IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

BioShock is 'A Lot More Than Just Rapture'

Posted August 12, 2010 by M.H. Williams

After releasing BioShock to excellent sales and reviews, Ken Levine and Irrational Games submerged to work on their next project. That project was revealed today as BioShock Infinite, a new spin on the franchise that takes us from the failed underwater utopia of Rapture to the alternate reality sky-city of Columbia. Ken Levine sat down to talk to Joystiq about the development of Infinite and the future of Irrational Games.

Levine said the new theme, the '50s-esque feeling and the jingoistic bent, did not enter the picture until late last year. “The notion of American exceptionalism, that didn't even exist until six or eight months ago. It was always a city in the sky from the very beginning. But very similar to BioShock 1, where we didn't have Andrew Ryan and the notion of objectivism -- we leave ourselves very open for evolution.”

“There was a feeling in America that we were trying to represent. At the turn of the century, there was this feeling of optimism. All these technologies came in place in the span of twenty years. You go from people with cows and outhouses and growing wheat in fields, to having radios and cars and movie stars, and all these incredible things. It's almost as if they felt a city was suddenly floating in the sky. That's how much the world had changed,” said Levine when asked about the philosophy behind the setting of Infinite.

“This feeling of optimism -- we can do all these huge things -- we have the technology, we have this incredible democratic system, which really was a beacon of hope at the time. It was a world filled with monarchies and despots. And Columbia [Ed's note: fictional city of Infinite] came out of that.”

Levine says Irrational’s team has stayed relatively small for a larger developer like 2K Games, despite the large workload of crafting an entirely new AAA game. “We're still not as big as the Ubisofts of the world, not even close. We got, like, 80. We like to stay relatively small. Not compared to a bunch of indies that do amazing things with five people. There's not a single shared asset between this and any previous BioShock game. All the code we're writing is entirely new. It's an entirely new engine.”

That new engine is none other than Unreal Engine 3, which is a change for Irrational as the original BioShock was built on Unreal Engine 2.5. “It's built on Unreal 3 this time, but there's no shared code between any of our previous games and this. This game was about getting out of our comfort zone for us, because we had used that engine on several games before. It was used on SWAT, Tribes, BioShock 1, and we were very comfortable with it. But it was also a limitation which didn't allow us to do the things we wanted to do with this game. It was a lot of work, and that's one of the reasons here we are, two and a half years talking about it,” Levine admitted.

“And we said that if we're going to do a city in the sky, it has to be in the sky. In our engine, buildings actually float. Buildings can actually collapse. Buildings you're standing on can collapse out of the sky. Every surface is floating,” he added.

Combat has also seen a revamp, going from the tight, darkened corridors of the first BioShock, to a wide open city. “The fact that you can fight fifteen enemies at once, where you're used to fighting one or two guys in a corridor in BioShock 1. Okay, maybe you will have some of those tight spaces. Maybe you'll have much broader spaces, where long-range weapons are a lot more important,” he continued.

“Maybe you'll have lots of enemies at once, where area of effect weapons become really important. Maybe you'll move at 60 miles per hour along the sky lines, where weapons that can be used in that context become really important. So, we want to demand more out of the player, so they had to be much more engaged in their tool set.”

With so much that’s brand-new about BioShock Infinite, why is it called BioShock at all? Levine explained that the BioShock name was far more important than just the setting and characters.

“I think BioShock is a lot more than just Rapture. This is a game; it's a first-person shooter set in an amazing place with a story wrought with – from our perspective – ideas that are tied with history. But we felt that if we made this game and it wasn't a BioShock game, that would be a bit of a cheat. To say, 'Oh, it's a totally new thing.' But it is a new thing, but it's also a continuation of the things we've done before. Final Fantasy is a very similar thing. They have some similar elements.”

Levine clarifies that Rapture and Columbia are two vastly different cities. Rapture was a dead, failed experiment, while Columbia is a city full of life and mostly-sane people to interact with.

“One of the cheats we've given ourselves over the history of the company is sort of being in this world that's almost dead. And you just have the sort of crazies wandering around who you can't really interact with in any meaningful way,” he said. “I think, and I could be wrong, I think I invented the "see the guy on the other side of the glass window and interact with him" thing. And that's a dubious distinction, as an invention. And that's one of the things that we said we're not going to allow ourselves to have a game that's entirely run by that.“

“You saw a sequence in the bar, where you come in and people don't immediately attack you. And that's actually meaningful to what we're trying to do with this game. I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail here but this is not a city that's as devolved as Rapture and I think that presents real challenges for us on the development side and it also presents real new opportunities for the gamer and a very different experience than BioShock,” he concluded.

The studio head confirmed that unlike Bioshock, whose PC port was handled by 2K Australia, all versions of BioShock Infinite are done in-house. Levine is also coy on how the ‘Infinite’ name relates to the rest of the game. “That's something you're going to have to find out,” he quipped.

New setting, new characters, new engine, and a whole new game; are gamers ready for BioShock Infinite?

M.H. Williams has been writing in some form or another for ten years and has been a hardcore gamer since the NES first graced American shores.  You can catch him on Twitter as @AutomaticZen, Google+ as himself, or on his personal Facebook page.