BioShock Infinite Interview
with Irrational Games' Ken Levine
Last fall, following three-plus years of speculation, Boston-based Irrational Games finally revealed their follow-up project to 2007’s BioShock. Surprising absolutely everyone, the developer announced BioShock Infinite, a spiritual successor of sorts to the Big Daddy-starring series. Leaving the soggy city of Rapture behind, Infinite takes gamers to Columbia, a mysterious metropolis in the clouds. Beyond the skyward setting, some scant story details, and the introduction of Elizabeth--an AI-controlled companion--details on Infinite are as scarce as an Adam-oozing sea slug.
Thankfully, we recently caught up with Irrational’s creative director Ken Levine who, while remaining cautiously tight-lipped, did elaborate on his goals for Infinite’s story, combat, and non-playable character (Hint: Don’t get your hopes up on her being playable in a co-op mode.) Levine also addresses BioShock‘s oft-criticized final boss battle and discusses why he’d rather be marketing the next Madden game. For more from the man who penned one of gaming’s greatest narrative twists, read on…would you kindly.
AtomicGamer: Now that you have some distance from the initial announcement, how does it feel to have BioShock Infinite out in the wild?
Ken Levine: It feels great, mostly because I’m not, by nature, a secretive person. I hate having to be in an awkward situation where people are asking what you are doing, even your family sometimes. It’s great to be at this stage. It’s cool to be out there talking about Infinite.
AG: It’s got to be even more difficult though, in that everyone now has a basis for their questions, but there’s only so much you can reveal.
KL: Yes, you still have to remember that you’re at the beginning of a process. You have to be honest. We don’t have all the answers yet. Many people think you have all the answers at the beginning and you just go and execute all of that. That’s just not the way it is. I mean, it’s very challenging to even talk about the game because things change in a couple of years. You want to make sure the information you’re giving people is current. You know, it’s a work in progress here.
AG: And the game’s still a ways out, so I’d imagine it could change in that time.
KL: Yes, that’s very true. We’re at 2012, so it’s still in major evolutionary stages.
AG: One of the big things that came out of the original announcement was that Infinite was actually another game in the BioShock universe. Prior to this, the majority of fans thought BioShock was synonymous with the Big Daddies and Little Sisters and Rapture. So, what makes a game worthy of the BioShock moniker?
KL: BioShock evolved so much from where it started. If you looked at some of the stuff on our website, it wasn’t actually Rapture until, you know…well, we worked on it for about five years in one way or another. It actually wasn’t Rapture until about a year and a half, two years before release. For a while, it was an island in the Pacific with these former Nazis on it. It was a science-fiction thing for a while. But what makes a game BioShock for me is that it’s set in a location that you find extraordinary and unlike anything people have seen before. But it also has a grounded feeling to it in some ways. And the other aspect for me is that we give you a broad toolset. We let the player determine how they’re going to fight and deal with their encounters by using that toolset.
AG: What would you say are the defining features of Infinite, aside from those BioShock traits?
KL: What makes Infinite different than previous BioShock games is really having the world of Columbia, and going back to having that feeling of not knowing what to expect out of that experience. Also, the kind of space that you see, the scale of the space that you see, the movement that you have in that space. That really gives it a different sense of the kind of tools that you have to use. It’s the variation of gameplay you can have, like, what weapons you can have. What good is a sniper rifle? What good is an area effect weapon or a crowd control weapon when you’re fighting one or two guys at a time in a corridor? I think we’ve made huge steps in improving the combat dynamics, in terms of the feel of that, the balance of that. I think we want to continue with that process of the franchise of making both an extraordinary world and really working on our combat shots to make sure that they’re as good or better, while still maintaining that core combat experience. Also the variety of enemies, the number of enemies you face, to really challenge a player's toolset.
AG: The Skylines are certainly something we’ve never seen in a BioShock game. How integral are they to Infinite’s gameplay?
KL: I think one things that people are saying, which is inaccurate, is that the Skylines are something that you start on, then you go in one direction and end up at the other end. They are not primarily a form of transport. We’ll have a demo down the road of showing the combat dynamic of the Skylines. They’re going to be used in a very freeform way, in a very combat-oriented way, jumping from line to line, being in combat on the line.
AG: Is it frustrating to show a demo and have people misinterpret it?
KL: Yes, of course. I think that I’ve been doing this long enough that you learn, even today, it’s your responsibility to explain the game to people. It’s not their responsibility to figure everything out…it’s our responsibility to explain it. There has been contention out there about a second playable character.
