BioShock Infinite

SS1 is something else, but its probably the best overall, although hitscan enemies are annoying and making the soundtrack sound its best is a bit of a pain. (pirate sound canvas VA for SC55 or 88 soundfont and google how to use it)
For an updated ss2 go to systemshock.org and follow newbie modding guide, which is mostly first playthrough friendly and vanilla graphics accurate, except for the rebirth mod

Here is a old screen cap of his AMA on plebbit.
I'm surprised that I've somehow avoided ever visiting reddit and only know what it looks like through years of user's posting pictures of it.

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Anons told me Reddit was a nice and cuddly place, but this burn is way worse than anything I've ever seen here. Why are you people lying?

I'll translate from Normie to Autard.

>Manhattan was an inspiration.
You can be inspired by anything, including a cat doing a dumb thing or an apple falling to the ground. Whatever you create from the event that inspired you is not limited by the nature of that event. Newton isn't as dumb as an apple and Levine's own personal culture isn't limited to Watchmen, and it doesn't matter. When you're an artist, anything can make you think about a good idea.

cont.

>I like things that make me feel stupid.
I'm amazed you guys genuinely don't understand this sentence. It means, "I'm interested in things that go beyond my understanding," and any good scientist is like that. Einstein was like that, otherwise he wouldn't have thought up all he thought up, and I dare anyone to say they have an easy time understanding relavity and space-time, as it's notoriously beyond our perception. The only people who think it's easy, as often, are those whose understand is so basic as to make the subject look simple.

As to "understanding quantum mechanics", stuff like parallel dimensions isn't something you can just "understand", it's highly theoretical.

Levine's problems have nothing to do with science and all to do with writing fiction. You don't need to understand unknown science, you only need to choose certain principles and rules and stick to them. You also need to consider that if a thing can be done in your fictional world, you need a reason not to be done if it isn't done, e.g. if you can get powers from a severed finger, you need to explain why nobody else did it. Again, nothing to do with scientific knowledge, all to do with writing fiction.

Then explain how he managed to make up a semi competent multiverse theory but somehow fuck it all up 1/3rd of the way through the game
Constant's and Variables.
Comstock is a variable. The baptism is a constant.
Drowning one booker in the baptism doesn't suddenly eliminate the variable that is Comstock.
What was Elizabeth plan when she dimension hopped the huge ass equipment?
the real route of the issue was the Twins.

I'm amazed you guys like to also feel stupid.

Isn't the whole false shepard and his mark him doing something about it?

time jannies

I like to learn; to learn, you must believe there are things you don't know. "There exist things I don't know," is what Levine means by "feeling stupid". You're probably too insecure to ever consider things from that angle. Relax.

Bioshlock Infantile

>Comstock is a variable. The baptism is a constant.
How is Comstock a variable? He exists in every version. The baptism is also a variable. I don't imagine they use the scientific definition of "variable", by any means. It's merely a way to say "some things change, others don't", but since even the constants vary from one dimension to another, it's pretty much the same as a variable.

Feeling stupid and learning something are two completely different things. Feeling stupid is the inability to learn something.

>How is Comstock a variable? He exists in every version.
he doesn't
other versions have Booker

Comstock is Booker. And that Baptism will always happen. whether or not Booker chooses to go to it and get baptized is whether or not Comstock exists.
Hence why your Booker isn't Comstock. Because he didn't go to the baptism.

What doesn't make sense is why Elizabeth thinks drowning Booker at the baptism will fucking do anything when Booker is a variable.

>Drowning one booker in the baptism doesn't suddenly eliminate the variable that is Comstock.
I believe this problem comes from mixing time and dimensions. Same as with that Avengers film: they're mixing parallel dimensions and time-travelling.

I believe Levine thought of his multiverse like this: the universe, in time, is like a ramification, and all possible universes come from a previous one, which is why, in his mind, drowning the "original" Booker ends everything (and yet). It doesn't make sense if the parallel dimensions are potential ones and always exist, since they would still exist no matter you do.

That's another problem: actual parallel dimensions aren't potential other dimensions. If Elizabeth can travel to a universe where they have guns to give, she could also travel to a world where they have an airship to go to Paris; fuck it, she could even travel to a world where everything they want is waiting for them. That's what doesn't work with this.

