Great post Luke,

To be honest, something that keeps bugging me with this game is that, why on earth does Comstock need to go back to the past to buy Anne from Booker? I mean, BEFORE he took the baptism, Booker ALREADY has Anne, right?

So that means, before Comstock took the baptism, he already has Anne. That’s really confusing for me.

Not to mention, if Comstock is born AFTER Booker took the baptism, then why Comstock exists before Booker took the baptism in order to take his child?

And then, i’m trying to digest the storyline of this game a little bit further and i found that, i think everything in this game happens in the current event. So it doesn’t require Booker to take the baptism in order to let Comstock exist. So everyone can exist in many many infinite realities and timelines.

Great post, really enjoyed reading this. I too was totally impressed by the effort that’s gone in to how Infinite *looks* (some would – and have – argued that that effort has possibly been to the detriment of how Infinite *plays*). I ended up writing a post (here be SPOILERS) pondering if it was possible to apply auteur theory to the game as a result of that level of effort, but it actually started life as an analysis of Infinite’s opening and how it compared to that of BS1. All those little touches that are common to both games, the bathysphere porthole vs the window of Booker’s capsule, the squid vs the dirigibles.

One thing I also noticed was how, when Booker descends into the Welcome Center, the religious imagery/messages shift quite abruptly to something rather more hellish: red lights, clanking chains and machinery… and then that shifts again to the stained-glass mural of the Comstocks with their lamb.

Looking forward to your next post!

@ Luke Maciak: Wow I have to find that shirt on my next playthrough! I took some time to get used to the intricacies of the vigors I think. My initial tactic was to stay out of range and pick them of from a distance which is my default fps strategy. But this only works to a certain degree in this game. After I found Charge and the water… thingy and learned how to utilize them effectively (Shooting rockets at moi? Can you fly? No? Shame..) I had much more fun dealing with mobs and Handymen after that. That was only in the late game though so I’m going to rethink my strategy second time around. I did find that salts went quickly especially when using awesome vigors like Return to Sender. Good thing Liz helps out in a pinch :)
I also used the machine guns exclusively plus the sniper rifle, also a default fps strategy. I’ll have to try how the other weapons hold up in the long run. Before tweaking the .ini for finer control it was a pain to aim precisely though even with the stupid aim-assist. Can’t disable that without a controller plugged in apparently :-/
Really glad I can finally read all the cool articles, reddits etc about the game without spoiling the story!

@ Sameer:

Actually, the frantic combat became easy once I found the “Charge” plasmi… I mean vigor, and pants that give you temporary invulnerability after the charge, a shirt that made all enemies drop salts and a hat that did AoE burn when jumping off the line. From that point on it was basically like playing Vanguard on Mass Effect. You charge, everyone gets the AoE burn (I guess it counts charge as jumping off the skyline – this might be a bug) then if the target still lives shoot it with your shotgun, click-loot the body to get salts and charge again. :)

The other good combination was ravens + shotgun. It’s probably worth mentioning I found the salt-drop gear very early on, and from that point I was maxing my salts stat before everything else just so I could spam vigors. So mid game I could pretty much continuously suppress groups of enemies with ravens, then waltz on over and take them down with shotgun from point blank range. If the raven attack timed out before I was in position I would spam it again because I knew that most dead bodies will have salt vials to replenish me.

Oh, and when I ran out of shot-gun shells I just used hand-cannon pistol. :)

Aah yes! I was hoping you’d do this Luke. I’ve finished BI just last night and its been one hell of a ride. This is my first day purchase in a very, very long time and it was well worth it. I spent the first few hours simply looking around this gorgeous environment. Indeed the game lures you, the fair (cleverly implemented tutorial) makes you long for more. The levels scream at you to explore them. The imagery and artwork is stunning, like you said, fantastic characters. But I was also very impressed by the enemies. The raven, handymen and masked creatures in the asylum. Motorized patriots really creeped me out! I have to admit I’m not really good at the frantic combat you’d have to employ but in the later game I did come to enjoy it immensely.
And then there’s Liz of course. I’ll save that for your part 2 :)