Bioshock Infinite

**reisespieces** Thu Jul 14, 2011 1:21 pm

Though it's not going to be ready until some time in 2012, BioShock Infinite managed to take our best overall game of E3 2011 award
and remains one of the most highly anticipated titles in the IGN
offices. Recently Irrational published video of the full E3 2011 demo,
so you can see why we're so impressed.

In Infinite, you play as Booker DeWitt, an ex-Pinkerton agent sent to
recover a woman named Elizabeth from the mysterious floating city of
Columbia. She happens to have magical powers and a bizarre relationship
with a terrifying flying creature known as Songbird. Though it bears the
BioShock name and a few thematic similarities, it's a whole new setting
and cast of characters for the franchise.

Ken Levine, Creative Director at Irrational Games, provides more detail about Infinite, the BioShock brand, the Wii U, PlayStation Vita, and Move support.

IGN: How early on in the project did you know you really wanted to
try something different with the Little Sister/Big Daddy mechanic that
was introduced in BioShock?

Ken Levine: Honestly, I didn't know. It's an interesting question.
I'm trying to reconstruct how that dynamic happened. We've always said
that this is a BioShock game. But it's not another BioShock game in the
way that people think of, say, another Call of Duty game. It's
thematically connected, it's gameplay-wise connected, in terms of
character growth in a first-person shooter, there's weapons in one hand,
powers in the other hand. There's this world to explore, it deals with
elements of history, elements of sociology, elements of science. Those
things are really important to us. People have started to notice this,
that relationship [between Elizabeth and Songbird] has some thematic
connections to the Big Daddy and Little Sister.

Elizabeth's not a child, that's a huge difference. Elizabeth is a woman.
A Little Sister has no capacity to understand what she wants in life,
but Elizabeth knows what she wants. She wants to control her own
destiny. She was locked in this tower when she was the age of a Little
Sister, five years old or so, and had no idea why she was locked in
there, no idea she has these powers, completely cut off from human
contact except for this creature, the Songbird. All she did was look out
the window and say, "I want to be out there. I want to control my own
destiny." And then she gets out there and she realizes she can't control
her powers. She doesn't know she has these powers, then she learns she
has these powers and on top of that she can't control them. What an
adult wants is to control their own life, control their own destiny.
That's the primary difference between Elizabeth and a Little Sister,
Elizabeth's an adult.

This game is about her struggle to control her destiny, and Booker's
redemption through that process of working with her on this. That's a
hard story to tell in a video game. It's complicated, her relationship
with the Songbird is complicated. I dated a girl once who was in an
abusive relationship before, and I could never understand the connection
she had with that guy. She did have a connection with him, and it was
baffling to me. But you hear the cliches, people get connected to people
who exploit them. I think that's what you're seeing, too, the Little
Sister and the Big Daddy have an exploitative relationship, but they
also have a connection with each other. Elizabeth and the Songbird have a
connection with each other. But she's an adult and she understands that
she's being exploited in a way that a Little Sister doesn't.

You can even see in the scene at the end of the demo, that rapprochement
she reaches with him. It's like a fight between two lovers, almost.
Because she needs to save Booker, she's trying to do the last thing she
wants to on Earth, which is convince him that she wants to be back with
him. It's not sexually romantic, but he's obviously, in his
conditioning, feels betrayed by her. And she has to tap into that space.
That's why, when I worked with the animators on that, I said, have you
ever been in a fight with somebody where they won't look at you? You're
trying to get their attention, you're trying to get their visual space
-- that is where this is. She's trying to say, no, look at me, and he's
looking away. Even with a giant 30-foot bird-creature, if you don't tap
into those things, then it's just a monster, right?

IGN: It has the expressive eyes, too, that change depending on mood, I assume?

Ken Levine: We're not the first people to do this, not something
like Wall-E or something like that. R2-D2 even. You find ways that
things that aren't human can express these kinds of things. Because how
else do we access those emotions? But then it's mixed in with this giant
30-foot-tall creature, it does that bird-head thing, you know how
birds, their heads move instantly, they almost teleport from spot to
spot. So you can't just... If it looks like a guy in a suit, you lose.
But if it's completely, it has no connection to anything human, you lose
as well.

IGN: What's the extent of Elizabeth's ability to "peel back" time? I
don't know if you've read Ubik, the science fiction novel by Philip K.
Dick, but it's like time keeps moving back in that novel... I don't know
if there's a permanence to it, where you get to a state where you've
actually rolled back the time such that you're in a different time
period?

Ken Levine: I have to be careful here, because I would love to talk
about all the details of this, but in the same way, if I reveal too much
of the story, I'm not doing a service to anybody. BioShock games are
set in a political context, in a social context, in a historical
context, in a scientific context. Right? BioShock 1 dealt with taking
what Crick and Watson were doing, with DNA, the structure of DNA, and
going crazy with it. That was happening back then, in that time period.
What was happening in this time period? Physics. Einstein. You have
Heisenberg, you've got people starting to understand that the universe
they thought they understood was in fact nothing at all like the
universe they thought they understood. In fact, we're still scratching
our head at the stuff that those guys were starting to tap into back
then in physics. Elizabeth's not a scientist, but she can tap into what
these people were starting to understand about the universe. I love
that, I love tying things into what was going on at the time and then
just running crazy with it.