Time travel and dimensions are two cans of nasty worms and Levine opened both without securing very tight principles.

>Isn't the whole false shepard and his mark him doing something about it?

>be me
>be Comsocks
>announce False Shepherd for years
>he finally arrives
>no army sent to get him
>no songbird sent specifically to kill his ass

He even says he could have just told Elizabeth the truth, but didn't. He knows the prophesy is that he dies drowned in a font on his airship, yet he doesn't just destroy the font or go some other place?

>I believe this problem comes from mixing time and dimensions.
I believe this problem comes from Ken Levine being a hack and not understanding the setting and laws of his own game.
Elizabeth and the twins straight up tell you it's all about Constants and variables. Even go out of their way to explain to you that the Baptism is a constant and Comstock and booker are a variable. So no. Levine didn't think past his C&V theory. He did worse than that. He forgot his theory entirely a third through the game but still had the characters talk like it mattered.

Every universe has the same constants, But what makes them different is the variables.

It's been a LONG time since I've thought all that out OP, so bear with me.

But the Lutece woman was just speculating about the finger on that audiolog, who knows if she even informed Comstock of that.
In general it seems you overestimate Comstock's omnipotence/omniscience. He's a fuckup.

>Feeling stupid and learning something are two completely different things.
>Feeling stupid is the inability to learn something.
I imagine that's how anyone feels when they take on something that's, for the moment, beyond their understanding. All right, I get your point. The reason I learn is not because I like to feel stupid, but exactly the opposite: I like to understand and to see that I can understand. So I concede that point.

I still think Levine meant he likes topics that escape him somehow, and I guess any nonsense in BS3 is not to be explained logically, which is a shame. Different rules apply to different situations. Sometimes it's time-travelling, sometimes it's parallel dimensions, sometimes it's one reality changing, sometimes it's travelling from one to another.

I was willing to go with this jank ass parallel universe constants and variable model since the whole story pretty much made sense if you don't know shit about the usual multiverse shit and this game was your first exposure to it
But they didn't even bother to follow through with it anyway since the DLC shows that at least one Booker/Comstock survives their "killing every Booker/Comstock in the baptism constant".

>he doesn't
>other versions have Booker
OK. The Booker is a constant (which is highly debatable, why would anything be a constant to begin with?) and what he becomes is variable. What was the problem with that?

I mean, I can accept a rule about constants and variables if they stick to it, even if we don't know why quantum mechanics do this (in the fictional world).

>people STILL don't get this basic shit
If you are presented a choice, and one option leads to an alternate dimensional version of you going back and killing you before you made that choice, then the choice no longer exists, the loop on those alternate realities is closed, the wavefunction collapses.

I'm not going to call anyone stupid for not getting this. I think people have a mental block placed on them and refuse to accept the story on its own terms, even though the story is no more complicated than Back to the Future part 2.

The real issue is Ken had a theory that was semi solid. But he both threw it out the window and also kept it in the game as the main focus of the games world.
Constants and Variables. He just needed to the story to stick with this idea and he wouldn't have gotten as much shit. He had you kill a variable and told you the only way to fix the issue is to elimanate the constant. and then you "A Variable" are drowned at the Baptism "A Constant" and Ken tells you that the problem is solved. When the real thing that needed to be eliminated was the Twins parents. Because the Twins were a variable, So the parents must be the constant. and Twins cause the dimension hopping bullshit in the first place so if they were removed all together none of this shit would happen.

>What doesn't make sense is why Elizabeth thinks drowning Booker at the baptism will fucking do anything when Booker is a variable.
Because if he is dead, he can't choose anything. Levine works from the idea that all the varying realities stem from ONE reality. Basically, the new dimensions start existing at that baptism node, and they didn't exist separately before, there was only one reality (for that reality, that is), and nipping Bookman at that point effectively cancels every potential world with Booker or Comstock in it. (You do get a time paradox from that, though, because if Bookman dies before he fathers Elizabeth, then she can't effectively come back to kill him.) Unless we work from the idea that changing something in the past creates a new reality. Which Levine does not choose because he has the other Elizabeths disappear, Back to the Future style, so he means that there are retro-active effects. The main Elizabeth may or may not disappear, we don't know. There's no reason why she shouldn't, though, if the others do.

What a mess.

