Irrational Studios’ boss Ken Live, the “big daddy” of Bioshock says that the team tried working on the multiplayer aspect of BioShock Infinite, but ultimately decided not to do it because they “didn’t have the resources and time” to complete what Levine says was an “experiment.”
“We look at this way,” Levine told IGN. “We play around with a ton of things. “So much of it is experimental that you really have no idea… 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. We probably tried 40 different versions of [Songbird] before we found the right one.”
He then went on to talk about the multiplayer component, and how the team experimented with that too.
“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,” he said. “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.”
However, he also said that the team hasn’t closed the door on having a multiplayer component in future BioShock games. “You never know when we’ll go back and revisit something,” Levine said. “There was some really cool stuff there, but it just wasn’t ready for what we were doing.”
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