Bioshock: Harvesting poll (Spoilers!)

I had no problem with charmed big daddies. I even used uncharmed ones to great advantage. The AI is so piss-poor, you just position yourself so a big daddy is between you and something shooting at you.

A lot of the ‘bosses’ in the game got killed because I did exactly that and they ended up fighting a big daddy. I remember the fire bomb teleporting guy, he was so dead. He hit a big daddy and I just followed him around while the big daddy beat him to a pulp. I didn’t have to lift a finger. The Big D saw him when he teleported and charged him before he even finished teleporting in.

In many cases when there were a bunch of badguys spawning (like in the theater area) I just hit behind one and watched him go balistic. In the area where you had to prime the plant watering system, a Big Daddy was there killing all thse splicers who tried to get in.

This doesn’t sound like bad A.I., since isn’t it the Big Daddy’s job to protect the Little Sisters? Therefore, anything percieved as harmful (Such as a firebomb throwing, Teleporting maniac) should be killed outright, before someone with a wrench, no?

I’m also tempted to say if you knew what difference there was before playing, could you abstain

This really bugged me-- the german woman admonishes me to save the evil little girls, for completely unknown future benefits. WTF? Can you at least give me a freakin’ hint about what I’ll get if I save the girls?

I mean bad AI from the gunner’s point of view. If a big daddy is between his target and himself, he shouldn’t start spraying the bullets or throwing bombs.

Ahhh, okay, I understand. Yeah, you’d think a Splicer would know when to stop.

I have not finished the game (ah, the perils of living in two different states at once), so I have ignored most of the comments. But I have killed 6/6 little sisters so far, and my spree shows no sign of ending. Nothing special has occurred, but I suppose that’s a given since there are no “civilians” or neutrals thus far to react to your atrocity, real or imagined.

Once, I saved before choosing so I could see what the harvest animation looked like, and I felt awful even after restoring. I have no problem with conflagrating an entire conga-line of Elvis impersonators in GTA 2 just for the points, so I’m not taking any objective moral high ground here. I’m just saying, you’re supposed to save the little girls because, y’know, killing little girls is reprehensible.

What gave you the impression they were evil?

The pallor and glowing eyes kinda did it for me, personally.

killing little girls is reprehensible

I rather enjoyed it after the first one. I didn’t see them as human.

I kind of relished the fact that my actions in a game could make me feel uncomfortable. I kind of wish they’d stuck with the cuter version (like the ones in the safehouse and the one you escort at the end) just to make it even grimmer. I seem to recall hearing somewhere that there was a conscious decision during development to dehumanize their appearance a bit so that it wouldn’t freak out the audience so much.

First time through I saved them because I wanted to hear the Doctors story a bit more. Mathmatically the only difference, ADAM wise, between harvesting and rescuing is 40 per 3 sisters.

3 Harvests at 160 a sister nets you 480 ADAM.
3 Rescues at 80 a sister nets you 240 and a teddy with 200 for a total of 440 ADAM.

I use 3 because that’s how many you need to rescue for a teddy. Also the teddies contain some handy plasmids and tonics as well as some nice ammo usually. Also either my game glitched on me one time or scrounger tonic ( loot a corpse twice ) works on teddies too, for 400 adam from one teddy.

Harvested the first time (on medium), saved the second (on hard).

I never did get how scrounger worked. Are you supposed to use it before picking up anything?

I think it lets you re-roll for loot. It doesn’t let you loot twice, and you can be worse off on your second roll.

yeah, you hit the right trigger to re-roll for loot. Some things are hard-coded to only have certain loot, others seem to roll on a random table. Sometimes you get less, but a lot of the time you get more. With scrounger and maxed spider slicer research, it’s like those folks were first aid factories for me.

How did you upgrade scrounger? There were a lot of tonics / plasmids that either had zero or just one upgrade. Like the chamelion one, Eve link (1 upgrade), and scrounger for example.

Yeah, scrounger sucks. I wish it just gave you a chance for more/better loot instead of a re-roll of any kind. It’s a pain in the ass.

I went out with a girl a few years ago who had a young daughter (around 2). Her daughter would, when upset, go ‘No, No No!’ EXACTLY like the little sisters do.

After saving the first Little Sister and hearing that sound bite, harvesting them is quite impossible. It made the escort mission quite a different experience for me, as well. I don’t think a game has ever made me feel more a failure then seeing letting one splicer too many slip past me…

I don’t see how “dehumanizing” them makes it any easier to kill them. Saving them turns them immediately back to human, so killing them is basically like killing a human being.

I killed the second Sister I came across just to see what would happen (only because it’s a game, mind you), but I haven’t had the heart to kill any since then.

That’s why “It’s hard to be a righteous person…”