Ken Levine on Reinventing BioShock Infinite

It’s been a long road for BioShock Infinite. Since its announcement in 2010, the game has seen multiple delays and developer departures, finally settling on a March 26, 2013 release date last week.

As the game finally nears completion, we sat down with creative director Ken Levine to talk about the long journey Infinite has taken from 2010 to now. From gameplay changes to characters to the potential of other platforms, Levine had a lot to say about his newest project, including how it differs from the original BioShock.

Playing through the first few hours of Infinite, it’s clear that this isn’t quite the same game that was shown off in 2010. In addition to receiving substantial polish, Infinite feels more like a BioShock game than what we saw previously.

“In terms of what stayed the same between the games, I think the core loop of amazing environment, detailed environment and improvisational combat with a ton of tools in a large tool set is very similar to the first game,” Levine told IGN. “I mean, we’ve changed it to all new tools and all new environments and all new all that stuff, but those themes will remain very much the same. And then there are certain things that just worked. For instance, the quest sound and when your health is low there’s a heartbeat sound. We used exactly the same sound from BioShock 1, just because those live in the meta space as well, so the player’s already conditioned, and BioShock players especially, to understand what those things mean. And we worked really hard to get those right in the first game, so we were like ‘why reinvent the wheel here?’”

“Now the rest of the game, there’s a fair amount of reinvention of the wheel,” he continued. “We basically walked away from all the things that we thought we were coasting on. We had done two games, System Shock 2 and BioShock, with a world that was dead, effectively, already and you were just sort of coming in after the fact. We had done two games where you were a silent protagonist and two games where there was nobody around you, and two games without any companions with you. And we said ‘okay, well what is the BioShock version of all those things?’ And if we were to walk away from those very comfortable little binkies of ours, what would we do? Because they were very comfortable, because for development purposes they were very useful. But we had done it, you know?”

“We figured our audience would be expecting more. They expect more each time and they deserve more each time. And to put down another $60 is a lot of money, and so we kept a lot the same but in terms of the content, there’s maybe a few shared assets across the games, but it is an entirely new experience in how you have to think about your character as a person and not just a cipher. And that you’re with somebody is a totally different experience, but yet it is very much BioShock at the same time. And the formula for that is completely unclear to me, except I know it when I see it. And we just sort of work on it, and when it doesn’t feel right, we change it if it doesn’t feel BioShock. And that’s how we get there.”

“I think one thing that Infinite is intended to demonstrate is that BioShock doesn’t mean a particular place. It means a lot of other things. We knew we basically had to start from scratch in a lot of areas but it still had to be a BioShock game. And that was a real interesting challenge.”

As Infinite has evolved, so have its gameplay mechanics. Nostrums, the pot-luck upgrade system described back in 2010, have been replaced by Gear, and the game’s special powers -- Vigors -- have become “richer,” as Levine describes it.

“Since we first showed the game, we’ve definitely done some shuffling in the game system side,” he explained. “Sort of the main game flow, the kind of combat hasn’t changed in a substantial way, but the underlying RPG systems have grown, actually, and modified. You have the Gear system, which was something new, and we decided that we wanted a bunch of systems that were all quite different from each other, and we think the Nostrums were too similar to some other systems. So the Gear system is focused on these mutually exclusive choices you have to make, these small choices you have to make that are really interesting. ‘What am I going to use for my head slot? I can’t have both of these.’ The Vigor system grew and got richer and it was quite modifiable, where each of them have alt-fires, and the weapons got all these modifications. Some of them have four or five modifications you can make to each weapon. It’s a quite diverse character upgrade system for a shooter.”

Just as Infinite’s gameplay has evolved, so have its characters. Elizabeth may have gotten an official face recently, but last week marked the first time we’ve truly seen how Elizabeth impacts gameplay. Is this still the same girl we met back in 2010?

“I think she’s very much the same character,” Levine told us. “The Tears have evolved in terms of we used to have a resource attached to them and we don’t anymore because we didn’t feel like that worked very well. You can only have one open at a time basically, so you can go back and forth between cooldowns. But she hasn’t really changed as a character. Her mission and her journey is still the same journey, but when we saw the reaction to Elizabeth at E3 last year, 2011, it was so strong that we really wanted to give her even more of a role as your partner, not just Tears and narrative, but really to spin her into every aspect of that journey. You know, from the narrative stuff and from the environmental stuff that she does, she’s always aware in the world. Always present and always observing things and paying attention to things and commenting on things, looking at things, interacting with things. But in combat, we really wanted to expand her role and we thought that there’s a bunch of things. People would say ‘oh, give her a gun,’ and I never wanted to do that.”