>Every universe has the same constants, But what makes them different is the variables.
That would imply that you couldn't remove a constant, but that sounds perfectly feasible for Elizabeth, and that's what they do: they remove the baptism, which is a constant. (Unless, of course, quantum physics include poetry and the drowning still counts as baptism.)

What a fucking mess.

>But the Lutece woman was just speculating about the finger on that audiolog, who knows if she even informed Comstock of that.
Would there be any other reason?

>it seems you overestimate Comstock's omnipotence/omniscience.
He used and abused the tears to see what he thought was the future (correctly), just like Elizabeth knew, in 1983, that there was only one way to succeed, exactly like that Magicman from Avengers. How come nobody accused Marvel of plagiarising BS3?

That's the thing. They didn't kill every booker/comstock at the baptism. They killed the one you playing. And that's all. Ken didn't understand his own bullshit.
Yeah. Now let me blow your mind. Booker is a Variable not a constant.
So killing him before/during/after the baptism does nothing but kill one booker in one dimension. You have to eliminate a Constant.
Somehow kill the Twin's Parents so the twins never exist because the twins are the reason this dimension bullshit exists in the first place, Or stop all Baptisms ever conceived during Bookers lifetime.

I unironically really liked the game until the dimension jumping nonsense

>But they didn't even bother to follow through with it anyway since the DLC shows that at least one Booker/Comstock survives their "killing every Booker/Comstock in the baptism constant".
I still don't get how BaS operates, from a narrative standpoint. What Elizabeth is this? Who the fuck is Sally and what did Elizabeth do to her?

How does Comstock just suddenly sorta choose to forget who he was?

If he is dead. That single booker can't choose anything. Booker is not a constant. If a variable's purpose is choices and change. There are multiple paths a Variable can go to.
Booker can be many things. Happy father, Drunk man who lost his wife and daughter, Comstock, whatever. But that Baptism? that baptism will always happen on that date. That time. that place.
You can't eliminate a variable because that is just one of variables choices.
You have to eliminate the constant if you want to remove the variable.

Your fixation on that one line is out of whack with its importance.
It's literally just there to connect the baptism choice inextricably with the events of game leading to the ending scene.
People do this all the time in life
>what if I turned left instead of right when I got in that accident blah blah blah.
They ignore the choices in between the first choice and the result. Butterfly effect.
Or, actually, it literally is the point of Back to the Future 2.
You don't need some bullshit terms like "constants and variables" to explain it at all.

>If you are presented a choice, and one option leads to an alternate dimensional version of you going back and killing you before you made that choice, then the choice no longer exists, the loop on those alternate realities is closed, the wavefunction collapses.
People understand, but people also realise the story doesn't accept its own, previously established, terms. That's what people have a problem with. I think we can all understand the time paradox thing, which should lead to some serious issues, and somehow does not, though I explained this with my "new reality" hypothesis, where there are no loops. You can sort of use it for Terminator 2 as well.

Infinite's major issue is just what the multiverse is and how it works, because the game forces you to adopt several models and stick to various ones depending on the situation.

>only way to fix the issue is to eliminate the constant.
That's Levine fucking his own rules. How do you get a constant in a universe you can modify?

The difference is if you kill a Variable. That was a choice and that variable still exists in other dimensions.
If you kill a Constant. It's gone. From everything and forever changes a variable if not removes them.
Removing the Baptism entirely ensures that comstock never happens because Booker can't get a baptism.
Removing The Twin's parents ensures that the Twins are never born, they name make the Dimension hopping bullshit in the first place and even if comstock exists he won't have the ability to do half the bullshit he did and just be some shitbird Cult leader.

What serious issues? All I see is ITT is meaningless semantics about Algebra.

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>You don't need some bullshit terms like "constants and variables"
You do because that's literally what the game tells you it's worlds rules run by. Until it completely disregards it because Ken is a fucking moron.

>They killed the one you playing. And that's all. Ken didn't understand his own bullshit.
In Levine's mind, this is the point where you get the other versions of Bookers, implying there was no other version before that point. That's the highly debatable point in the framework, but that's the only way this ending makes any attempted sense.

