Irrational Games’ creative head, Ken Levine revealed that Bioshock Infinite looked exactly like Bioshock 1 at one point in time. That prompted them to change the look to give it a distinct style. ‘For a long time, it looked like ‘BioShock 1 in the sky,” he said to Gamasutra.
When they came to the realization that it looked exactly like Bioshock 1, they implemented drastic measures.
“That’s when we came to the conclusion we had to do some aggressive change to make it a distinct look,” said Art director, Nate Wells.
“It was uncomfortable for us. Ken started literally pushing back the clouds — ‘bluer, bluer!’ We were really uncomfortable with it, our initial reaction is it’s a little bit cartoonish…. but when we saw it in context, that was our a-ha moment.”
“That searching and that failure was absolutely essential. By spending some time muddling around… by failing, you find it. That was an idea that I don’t think that we could have landed on; we wandered to it. You need that galvanizing idea, but you can’t… just do nothing until you have it.” said lead artist Shawn Robertson.
Bioshock Infinite had a very impressive E3 showing, and you can check out the gameplay video below. The game releases next year on the PC, PS3 and the Xbox 360.