“I never wanted to do that because that’s just what the player does, and I don’t want someone kill stealing from me,” he elaborated. “Why even have that AI there? Why don’t I just do that, you know? I’m already doing a pretty good job with it, I think. So we really wanted to make sure all the things she did for you are quite different from things you do. So in combat, she’s constantly scrounging for resources for you. For money and ammo and health and Salts that power your Vigors. And she’s sort of scrounging, and oftentimes in clutch moments she’ll hook you up with just what you need. And I think that also makes a bond between the player and Elizabeth. You feel that she’s not just along for the ride. And then in the world itself, she has use. When you first meet her, you kind of see her environment that she lives in, and she’s a bit of a nerdy girl. The 1912 version of the nerd girl, you know? She’s interested in lock picking and painting and cryptography and things like that because she was locked in this tower.”

“We really wanted to pay those things off in the sense that she can pick locks for you, and there are these cryptograms you come across that she can help you figure out once you find the ciphers. She can help you figure out what leads to some good loot for you. We really just wanted to weave her into every aspect of the game, but we never wanted her to do the things that you do. We wanted her to do totally different things.”

Levine confirmed just a few weeks ago that Infinite won’t have any multiplayer. We’ve heard rumors of cut multiplayer modes in the past, and Levine says they just didn’t fit with the overall vision Irrational was hoping to achieve.

“We look at this way: we play around with a ton of things,” Levine said. “So much of it is experimental that you really have no idea. When you’re making a game about Marines fighting the Taliban, you sort of a clear path to go with. In a game like this, where we start this thing and we’re like ‘okay, it’s in a flying city in 1912 and you’re this guy and there’s this girl who can change the nature of reality,’ you don’t quite have a lot of guidelines to go with. I can show you Songbird and the evolution of that character, the visual evolution of that character. Robb Waters, who did that stuff, he just pounded out version after version and probably wanted to kill me by the end of it because it was like ‘nope, nope, that’s not right. Let’s keep going.’ We probably tried 40 different versions of him before we found the right one.”

“So, like everything, you try certain things, and the multiplayer, we got to a point where we said ‘okay, this is the you-know-what or get off the pot moment,’ and we decided to get off the pot because it wasn’t there yet. But that makes it sound like I’m dissing on what the guys did. No. Actually, I think they did some really extraordinary stuff, but we felt we didn’t have the resources and time to finish the experiment to the level we wanted to. And we weren’t going to ship something that was not consistent with the overall package.”

As for whether he could talk about those cut modes, Levine told us “I’d rather not, because you never know when we’ll go back and revisit something. There was some really cool stuff there, but it just wasn’t ready for what we were doing.”

Sitting down to play BioShock Infinite, it’s clear that Irrational took the 1912 setting very seriously. Walking through Columbia, you’ll encounter references to actual historical events at every turn, giving the illusion that Columbia is a real place that might have existed last century.

“I would see events that happened and I’d say….I don’t want to spoil anything, but ‘could Booker have been there?’ You know, what would have happened if he was there? Would that be interesting? What would happen if this other character was there? It’s much more tied historically to reality than BioShock 1 was,” Levine said. “I mean, you sort of have a couple of major things that affected Andrew Ryan. Obviously the rise of the Soviets made him leave Russia and World War II and the New Deal affected him, but Booker was actually at and another character was actually at some of these events, and they had a profound effect upon their lives, and if not for these events, probably a lot of things that you see in this game would be very, very different.”

“They’re really motivating factors. And as you explore the world of Columbia, you’re also exploring Booker and Elizabeth to some degree. I don’t mean that in any creepy sexual way, I mean that you’re learning about them because we’re not a company that says ‘here’s the autobiography of Booker DeWitt you can read’ or ‘here’s the autobiography of Elizabeth.’ You’re discovering about them as you go through. And there’s some surprises there and some things that you go ‘oh, okay, that makes sense,’ and some of those historical events are tied into that.”

Irrational announced PlayStation Move support for BioShock Infinite last year, but not many details about the game’s motion controls have been revealed. According to Levine, Move has been treated like any other control method, and the team tried to make sure players would have the same experience regardless of how they decide to play.

“I think it comes down to very small things. You know, for instance, a mouse is an absolute controller,” he said. “A joystick is a relative controller. You say ‘I want to go to that point’ with the mouse, with a joystick you say ‘go left.’ And those are very, very different experiences. And very smart people spent a lot of time figuring out how that worked well. And those people were not me. My sort of area of expertise is somewhere else. I think it’s the same thing with Move or any alternative control device. It’s always about ‘how do I make this thing still feel as natural?’ There can be a learning curve there. The first shooters that were on gamepads felt terrible, right? Then GoldenEye sort of got far down the road, and then Halo sort of got really far down the road, and then we sort of went a long way from there. But there are these moments where people figured these things out, and we have guys on the team who are dedicated to getting the mouse control right. And we were very specifically focused on getting that right, because we didn’t quite get it right on BioShock 1 and we were very focused on that this time. But we also had people dedicated to getting the Move controller right and the more traditional controllers right as well.”

