Bioshock: Infinite “To Demand More Out Of The Player”

Speaking to Joystiq, Ken Levine has revealed more of the design philosophy behind the newly-announced Bioshock: Infinite and how the game mechanics will challenge players.

“Rapture was a bit of a fake, in a sense that you never engaged with the ocean in a real way,” Levine admits. “We said that if we’re going to do a city in the sky [for Bioshock: Infinite], 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.”

“Some of the combat in previous BioShock games got to be a tiny bit samey because when you’re fighting just one or two guys in a tight corridor … we want to demand more out of the player.”
“[In Bioshock: Infinite] maybe you’ll have much broader spaces, where long-range weapons are a lot more important. 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,” Levine said.

Addressing the issue of interactivity, Levine talked a little about the sorts of encounters players can expect to have in the sky city of Columbia.

“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 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.”

There are times, Levine explains, when players will not be immediately attacked by entities they come across. “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 … [I think that] presents real new opportunities for the gamer and a very different experience than BioShock.”