FanBoy RAGE!!

[Jorgen]

those are the exact things i already said skieski =P

and really how do they get from one place to another, what do they do with the people born there who have a fear of heights? how do they keep it secret (literally impossible)

hot air balloon buildings would require an EXTREEEEME amount of fuel and would not last long at all... that and as i said over how to keep it secret when it will never be in the same area.

most likely the art decor would fall together quite instantly-.- great it is a game, but even games need to be somewhat close to regular rules-.- and seeing that this is BEFORE RAPTURE why was this never fucking mentioned in the real bioshock games then........

the timeline also fucks over the big daddy you see in 0:49 seeing that it was not invented yet (the statue i mean obviously)
also it has somewhat more toonish stylings than what we are used to with bioshock which is never a good idea with this kind of game...

also while looking at historical errors even at the end of the 1800ds USA still has a main priority off building upp the real USA and would not spend time on this project-.- USA at that time was pretty much fend for yourself, and no great man like "forgot his name while ranting" who built rapture, would have anything against that...

if they wanted they could just as well create a private organisation on earth and stay away-.-

[AlphaWeeaboo]

Hey guys...

RPS: My initial question upon seeing the demo is… well, is this actually the same universe as Bioshock?

Ken Levine: I’m not going to answer that question. But will say… you’ve just seen the demo once. There’s stuff going on which isn’t immediately apparent. That’s all I’ll say.

RPS: I was thinking it could abstractly go either way. It could be something like Assassin’s Creed where there’s a plot device which allows you to go to hugely different worlds and still be in a shared universe… or it could be more like the Final Fantasy model where the worlds are all new, and all that it shares are the mechanics and the sort of design vision.

Ken Levine: To answer the question on the meta-level… for us, we want to be very free. Our first role – and I’ve said this a couple of times tonight so if it’s getting a little market-y just forgive me – we started by saying there were no sacred cows about Bioshock. Anything and everything is up for re-examination, based on what we were trying to do. We just knew we done with Rapture. We loved that world. We created that world. But we’d said what we wanted to say… so we built out from there. We thought about the time-period… what did people think about when they thought about the future? They thought about the sky. In 1900 it was a time of incredible optimism, to see how the technology was changing. That was the first thing. In 1880 there were farms. In 1900 there were movie-theatres. If you went back and said to people “In five years, we’ll be living in the sky” they’d have said “…Okay. Yeah, that makes sense to me. That’s the pace things are going at”. Incredible optimism.

RPS: That comes across. I scrawled the phrase “Pre-WW1 utopianism” a couple of times as I was watching . And I was very excited to see the colour blue.

Ken Levine: You don’t see it much in our games. Which is another thing – we’ve been so reliant on a particular colour palette in our previous games. So when we were trying to scare people or be tense it’s something we allowed ourselves to fall back on. I admire what Kubrick did with the Shining. That’s a haunted house story in a sterile florescent-lit environment. I’ve done a ton of games with darkness and murkiness and that’s easy to be scary in. At this point in my career, I don’t want to take the easy path, because I’ve done it before because then you turn into one of those old rock stars who don’t do anything interesting any more. You’re just making the same thing again. And you can fail. You can make mistakes. It’s much easier to say “We’ll do another Bioshock in Rapture” game. That’s the easy path for us. So we took a harder path for ourselves.

People ask me why it’s a Bioshock game. And that’s a reasonable question. Two things about Bioshock that are core. One is that you’re in a world that’s amazing and new and fantastical and surprising and sort of “What the Fuck”…but it also feels like it makes sense. You feel like you understand how this world functions. And the other thing is we have a gameplay challenge where the player drives how he solves the problem and he has a huge set of tools to drive the solution. And to make a game which has those things in it – and we have more to say about those things – but wasn’t a Bioshock game… I felt would have been dishonest.

RPS: I want to come back to Horror During Daylight, but to dwell on the title a little more my peers and I were reverse engineering the title description. You may think “Bioshock: Columbia” or “Bioshock: Icarus” would make more sense… but then you realise that makes it just sound like an expansion pack.

Ken Levine: There was never a discussion that it’d be “Bioshock colon Something” because that always says expansion. And I think “Columbia”… well, we had a lot of conversations about the name. And it wasn’t a Bioshock 3 because it wasn’t a follow up the previous Bioshocks. We struggled with the name for a long, long time and then one day we were at lunch and I said “What if it was this”. And everyone said that it’s the right name for it. There’s things going on which I won’t talk about, but you won’t understand until you’ve actually played the game through and it’ll make even more sense when you know that stuff. It’s frustrating for us, as no-one can know what the title means until they’ve finished playing the game.

RPS: This segues to what I’m sure will be what you’ll be talking about for the next two years, at least. From what you’ve shown so far, the major themes are American imperialism and fear of immigration. Both are themes which are, to say the least, discussed heavily today.

Ken Levine: But they were discussed back then at length too.

RPS: Is that what you’re interested in? The line between then and now? That they’re perennial debates? What made these questions interesting to you?

Ken Levine: I’m always interested in the question of history. If you look at Bioshock 1 or System Shock 2 or any of our games. System Shock 2 was about individualism versus Collectivism. Bioshock was about objectivism versus… however you would define Fontaine. Non-objectivism. But both are set in the different periods – one in the future, one sixty years in the past… but they’re both relevant today. And the reason they still drive people. These are the debates people have. And if you look at Columbia and say what they’re talking about in that world isn’t relevant today you really aren’t looking very hard.

RPS: The other thing I like about the game on a conceptual level is that it’s a game which seems to be about the American Century, set right at the start of the american century. The very pure idea before it was tarnished by WW1… which is interesting in that you’re foreshadowing a disaster. There’s propaganda posters talking about the Siege, re-appropriating some WW1 propaganda. So the breaking down from the ideal to the effect of the war will be a theme of the game as well?

