Infinite Keeps Core BioShock Principles, Is Art Inspired

After the first game in the BioShock series Take Two farmed out the series to its Marin subsidiary and allowed Irrational Games to change its name and spend some time thinking about the future of the series and about whether Rapture, the underwater city created by the team, would remain the main setting.

It seems that the developers agreed that they created the best experience they could in that setting and that they needed to change backgrounds in order to jump-start their creativity.

Ken Levine, who is the leading developer working on BioShock Infinite at Irrational Games, has told CVG that, “When we first determined that we were going to not go back to Rapture, we, as a studio, said what we wanted to say about Rapture. We kicked around the idea of, ‘What if we were to keep the core principles of BioShock, but everything else really was really up for grabs at that point?’”

He added, “The first thing we said was what if we went to a very different time period. The turn of the century was very attractive to us and if you looked at the sort of art for that period, especially the sci-fi art, there’s always these images of cities in the sky. And that just really inspired us, and that was really the starting point.”

Infinite moves the action to the sky, where the flying island of Columbia is home to two very different political factions and also houses the kidnapped Elizabeth, who the main character needs to rescue and guide to the ground.

The most intriguing feature of BioShock Infinite demoed so far is Elizabeth power to open up what seem to be portals to alternate realities and different time frames, which will influence the game in yet unknown ways.

Infinte will be launched during 2012 on the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3 and the PC.