Irrational Games head Ken Levine has revealed that BioShock Infinite will contain far more dialog than the first BioShock. How much more? One level of Infinite has three times more than the original game had in its entirety.
The geometric increase in dialog is due to Levin’s decision to have Booker and Elizabeth interact with each other and their world.
”I didn’t consider how much writing that was going to be,” he related, ”Just one level of BioShock Infinite writing and the amount of character interaction we have is probably three or four times as much writing as in all of BioShock 1.”
Levine may even have second thoughts about that change. “I’m doing the vast bulk of it and it really is… it can get overwhelming,” he admitted, then added, ”But on the other hand it’s a world that I absolutely love to write. Mostly because it’s a new challenge. Thinking how these scenes are going to play out, how we keep them interactive and how you communicate the ideas.”
The dialog won’t appear in many cutscenes either, as Levine stated he prefers to keep the player involved in all of the action.
”It would be so much easier just to write tonnes of cut scenes - I could tell the story much more easily,” he said, ”But my gut feeling, which probably comes from being forever changed by playing System Shock 1, is to keep the experience going.”
One of Levine’s issues with cutscenes is that they destroy the player’s suspension of belief, “locking the player” in place or moving the player’s avatar out of their control.
”But it’s challenging because these two elements often struggle with each other. And in that struggle you often say either I need to take a lot of control away from the player, or I need to simplify things. And generally anything encouraging you to simplify things is a good impulse. If a scene isn’t working it’s generally because you’ve made it too complex,” stated Levine.
BioShock Infinite will be released on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on the 19th October.
