14 DAY TRIAL // Making Booker DeWitt talk was a hard yet fun thing to do, at least according to the game's writer and creator, Ken Levine, who said that he and his team at Irrational Games worked a lot on the protagonist of the upcoming BioShock Infinite.
Many gamers from all around the world anticipate BioShock Infinite as it promises to deliver a new experience from the same team who made the original BioShock 1, a cult classic that appeared back in 2007.
While the original game had an almost silent protagonist, in the form of Jack, BioShock Infinite will have a fully talking one, in the form of Booker DeWitt, a Pinkerton agent sent to the floating city of Columbia to rescue a young woman called Elizabeth.
According to the lead writer and creative director of the studio, Ken Levine, making Booker talk was quite hard.
"It's tricky doing it in first person too," Levine told CVG about making a character talk. "When players play a Third Person game, they tend to look at the character they're controlling and go 'that's him' or 'that's her'. In FPS's you're controlling you, basically. But most first person characters don't talk - they don't have a personality."
"So when we made the decision to make Booker talk, we knew we were opening up a whole can of worms there. And not just talk, his story with him and Elizabeth - it's a story of their relationship set against this fantastical backdrop. Part of the fun for me as a writer was learning about the pair of them as we moved forward."
According to Levine, Booker also has a history that will be slowly revealed throughout the game, so fans will continue to learn more about the character they're controlling and develop a stronger bond with him.
"Look, I could've brought Booker on and introduced him and gone 'he did this, and he did this, and he did that'. Or there's the option of slowly revealing who he is over the course of the game. It sounds like a small thing but it's one of the more interesting experimental things involved in making Infinite - figuring out how to walk that line, because this notion of trusting who you are is very complicated."
Players will be able to control Booker on March 26, when BioShock Infinite is released on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.