Ken Levine: We always appropriate stuff. When you look at a lot of the art on the wall for the original bioshock, that’s appropriated art from the period, just re-purposed. That’s what we’ve always done because A) It’s beautiful art work and B) It’s not a game about history, but it /is/ set in the context of history. One of the posters particularly I think you’re looking at is a British WW1 poster… “Daddy: What did you do during the great war”. And I thought that was so powerful. What a message to send to somebody. That’s an incredibly nationalistic poster… but also an incredibly effective poster. And it made me think a lot about it being a challenge we don’t have to face. What if your country is in an existential struggle potentially? We have a choice now. We don’t have drafts. And it was a poster which always drilled me to my core. I’ve known about that poster for years, and when I thought of this game, I thought of that poster.

RPS: This reminds me of my dad, who used to serve in the Navy, resigning up for the Navy circa the Falklands war. I remember him telling me as really a small kid that I may think him an idiot for this, but it’s something he had to do. And… yeah, this line of thought isn’t leading anywhere, especially not a question.

Ken Levine: I think it’s kind of an alien thought to some people in our generation… that you couldn’t not enlist back then. You couldn’t socially not enlist. And I think there’s a connection to a country that’s fascinating to me… that I think a lot of people still have, but people back then definitely had.

RPS: Bioshock was highly noted for the binary moral system of either killing or saving the little sisters. Are you exploring anything like this area here?

Ken Levine: It’s clear that the notion of morality in videogames is a narrative theme that’s very interesting to us. Obviously you can see themes of morality – not preaching morality – but moral themes in this universe and they’re larger themes than “This is the good guy/this is the bad guy”. The particular mechanistic approach we did in Bioshock and they followed in 2… I think we’ve explored that mechanic. And we’re not interested in taking that particular mechanic any further. We’ve said what we need to say about that. And so anything about any kind of mechanic would… well, be something that we’re not talking about now.

RPS: Shock 2 and Bioshock were games which were all about isolation. This seems to have the idea of a relationship right at its core. Why have you gone in this direction?

Ken Levine: We wanted you to feel a connection with a particular character. We thought there were areas to explore which hadn’t really been explored. The moment to me which is most interesting is when you’re on the bridge and you turn to Elizabeth and blood’s coming out of her nose. And you realise… that’s because of you. She’s not some superhero. There’s a cost to what she does. Can you build a relationship with somebody and then having that relationship, when those seeds have been planted, what can I do from a narrative standpoint? Rather than just having some plucky side-kick. She’s got stakes in it. She’s a woman who’s been imprisoned from 15 years, since she was 5 years old and she has no idea why. Helping her figure out why – and what that means for you and for her – is something which really interested me.

You’ll also notice that when you come into the bar, there’s a bunch of characters who don’t immediately attack you. One thing I think we started in Bioshock was characters like the Big Daddy who didn’t immediately aggro on you. And it occurred to me… where in the world do you walk into a room and everyone aggros on you? Even in the Wild West there’s this feeling of everyone having their hands on the gun. It allows us to tell stories like the Baby Carriage in Bioshock. As soon as she saw you, she comes after you. But what if we extend those stories out so you see those sort of moments go on longer. What if you don’t know if they’re an enemy? What if you’re sitting there for a long time? You asked how you could increase tension and drama. Well, that’s one of the routes you’re taking.

RPS: One of the images of the demo stuck with me. The woman calmly sweeping on her porch, with the whole building ablaze. Genuinely an uncanny lingering image…

Ken Levine: When we talk about Daylight, I think David Lynch is someone I thin of a lot. Think of the opening of Blue Velvet. That’s a movie about Daylight in a lot of ways. I think that moment was very much inspired by David Lynch.

RPS: Thanks for your time.

Bioshock: Infinite is due for some time in 2012. You can read our impressions of the game so far here.

[vinnylord]

i tried to read it,.. but i stopped at the second sentance

[Kingtrue]

To tell you the truth, I was loling in and out of this video. 

When he pulls his head out of the fish tank I could only think of one thing "Lets go scuba diving with my pet fish!" lol.
After that I wasn't sure why the guy was freaking out, I didn't think someone else was in the room. It just looked like the guy had a serious case of adhd or heat exaustion.

The sequence with the girl manipulating the roses made me feel like I was watching a dreamworks film. Especially when she abruptly paused before being yanked inside.

The feel of this video was way too... cartoony. Like a cross between Rat-a-2-ee and UP. Definately out of place with the bioshock series.

[AlphaWeeaboo]

Bioshock games always had cartoony graphics to be honest.

[Skieski]

Bioshock games always had cartoony graphics to be honest.

Emmm, no?

How?

[AlphaWeeaboo]

The characters did atleast...

[Skieski]

The characters did atleast...

Please, expand.

[AlphaWeeaboo]

That character above looks cartoony, no?
I don't know how to explain it but the characters look cartoony becuase of the tone of colors on them, shine on the body plus they have over exaggerated looks.

[Jorgen]

not cartoony she has a evil grin-.- and just overall not really cartoony

[AlphaWeeaboo]

Well somewhere near that. He coloring on her, like the texture is just cartoony, and her features are not exactly realistic.

[Tictactoe360]

CRY SOME MORE!
I Didn't Bitch with Farcry 2 you cant bitch with this

[vinnylord]

actually you can cuz everyone has his own opinion

[Christovski]

<3 tictac

heavy weapons guy says get over it

[TheRMF]

One new good franchise down.
a few more to go.


Anyways, a flying city? What the hell? Well, lets see what comes out of this..