AG: You’re referring to Elizabeth?
KL: Yes. That’s not the case. I want to be clear about this. We’re designing her as your companion and she is experienced as an AI. You just do your best to make things clear and that all the people can hear you. You’re just trying to correct the record and do the best you can. It’s a very big product. It’s a big game and there’s a lot to talk about. People are like, “What am I seeing here?” We kind of expected people to be a little shell-shocked. I don’t think there’s anybody who thought the next BioShock was going to be this, and that’s cool. One of our goals was to bring the franchise to a new place. It’s a very natural evolution to have two games in a franchise where the setting is not going to have the immediate impact that it had when it first came out. We immediately felt it was necessary for the BioShock world to go to a different place and get people back to a place they don’t really understand. That’s the goal. The goal is to get back to that place.
AG: Is the protagonist’s relationship with Elizabeth serving the same purpose, the risk/reward dynamic, of the Big Daddy and Little Sister relationship? What can you tell us about Elizabeth’s role?
KL: We don’t sort of think about, okay, “We had X in this game, so we need to put it in here also.” I think Elizabeth started as a separate set of challenges for us. Primarily, she was very important for us in two different areas. She had dealt with the conflict of this world in a very material way. For 15 years, for most of her life, she’s been locked up and not even knowing why. And to learn about this world with somebody, instead of people just telling you about it, to show you the effects of this world on a person you’re with…we felt was a really interesting challenge. And to also make her a player-driven gameplay component and not an AI squad mate…that’s a very challenging thing to get right. So like a player-driven, gaming player where she’s essentially setting you up to do really cool, larger-scale things than in any other previous BioShock game in terms of using your powers. She augments those. But she’s never going to take charge and do things on her own. She always has the option of using your toolset, your standards for BioShock, but she’ll use your profile in a very traditional BioShock way.
She is there to give you choices about how you approach the situation. So you can use a suite of very traditional BioShock tools in combat and things that people are more familiar with. Of course, we’ll have more powers. We’ll go into it later about the different things we’re going to do to make those powers work differently from one another. There’s going to be a different approach about how the character growth works in this game. We’ll talk about this down the road. But what Elizabeth does is that she basically sets you up, potentially to do larger-scale things. And you don’t have to take advantage of those opportunities. You can just be like, “Okay, Liz, that’s great. Thanks for setting that up. I’ll go do my own thing here.” She’s just there to help you do cooler things.
AG: BioShock had a great story, but you needed to dig a bit for it. If you passed up all the audio logs, ghosts and messages, you could play it as a action-intense shooter. Are you taking the same approach to Infinite?
KL: Here’s our goal: We never want to stop the action to tell you a story. That’s why we don’t do cut scenes. If you’re not interested in Elizabeth, you know, we’re trying to make the game for a variety of different interest levels in the story. For example, Alpha talks to you in BioShock…you can choose to listen to him, you can choose to ignore him. We all play some games this way: “Okay, what the hell do I have to blow up? Who have I got to shoot?“ You can play the game that way if you want, if it’s something you’re interested in. Our goal is to not stop the game, but to force you to be engaged in that. It’s just another way to put something in the world that tells a story, and have that story be more immediate and have somebody who is more present than what you saw in previous BioShock games, where essentially you’re dealing with a mostly dead city. Something we’ve been working on is the concept where, you know, …when we think of AI’s in most games, it’s shooters; generally, there are characters who agro on you.
We’ve been working on that mix that you might find in a Deus Ex-style game, a more of an RPG-ish game, where there are people that don’t necessarily attack you on sight. Sometimes, figuring out what’s going to set them off is one of the challenges; what will and won’t set them off. I’m sure you remember the baby carriage splicer in BioShock. Well, what if you can approach her and she can continue on with her little vignette that she’s going through? You could learn more about the world and what she’s doing, without her necessarily just agro-ing you the moment she sees you. The problem with what we had before is that if you went around to the front of that baby carriage, we couldn’t face her back view. It’s also that if she saw you, she’d come after you and that would break up her scene. So we’re trying to think about making the world feel like you’re coming into it more whilst in a process rather than after it’s collapsed.
AG: You’ve hinted at this a bit with the combat, but was there anything specifically from BioShock that you really weren’t satisfied with that you’d like to address in Infinite?