With so many controller options, we asked Levine if he’d consider bringing Infinite to Nintendo’s new console. “It’s a cool platform. I have one,” he told us. “I wish I could give you a more exciting answer, but that’s really a discussion that the business people have and see if it makes sense for Nintendo, if it makes sense for Take Two. For me, independent of anything, the more [platforms] the merrier for me, but it’s a lot more complex than that. I had my time dealing with that aspect of the business when I ran Irrational before I sold it, but I’m very happy now just to be focused on the creative side.”

One of BioShock’s most notable features was the element of choice -- do you save a Little Sister or Harvest her? Each choice had its own consequences and rewards, and that element of choice came to partially define the BioShock experience. According to Levine, Infinite has plenty of choices for Booker to make, but there won’t necessarily be branching paths or multiple endings like in BioShock.

“I very much love that part of BioShock, with the Little Sisters, but the problem with it was it was sort of the same choice 22 times over,” he explained. “It was still a powerful component of the game. And in this game we never felt really beholden to any particular part of BioShock. Just because it was in the other game doesn’t mean it has to be in this game. We always said there are no sacred cows in BioShock 1. And we didn’t want a moral choice system in this game, but we wanted Booker to be in a morally grey space, and we wanted him to have some agency in very particular moments about the choices he makes. And those have some payoffs to them as well, but those moments, more importantly than in the choice you make, what the results are, it really confronts you with that moment. And I think you’ll find there are moments that aren’t really quite like anything else you’ve seen in another video game. Like that first choice…I don’t want to spoil anything for anybody, but I don’t think you’ve seen that in another game. And we didn’t want that just to be something you could be a passive observer in. We really wanted to engage you in that moment.”

“There is a particular story we’re trying for. There is some divergent material depending on what you do, but I don’t want to oversell it as ‘oh, the game completely branches in one direction or the other.’ We recognize the choices, but I wouldn’t say it is a major, major feature of the game. But it’s more about confronting the player with the choices and making him think about them. But it’s important that you have some recognition of that, and we do. You’ll see after that moment, you can please one party or a different party by your actions, and get different rewards for that. Not just physical rewards, but also you’ll feel emotionally a little different depending on which path you took.”

Anyone who played BioShock will remember the various Plasmids and how they impacted gameplay. From fire to swarms of insects, having special powers helped make BioShock more varied and made difficult battles a matter of strategy. Plasmids have been replaced by Vigors in Infinite, but Levine says they’ll still serve mostly the same purpose.

“I think they’re all sort of in the same category,” he said. “We don’t want them to replace weapons. They want to have a different feel than weapons. They can get quite different depending upon how you modify them. I don’t want to oversell the difference of Vigors versus Plasmids. I think that would be unfair. I do want to oversell how much variety there is within each Vigor. Because they all have an alt-fire and they all have an upgrade path. And you sort of choose that upgrade path. And weapons all have upgrade paths, too. They’re quite diverse. And Gear. And they all sort of talk to the Gear, and all these things talk to each other. So I would say the growth system as a whole is substantially richer than BioShock 1. I wouldn’t say it’s as rich as World of Warcraft. I don’t want to oversell things, but for a shooter I think it’s pretty rich. And I think it’s a more interesting system, a more well-thought-out system. We had a lot of people spending a lot of time thinking about it.”

“But no, I wouldn’t say ‘oh my God, that Vigor is unlike anything you ever saw in BioShock 1.’ They’re designed to complement certain play styles. Yeah, there are a couple. Because of the distances involved in the game, you have a couple. There’s a charge Vigor, for instance, that is about closing space and doing damage and getting into a melee experience, where in BioShock 1 that wouldn’t really have made much sense because there’s not much space to close."

"There’s some others like Undertow that pull people towards you or push them off ledges, and those things didn’t have any meaning in BioShock 1. There’s no ledges to push anybody off. And things that affect your style. The environment is way more complex and way more varied. The choices within and the enemy types and the Vigors are very much more expressive, but there’s also things that wouldn’t have made sense in BioShock 1 that make a lot of sense here.”

For more from our interview with Levine, read his comments about Infinite’s most recent delay and the latest update about BioShock on Vita.

For more about BioShock Infinite itself, read our hands-on impressions and find out everything we know in our BioShock Infinite wiki guide.

Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s associate news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following @garfep on Twitter or garfep on IGN.