Everything in Booker's life up to that exact moment is "constant" and does not change. It becames "variable" at the baptism, and from that, you have an infinity of versions. Of course, this begs the question of why this exact point in his life and not any other previous point, which would have caused its own infinity of versions. That's the weakness of that model. It implies literally everything since the dawn of time was a constant until Booker got baptised or refused it. It also implies everything past that point is variable. For everyone in the whole universe.

>because the twins are the reason this dimension bullshit exists in the first place,
No, they only found a way to bridge the dimensions. Nobody is arguing that until their invention, there was only one reality. (By definition, since they both existed in their reality until they found a way to contact each other.)

If You modify the constant it modify it everywhere.
Remove the baptism in one universe it no longer exists in all of them.

Elizabeth is from after the game's ending
Comstock probably asked the twins to mind wipe him like booker in the intro

timelord elizabeth can reality hop which is what she does in the dlc to hunt down the comstock that survives

and they they made up another fucking rule that if timelord elizabeth dies in the universe she's jumping into, she gets kicked out of that universe. if she chooses to jump back in anyway she loses her timelord powers forever.
she does it anyway because she wants to save some literally who little sister
One of the characters finds out about this, I can't remember if it was Ryan or Fontaine, and says she's fucking retarded and like "Edison jumping into a fire to save his dog"

You're like some theologian or something with how fixated you've become on 1 (ONE) fucking line of this old-ass game.
>C&V Theory
Nigger it ain't a scientific theory it's a fucking video game storyline.

Yes. They found it. Nobody else. Eliminate them and guess what. Nobody found it. Comstock doesn't have the ability to steal his own daughter.

>I unironically really liked the game until the dimension jumping nonsense
It jumped the hyperdimensional shark. The first time it happens, it was obvious that they didn't actually travel to another world, but actively changed the one they were in. Even the way this is done suggests this: Elizabeth spreads the tear to everything around them (as opposed to walking through a gate). The fact that some people have nose bleeds from the fusion of two realities, so to speak, also indicates that, originally, the other dimensions were just potential (except that doesn't work with the Luteces, as they existed on their own).

Why would there be a connection between two versions in their own reality? Why would Booker bleed?

Yeah. That's right. The game itself doesn't abide by it's own laws.
And that's the entire fucking issue with the game and Ken Levine.
Keep the fuck up.

The answer is Infinite is a bad game whose only redeeming feature is Elizabeth porn.

You aren't even reading my posts anymore, so I'm done humoring your unhealthy obsession with this plot.
Which by the way, is only 1 step more complex than Sonic CD ffs.

>Booker can be many things. Happy father, Drunk man who lost his wife and daughter, Comstock, whatever. But that Baptism? that baptism will always happen on that date. That time. that place.
>You have to eliminate the constant
So which is it?

>You have to eliminate the constant if you want to remove the variable.
Doesn't that mean that variables are constants? If your variable is just a version of a constant, or the resulting choices of it, then you can only have one if you have the other.

Mainly, though, if something is a CONSTANT, in theory, you cannot remove it. Now, does that mean Elizabeth's powers are actually limited within those parameters? How exactly would this work? What would prevent her from going back in time and killing Booker's mother before she has him?

Also this: going back in time permanently alters every future version of every dimension stemmed from the one you jumped to.

>You don't need some bullshit terms like "constants and variables" to explain it at all.
I think they really just meant "some things are the same, some things change", and not some explanation of how quantum mechanics worked. A constant in one dimension may be a variable in another.

I'm fixated on that one line in the game because it's the entire fucking basis of the whole games Laws it set for itself.
It's like you are playing soccer and one of the opposing teams forwards just picks the fucking ball up in the last few seconds of the tied game and just tackles and dives into your teams goal. Everyone cheers, They win the game, and the ref sees nothing wrong with that.
The game breaks it's own rules, Nobody in the game sees a problem with it, and expects you to just think that it's no big deal.

Variables are products of the constants.
Constants are there to be crossroads for the variables
The Variables will get to the constant and then from there the variable will change. That constant will always be there and no different between all Dimensions.
Removing that Constant will remove that Variable because it removes the constant from every Dimension.

I see your model. Interesting. Constants are nodes that exist in every dimension and affecting one affects all realities.

Your idea about removing the Luteces' parents, though, that would just create the same time paradox: if you can't travel through dimensions, and time, then you cannot kill their parents. If you can't kill their parents, then they exist. If they exist, then you can kill their parents, and they don't exist, but if they don't exist, they exist.

