Introduction

Post-release of the first BioShock game Ken Levine and the gang at Irrational were already piecing together plans for another BioShock game. There may have even been scraps of Infinite around the studio while BioShock was under development but never the less, something was brewing. Immediately after release they began working on "Project Icarus", a codename used in their studio to avoid potential leaks. The worked on what would become Infinite for more than two years before making any sort of announcement. Soon, though, in 2010 they had finally announced the game. Fast-forwarding to early 2012, Irrational had announced a Fall 2012 release date and then over the course of 2012 had to continually push back the release date as they weren't happy with the state of the game. Irrational were luckily given complete freedom to work on their game for as long as necessary which likely contributed to how polished the final product feels.

One of the reasons BioShock Infinite not only looks so great in and of itself but also very different from previous BioShock games is because they essentially had to re-design assets from the ground up. Having moved to a new engine (Unreal 3) and having developed custom lighting and physics (like how Columbia is constantly bobbing up and down for example) and thus Infinite looks leagues better than BioShock 1 and 2 did while still maintaining that same visual flair known to the BioShock series.

During development Ken Levine worked closely with voice actors Troy Baker (Booker) and Courtnee Draper (Elizabeth) to develop their characters and ultimately to develop parts of the narrative. A practice known to be uncommon in games development. A lot of scenes in game were improvised and fleshed out through long recording sessions with the three of them. I'll get in to this more in another post but their close working leads to some extremely well done dynamics between characters rather than having actors in on separate days recording lines in solitary, much of it was recorded together, reacting to each other and acting out scenes rather than just recording a batch of lines.

Brainamp made a fantastic LP of the first BioShock: http://lparchive.org/Bioshock/

The Let's Play Archive

Bioshock Infinite

by Sundowner

Introduction

Table of Contents