KL: Well, in anything you do, there’s always going to be things that you’re not crazy about. I think we’ve demonstrated that we’re not a team that is exceptionally good at making traditional boss battles. I think if you look at two boss battles in BioShock, one is Atlas at the end, the other one is the Big Daddy. The Big Daddy is who we’re trying to innovate with in terms of not agro-ing emerging bosses. You didn’t need to fight bosses in any specialized way. You just needed to jump on their heads three times. I think what’s more powerful about them is you engage them on your terms. I think we’ve learned a bit of a lesson trying to do things that are out of our comfort zone and things we’re not particularly interested in just because people expect them in a game. Like a boss battle is probably not something we’re going to try and do again. I think that was probably one of the biggest flaws.
AG: BioShock’s mix of storytelling and FPS action was a success and has spawned many imitators. Does this give you the creative freedom to take that concept even further?
KL: I think the wrong way for us to go at this point would be to say: “Okay, people loved BioShock, so let’s just start the game by having ten minutes of cutscenes because we just want to tell our story.” One of the reasons for the BioShock story…hopefully it was a good story and reasonably well-told…but I think the reasons people liked it was because they could engage in it on their terms, like you were saying before. That’s our core principle. Back from System Shock 2 days, you know, we’d be trying to tell much of the story in the world as we possibly can. The challenge there is there’s real limitations to that in terms of what you can do because you have to figure out new means of getting the story across. In System Shock 1, they’d give you audio logs. That was a brilliant innovation. We were obviously inspired by that in System Shock 2 and onwards. I think in System Shock 2 and BioShock, we really tried to move that story to what you saw in the world. Now we’re also trying to move that story to some of the characters. And I think there wouldn’t be much of a story there because there’s no journey for that character to go on. And, you know, we’re talking about a character that has almost no identity. We have to leverage that lack of identity in the story. If you know what the character’s identity is, there’s no story to tell at all. That story is a parallel of the world. It’s just a parallel of the world that’s built on free will. That’s what Andrew Ryan’s dream was, to build a world entirely driven by individual will. You don’t have that moment. The player has no role in that world. He’s just an accident in that world. So it wasn’t so much of a desire for a twist as a desire to really deliver on the message on Andrew Ryan’s world. And similarly, Infinite’s a story of characters going through changes. You know, Booker DeWitt is going to be changed by his experiences in Columbia, learning about who he is and learning about what he’s going through. What happens to him is what this story is about.
AG: Given BioShock’s success, does Irrational now have free reign to do whatever they want creatively with Infinite?
KL: You know, I think that’s given us a fair amount of freedom. We have less freedom and more freedom because the expectations are higher to some degree, not just on BioShock, but this is a game coming out in 2012. The competition of 2012, five years after 2007, is a very different thing. I mean, people have gotten very, very expert at their tools, so that’s why we have a new engine. That’s why we’re spending so much time on the technology on this thing. There is esteemed competition. We have to make sure that we’re going to have a product that’s going to be exciting and interesting to people in 2012. Now, on top of that, you need to deliver good gameplay, good feel of the guns, good narrative. Those things don’t really change. But in terms of just doing a game that uses exactly the techniques of BioShock 1 and BioShock 2, which is out in 2012, to tell a story, to verse people on the world, is going to be less interesting for people who have seen it before. So you have more demands on you and more demands on the team. The team has to look into their crystal ball and see what people are going to expect out of a game in 2012.
AG: What do you think of all these heavily story-driven shooters, like Singularity and Metro 2033, that have come after BioShock
KL: I think it’s an evolution. It’s interesting to see. What’s gratifying is that the success of BioShock, the commercial success has allowed more of these games to come into existence. As a gamer, I like these types of games. I like playing games like Metro and Singularity. I think the financial success of BioShock is maybe what did it. But I think that making those games is really challenging, and getting those games across to an audience is even more challenging. Some of those games don’t have an audience in terms of numbers. Not because they’re not good games. I think all those games you mentioned are good games. I think it’s just because these are very hard games to explain to an audience. They’re very difficult because they’re not like, “Hey, dude, guess what? You’re a Marine and you’ve got a machinegun.” That’s a little easier to explain. I’m not knocking those games either because I’m a big fan of those games. It’s just that certain games are harder to get across and some games are easier. I wish I was trying to sell people Madden 2012. That’s a lot easier to get across to people.
Thanks to Ken Levine for getting us even more psyched for our trip to Columbia. Is it 2012 yet?
