Squidziod
LegendMystic
To clarify, this thread's purpose is for those who have beaten this game, and wish to discuss it, in all its respects, but focusing on it's ending. This will inevitably contain major spoilers.
I finished this game quite recently, and for anyone who has done the same should know, it really can be difficult to get your head around the ending and certain events in the game. I see this game as the Donnie Darko of games, meaning, that it is open to speculation.
I would like some help putting the final pieces together that I just mentioned, and I would love if the people who have finished this game could converse on the subject of it's ending and thier thoughts or perceptions of it. Perhaps point out something I missed or add to a theory.
I finished this game quite recently, and for anyone who has done the same should know, it really can be difficult to get your head around the ending and certain events in the game. I see this game as the Donnie Darko of games, meaning, that it is open to speculation.
In the last moments of the game, multiple things happen, and I feel you are presented with almost too much information to process. But I believe I have the basics across. After the Battle of Wounded Knee, Booker DeWitt seeks a form of redemption, religion. He wants to wipe away his sins, but he has doubts. He goes to be baptized, where he is presented with a choice: accept baptism, or accept living with his sins. The Booker we play as, chose to live with his sins, and the Booker who chose to be baptized, becomes the main antagonist, Zachary Hale Comstock.
It all comes down to that choice. And it can't be made, hence the ending. If Booker denies the baptism, then he goes on kill all those people in Columbia, and lead the Vox Pupuli in a bloody revolution that burns most of Columbia to the ground. If Booker accepts the baptism, he goes on to build Columbia, a fascist, racist, and militant floating city that intends to purge the world.
That's why Booker DeWitt had to die, so that he wouldn't be able to make the decision, to make sure that neither of his future incarnations ever get to exist. The Comstock you kill in the game knew it had to end this way, and even the Booker you play as knew, he just didn't realize it meant him too, because he didn't know Combstock was his alternate future.
I know that I left out the whole piece about Elizabeth being Booker's daughter and how his alternate future stole her from him because he need a child and couldn't have one but that's the part I'm still fairly fuzzy on. Mostly why he gave her to Lutece. I'm also confused how Lutece got you to go after Elizabeth, or how that's even possible considering neither Combstock nor Columbia would have existed in the universe Booker originally came from. I must have missed something.
I would like some help putting the final pieces together that I just mentioned, and I would love if the people who have finished this game could converse on the subject of it's ending and thier thoughts or perceptions of it. Perhaps point out something I missed or add to a theory.