BioShock Infinite Features an Evolved Combat System

The creator of the BioShock series, Ken Levine, has talked about the array of improvements made by Irrational Games to next year’s BioShock Infinite and how the combat has been overhauled in order to promote weapon and power variety.

BioShock 1 and 2 allowed players to wield not just regular weapons but also special powers called plasmids. These ranged from zapping enemies with electricity, to throwing swarms of bees and other such things.

However, despite this variety, many players stuck with just a few favorites and never bothered to experiment.

In Infinite, however, Levine and his team are practically forcing players to alternate between equipment, as each weapon or power has certain areas where it behaves best.

“Combat is one of the things that has evolved in a very substantial way,” Levine told CVG in regards to the first two games.

“The reason I feel that way is that in BioShock the combat got a little bit samey along the way because of what we demanded of the player. You'd generally come across an enemy and the right way to deal with them - almost all the enemies - was to use the Electro Bolt, which was incredibly effective across the spectrum.”

Weapons, powers and environments in Infinite, however, will require more skill from players, as they’ll always have to decide what to use in certain scenarios.

“With BioShock Infinite, one of the opportunities of having the large, vertical spaces is the ability to include weapons that are effective at short range versus those that are effective at long range. You have certain weapons that are extremely effective against you on the Skyline and weapons that are more effective against you on the ground and vice versa in terms of how you interact with the enemies and which weapons you use, so you have to be thinking all of the time.”

As you can see, BioShock Infinite will be a more complex game than previous titles from the series and you can bet that Irrational is using the extra development gained from the recent delay in order to polish the combat mechanics even more.