This is almost word for word the ending of some French classic early science-fiction novel.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Barjavel

(Not that early, actually.)

Well yeah, I agree.
I explained exactly what work I thought that line was meant to do in the post you replied to.
The nigger ITT is literally talking to himself about nonsense he inferred from a single line.
You've gone so far up your own ass you've forgotten what was actually stated in-game vs. some autistic inference you drew with your own shit on a bathroom stall.

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I'm interested in plots and narratives and all that stuff, professionally. That's why I'm here. I'm a busy man and this is relevant to my interests.

>You do because that's literally what the game tells you it's worlds rules run by. Until it completely disregards it because Ken is a fucking moron.
At what point does he do this? Specifically, I mean.

In that same theory if you manage to remove a constant in one timeline/dimension/universe it's removed from every timeline/dimension/universe at the same time.
Or it makes that Constant no longer a constant but a variable and makes the event of eliminating that constant a Constant instead.

It's honestly possible to never actually remove comstock but instead just replace constants.

>If You modify the constant it modify it everywhere.
That bit is a massive problem to me. How would quantum physics isolate an event in such a way as to make that same event connected throughout the multiverse? Some metaquantum physics shenanigans up in this bitch.

the DLC shows the constants and variable drowning scene is bullshit because one Comstock is alive in Rapture

>timelord elizabeth can reality hop which is what she does in the dlc to hunt down the comstock that survives
Why not just kill him as soon as she sees him and then go back?

>One of the characters finds out about this, I can't remember if it was Ryan or Fontaine, and says she's fucking retarded and like "Edison jumping into a fire to save his dog"
It was Ryan. And it was Newton and his dog. He has a point. I never understood who Sally was or what Elizabeth did to her.

The fucking Twins go out of their way to explain Constant's and variables to you. Then Elizabeth tries her had at it when you are in that multiple lighthouse scene.
The Concept and laws are well explained to you before Liz just kills you for no good reason.

He still may be right, even though it's hard to see because the game doesn't respect its own established principles. The game being old (if 7 years is old to you) is irrelevant. It could be 2000 years old and it wouldn't matter.

It doesn't have to be a scientific theory, it's a narrative principle that we are discussing.

>Eliminate them and guess what. Nobody found it.
Problem: to eliminate them, you need to use the very thing they created. Without them, you can't kill them, if you can't kill them, you can kill them. It cannot be solved.

You get the exact same time paradox issue as with the ending they went for, except it's a lot better, as nobody would care about killing the Luteces' parents.

That's the thing. It's not Quantum physics.
It's Ken Levines dumbass bootleg version of Quantum Physics. Because
>I like things that make me feel stupid.

Constants tie all the multiverse together, variables justify their individual existences.

>I believe this problem comes from Ken Levine being a hack and not understanding the setting and laws of his own game.

This. It's one thing to have pseudoscience, it's another to implement your pseudoscience wrong, however, when science fiction do these things, they (usually) keep the rules they created that involve the pseudoscience constant and the same. He didnt do any of that. He wanted to "feel stupid" all while being actually stupid.

Yeah, what's up with this? The main question is whether the rules are different from what we thought, or Levine changed them.

I tend to think BaS negates Infinite in many ways, and makes it subservient to BS1, and it also gives Elizabeth a depressing ending.

The Varibles don't change thier path until they reach a constant.
Booker doesn't become Comstock randomly in the Multiverse. It's always Booker going to the baptism that does it.
He gets it. How the fuck am I supposed to care or enjoy your game/book/movie/music if you can't follow your own rules you've set for it.

Maybe if he focused on a much more grounded story, Infinite could've been at least okay from a narrative perspective. But the whole thing just feels like it was written by a bunch of moronic hoity toity English majors and Reddit.

You have it completely backwards.
The whole reason those "rules" were invented was to justify her going back to that moment instead of any other time.
Like I explained here , it's just a simple elision, like how the Rolls Royce accident in BttF magically makes the protagonist's family life go to shit.
If she wasn't going to kill you the lines wouldn't serve a single purpose in the first place.
No, you're gibbering over pointless semantics. You might as well be discussing the constants and variables in Howard the Duck.