the way up until the very final dimensional door. Not conclusive evidence, but very telling in my mind.

If my theory is correct and that is the case, the Bioshock universe has what is essentially a lady Doctor Who on its hands.