Was the "tear" in Bioshock Infinite to Rapture Before or after the events of Bioshock 1 & 2?

Question

Near the end of Bioshock Infinite you go through a "tear" to Rapture. Everything in the area looks fairly newish, but there's nobody there (and there's a "big daddy" suit in one of the halls). Was this before or after the other two Bioshock games?

Answer 1

The game is intentionally vague and non-specific about when, and what version, of Rapture Elizabeth takes Booker to in Bioshock: Infinite. Since Elizabeth can travel to alternate dimensions, we don't even know for sure, in this version of Rapture, that Andrew Ryan even exists, let alone if there will be a civil war between himself and Fontaine. There's certainly none of the expected propganda of either person in that version of Rapture, or any indication that there's any kind of war brewing, happening, or recently ended.

There is also some evidence that this version of Booker may himself be a parallel version of Andrew Ryan, since Booker is able to use the bathyspheres that are genetically coded to Ryan's DNA, which would mean he must have visited at some point before the civil war, when Ryan was still alive and freely wandering around Rapture, but that's pretty heavily speculative.

Note that the Burial at Sea Episode 1 DLC has a much clearer place in the Bioshock 1/2 timeline: it specifically happens in the same city as Bioshock 1 a year before the civil war breaks out. However, the Booker/Elizabeth from Burial at Sea are just two more parallel versions of those characters from Infinite, so that doesn't really help us place the original foray into Rapture any better.

Answer 2

Referring to the first answer: That bit on the link may well have meant that Burial at Sea was always in the cards. The thing is that Elizabeth's full power (frankly supercharged by the destruction of the Siphon and the release of years' worth of her potential, a process that had been responsible for the generation of Tears in the city at large) was skewing things in her favor but that particular bathysphere was tinkered with by Fontaine/Atlas. That is in fact the bathysphere that Jack rode back down to Rapture at the beginning of Bioshock. This naturally places Elizabeth and Booker's visit to the time just before the events of the first game.

Going by the understandably warped game lore injected by BaS, Elizabeth (in both instances) was the multidimensional result of Epilogue, years later after assimilating all of her various selves (including Elder Elizabeth... sorry about that) as a consequence of the Creek. Booker was in fact the very worst Comstock of all, one any other Booker (or Zachary) would gladly shoot in the head, one who only went un-Creeked because he'd gone through a Lutece gate and deliberately scrambled his own mind in the wake of that awful deed and accidentally scrambled his quantum signature in the process.

There is a certain irony in this. Just as Booker DeWitt ends up getting drowned on three occasions rather closely together in Infinite, his daughter dies multiple times in BaS, a storyline that sets up Bioshock. The unluckiest Anna, Elizabeth avenging her only to be wiped out by that Big Daddy, and Elizabeth's seeming to and believing she did become mortal in returning to Rapture a while later to save the girl she'd used to finish "Booker", arrange Atlas' self-defeat, and die in the process. "All Debts Paid" wasn't just an achievement... it was her intention.