Ok, internet. I'll play this god damn game.

Played, plays, will play.

@supamon said:

He DOESN'T play.

The gamer plays everything, but I'm just a prophet… so I don't have to.

Thanks for this, it kinda cleared my distorted mind. Time-space continuum is one hell of a complicated mess on its own without the religious undertones.

Pretty sure the Rapture part is 1960 or later. The shock plasmid is gone and the bathysphere is there.

He doesn't row. Why not? Because he is playing? No HE DOESN'T ROW. Oh right.

I still never got the dimension hopping that happens in the middle of the game. Do they ever go back to the dimension they start the game in? Cause they go to one dimension to find Chen Lin alive, then go into another one where he was dead. I didn't really get the point to that one since you warped into a dimension where it doesn't matter that you got them the weapons or not cause you were already this big martyr. But I don't remember them leaving that dimension so yeah. I don't know. Was there any point to anything you did in the middle section of the game?

Would you kindly play this game? Oh wait...

That is a metaphysical/existential question. :)

Very cool. I'm more and more convinced that Infinite has the best storytelling of any video game.

Are you sure the twins were real twins. I was under the impression that they were the exact same person but just over different dimensions and the female one brought the male one into her reality?

The Lucetes are no more twins than Comstock and Booker are "twins" or even siblings. I'm not even sure they see each other as...each other.

at what point does Booker cross over into the Comstock timeline?

@poperamone: At the very start of the game, the Luteces bring him in to their timeline and give him an objective: 'Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt'. They give him signs and pictures so he pieces his own story together with little memory of before.

@beachthunder said:

It's "twins" for simplicity sake. They are indeed the same person from two separate realities (Rosalind is from the Comtsock one, Robert is from Booker's), separated by a single chromosome.

Theoretically, the beginning of the game - however, it's the umpteenth time the opening happens in-story.

1. They don't. Once they hop into a different reality, they stay in that reality. Elizabeth outright says that she has no idea how to bring them back. "Old" Elizabeth kicks Booker back to the one where he still has a chance of saving "his" Elizabeth.

2. The point is that they don't know what to do with the different realities. Elizabeth is initially convinced that the tear-opening is a form of wish fullfilment - and she's right, but not in the way she thinks. They jump to a different reality because the initial one stacks itself against their current goal, which is "get the airship and GTFO". Booker and Elizabeth believe that if they open a tear near his dead body or the missing tools, they'll just modify the current reality into one where the status and JUST the status of Chen Lin and the tools changes. They simply don't understand the rules and they think that they're changing a single variable on the spot, not really dropping into a completely different world.

The middle part of the game very much establishes the rules of the multiverse. Especially when they jump into the martyr!Booker one - this particular bit is crucial to understanding what happens in the ending, since a) it establishes that the realities don't determine each other, which is why Booker doesn't immediately die if he finds himself in a world where he's already dead, which also means that there are no "reality loops" (which would work like a stable time loop); instead, the universe simply adjusts itself accordingly and b) player!Booker starts remembering what martyr!Booker did after he arrives, which explains the post-credits scene.

@starvinggamer Where's the part about the drowning?

@theyouthfuls: DOH. I forgot that entire scene! I am getting a nosebleed

@klei said:

It's the black line: "Elizabeth nee Annabell returns with DeWitt to sever Comstock timeline". It's not entirely precise, because they sever it in a very particular way - they change "Booker DeWitt is baptized; Zachary Hale Comstock is born" into "Booker DeWitt accepts baptism and drowns in the process".

Even though it may be obvious, this should probably have a spoiler tag.

Great job on the timeline, though. That game's story was incredible.

@beachthunder: They're not, I forgot to add a box on the timeline for when Robert Lutece is pulled into the Comstock timeline by Rosalind Lutece. I'm not actually sure when that happens though as it is only vaguely hinted at. It likely happened before 1889, as that is when the quotation by Rosalind Lutece about memories is attributed, but not by much.

@stealthraptor: Thanks, I beat the game after pulling an all-nighter so that part was super fuzzy in my brain.

I'm still of the belief that the "drowning" did not actually result in a Booker DeWitt is drowned timeline, but rather excised that entire timeline from existence. Accepts baptism / refuses baptism (bird or cage) simply goes from being a variable to a constant, refuses baptism (heads).

@starvinggamer: Hm, fair point.

@starvinggamer:

Cool dude. One thing I would add is that there is a potential for billions of potential realities as well. Which would suck to graph so there's that.

It's a Shroedinger's Cat scenario, isn't it? Your options are either the cat is alive or the cat is dead. Booker created a third choice that obliterates the other possibilities (the cat was never in the box to begin with)

@mildmolasses: I'm not sure. The existence of constants and variables implies that the multiverse of Bioshock is not truly "infinite" (hur hur hur). We know the rejects baptism timeline results in extensive gambling debt and the birth of Anna, which is where it's implied we end up post-credits. Removing Booker from the baptism situation entirely would be a third timeline trunk that could literally go anywhere.

@starvinggamer: Except they didn't remove him from the baptism, they forced a new outcome from the baptism that never existed before. But the post credit scene seems to point to their actions not mattering at all, or perhaps there is another point in time that branches into that outcome no matter what

@mildmolasses said:

Why they didn't matter? The changes amount to erasing the Comstock branch. It doesn't rewrite history - it just removes that branch and allows the multiverse to sort things out. There won't be a Comstock to whom Booker can sell his daughter. The knowledge of everything that happened throughout the game dawns on the post-credits Booker. Same way as it did when he crossed into the martyr reality.

OK I lied, Robert Lutece entered the Comstock timeline in 1893. I updated the timeline to reflect this.

@fredddi43 said:

Since he's now had a super-quick spiritual journey, I imagine that he can get out of it without resorting to selling his kid. The story is as much about changing reality as it is about Booker, so I'd say the ending is, ultimately, hopeful without accomplishing it through a gigantic reset button.

And yeah. I'd like to see the DLC take place across these other two timelines.

Play as the Booker that dies in Vox kills Chen Lin timeline

I had assumed that the post credits scene is a completely different booker in a completely different timeline where none of that gobbledygook ever happened.