It's not Rapture, it's Columbia. It's not underwater, it's tied to Zeppelins and floating around the world, thousands of feet in the air. It's not a secret, delapidated cool kid's club, it's a spectacle of American achievement with the same agenda as the moon landings. And you're not a Nameless Nelly, you're ex-private detective Booker DeWitt. Watch the first Bioshock Infinite trailer (it's not an infinite trailer, it's about two minutes long) and prepare to go "oooooh."
Ooooooh. The game was revealed to press yesterday in New York, and thankfully Craig was there. He's written us a blow-by-blow of the Bioshock Infinite demonstration there. The basics, though, are that Ken Levine is heading this BioShock up, that it's set in the early twentieth century, that there's a psychic lady and evil steampunk cybullies, and that you probably shouldn't fall off.
You've been sent into this rogue 1900s Death Star to retrieve a woman called Elizabeth. She's at the centre of some sort of conflict, she has magical powers that give her nosebleeds, and you'll need to work together to survive and escape. It'll have more of the same consequence-driven story, although we've not yet got details on what those choices will be.
When I played BioShock for the first time, I was expecting the Splicers to have personalities and dialogue, to be characters. They were characters, but that didn't stop them from running at you with a knife. They were basically monsters with voice actors. It won't be like that in Bioshock Infinite, according to Ken.
"When designing BioShock Infinite, we thought, 'wouldn't it be great if you walked into a room in this game and you didn't necessarily know the dispositions of the people in it? Are they going to sit there? Are they going to attack you? What might set them off?' We really wanted to have a notion that not everyone in the city was automatically hostile towards you. Instead it has more of that “Wild West” feel where you walk into a bar with your hand on your pistol and you're not sure what's going to happen to you."
Craig is on the floating city right now, interviewing Ken Levine as his Gyromotive Steamcoptertrain refuels. Watch this space.
