BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea Can not Reconcile Its Alternate Selves

BioShock is celebrating its 10-year anniversary at the moment, March 26, 2023. Under, we check out how its DLC, Burial at Sea, tried imperfectly to search out synthesis between its numerous worlds.

BioShock’s Rapture is a spot of necessity. The novelty of its underwater setting comes out of a sensible concern: Why would not a participant character simply depart a harmful place? The sport’s thematic considerations got here out of those gamey issues. Give Huge Daddies Little Sisters in order that gamers are incentivized to assault troublesome enemies to get assets. A world with out regulation signifies that gamers should buy ammo from merchandising machines and shoot lightning out of their palms with “plasmids.”

Even the sport’s preoccupation with objectivism comes from these sorts of sensible issues. In director Ken Levine’s personal phrases, “we needed a really plausible purpose why they might be there.” Rapture’s founder Andrew Ryan (a thinly veiled stand-in for author Ayn Rand) can’t think about a spot the place he can construct his supreme, objectivist world on land, so it have to be accomplished within the sea. Although BioShock’s narrative finally, tepidly, condemns him, it additionally finds some the Aristocracy in his mission, within the purity of his imaginative and prescient. Perhaps that is as a result of his targets had been much like the designers’. They too constructed Rapture out of necessity, a world constructed out of gameplay constraints, that might solely exist digitally.

BioShock Infinite is equally synthetic, however additionally it is far much less clockwork in development. Not like the prior recreation, there is no such thing as a marriage of comfort between sensible and narrative considerations. For instance, Rapture’s Plasmids return, right here renamed Vigors. Whereas Plasmids get a number of audio logs exploring how and why they got here to be, Vigors get tertiary consideration. They’re a part of the carnival which opens the sport, however how and from what they’re made is unexplained. Not like in BioShock, their presence doesn’t feed again into the narrative. In certainly one of trendy gaming’s most steadily noticed plot holes, protagonists Booker and Elizabeth are tasked with arming a revolution in a world the place you may throw fireballs together with your naked palms if you happen to purchase the precise bottle from a merchandising machine.

Declaring such inconsistencies will be irrelevant, however on this case it reveals a elementary distinction between the 2 video games’ design. BioShock is obsessive about its setting. Rapture is the first means by means of which many of the characters are channeled, and the sport’s systemic preoccupations are about house. Some skills focus on hacking cameras or turrets to create protected zones. The sport encourages you to know the place merchandising machines and well being dispensers are. Taking part in a degree means attending to know the ins and outs of a selected a part of Rapture.

In distinction, Infinite is way extra targeted on a propulsive, blockbuster logic. In a sure sense, you progress much less from location to location and extra from set piece to set piece. There may be far much less backtracking and fewer means to have interaction with the techniques of any given location. Infinite has a wide range of ranges, however the way you have interaction with and what you do in every degree is mainly similar. The place-based techniques of the unique are virtually completely gone.

BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea makes an attempt to reconcile the franchise’s two worlds, bringing Elizabeth and Booker into Rapture itself. However this Rapture feels utterly totally different. Within the DLC’s first half, you play as Booker. The sport performs identically to Infinite, with no actual modifications primarily based on the brand new setting. True, you battle a Huge Daddy, however in any other case the weapons, enemies, and pacing are crammed with Infinite’s sensibilities. The unique’s claustrophobic hallways are traded for Infinite’s vistas. A part of it’s because Burial at Sea takes place simply earlier than and through Rapture’s collapse, when it’s dystopian however not in shambles (very like how Infinite sees Columbia within the midst of collapse reasonably than after it). However the flat change of design reveals how totally different the 2 worlds had been within the first place.

Nevertheless, solely Half 1 is an actual reproduction of Infinite. Elizabeth is the participant character in Half 2, and with that shift comes a wide range of new techniques: non-lethal weapons and a larger emphasis on stealth. These modifications convey flexibility and decisions, which really feel extra akin with the unique recreation. Burial At Sea Half 2 frames BioShock Infinite as a personality portrait. Being in Rapture, and by extension Columbia, is totally different for Elizabeth than for Booker. The depiction of each settings in prior video games, and Booker’s bloodthirsty method, will not be wholly goal, however tinged with human perspective. In different phrases, Rapture is like Columbia to Booker as a result of his violent coronary heart treats all locations this fashion.

Nevertheless, even in Half 2, Rapture and Columbia are relentlessly made equal. Elizabeth returns to Columbia to search out that she will be able to work together with it in roughly the identical approach she may Rapture. Within the first place, a lot of Infinite’s techniques and narrative beats are current as a result of they had been within the authentic BioShock. The sport’s meta multiverse fills that reality with profound, metaphysical significance. The DLC doubles down. Within the creativeness of Burial at Sea, techniques will not be tied to position or circumstance, however are virtually everlasting. Elizabeth wonders if all individuals are trapped in what she calls “a wheel of blood.” The revolutions that hit each cities are drawn in parallel. The way in which that Elizabeth and Booker resolve issues is nearly solely decided by their very own strategies and their our bodies. The techniques which make up Columbia and Rapture are functionally the identical.

The sport makes this level narratively, too, tying up unfastened ends and explaining plot holes with the inter-dimensional connection between Rapture and Columbia. Burial at Sea turns the BioShock games–except 2, which is on no account talked about or alluded to–into one huge story. It reframes BioShock’s participant character because the one who can break the cycles which entrap Booker, Elizabeth, and the remainder of the video games’ solid. What Burial at Sea forgets is that not all the pieces will be reconciled or retconned. Clearly each historic and sensible strains will be traced from BioShock to its sequel. However Infinite’s ambition reaches for the sky even because it plunges into the ocean. BioShock had the braveness to only be a spot. Imperfectly rendered, typically trite or foolish, however a spot however.

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