With Bioshock Infinite, Ken Levine wants to bring back the “mystery” to the franchise that the first Bioshock game had become anonymous with. He says the reason he decided to forgo of the underwater world, Rapture, is because there could be no element of surprise and mystery in a tried and tested environment.
“One of the most important things to us was bringing the mystery back to the franchise,” he said. “When BioShock 1 came out people were like, ‘what? What am I seeing here? What is this?’ And by BioShock 2 naturally that was a very difficult thing to maintain… you’re back in Rapture, you’re back in that setting.
“For us BioShock was never about the setting, it was about a couple of gameplay principles – the idea of being in an environment that’s strange and weird, ridiculously and over the top but still grounded in a human experience and humanity,” Levine said.
“We kind of knew people would be thrown out of the loop when we announced this game. That’s what we wanted, even on a meta-level. ‘What? It’s a sequel, but it’s not?'”
He also said he’ll soon be telling people about his upcoming game, and said “why it’s called BioShock Infinite will become clearer and clearer over time.” He also said that, “there are very clear reasons” Irrational Games didn’t ditch the BioShock name. We’re super, super excited for this.”
More news on this later. Till then, check out the debut trailer of Infinite.