BioShock Infinite has only been shown to the public twice. Sure, there have been plenty of trailers released over the years and Irrational even showed off the first few minutes this week, but only two extended gameplay demos have been shown: an early one in 2010 and the stunning demo shown at E3 2011. In the year and a half since that second demo was shown, people haven’t seen much of BioShock Infinite in action.
Earlier this month, Irrational changed that by finally giving the press a chance to play the first few hours. While we can’t show you everything we saw, we can walk you through everything that’s changed. Infinite is still the BioShock game you’ve been waiting for, but you may be surprised to see how the finer points have evolved.
This article contains mild gameplay and character spoilers from the first few hours of BioShock Infinite.
To start, the combat systems you’ve seen before have evolved into something new. Nostrums -- the ambitious upgrades Ken Levine has described in the past -- have become Gear, a passive upgrade system similar to the original BioShock’s Tonics.
Back in 2011, Levine explained Nostrums to the MTV Multiplayer Blog, saying they came in two varieties: Stable and Pot-Luck. “You have to, at that moment, choose one of those,” Levine explained at the time. “You basically get to choose one of those powers, but you have to choose right then. Then that power goes in your character sheet. And you're making a lot of those choices throughout the game. That’s the direction we're trying to go. Give you a lot of choices that you don’t have to have that same kind of cumbersome management system because you're making the choice as it happens. As you find it."
Instead, Gear will see players equipping upgrades in one of four slots: Head, Torso, Arms and Legs. As Levine told IGN in an interview a few weeks ago, “we wanted a bunch of systems that were all quite different from each other, and we think the Nostrums were too similar to some other systems. So the Gear system is focused on these mutually exclusive choices you have to make, these small choices you have to make that are really interesting. ‘What am I going to use for my head slot? I can’t have both of these.’”
Levine also explained how Vigors -- BioShock Infinite’s special powers -- “grew and got richer” as development progressed and have become “quite modifiable, where each of them have alt-fires.” In the same MTV Multiplayer Blog interview in 2011, Levine explained an ambitious Vigor system that was different than the original BioShock’s Plasmids in that each power had a limited number of uses.
“The big difference we're doing is that Vigors have, essentially, charges," he explained at the time. “What's nice about what we're doing here is that, because you're finding X number of charges of a vigor, you can have super, super powerful ones that have like one charge or two charges. And ones that are much less powerful, but have 30 charges or 40 charges. That's a really interesting development for us, because that allows us to do these huge, epic vigors where we wouldn't have that before. We couldn't balance that before."
Now, however, Vigors are functionally identical to Plasmids. In the way that Plasmids required the player to fill an Eve meter in order to use their powers, Vigors use Salts, a similar resource that even fills a familiar blue meter. In our interview, Levine said “I don’t want to oversell the difference of Vigors versus Plasmids. I think that would be unfair. I do want to oversell how much variety there is within each Vigor. Because they all have an alt-fire and they all have an upgrade path. And you sort of choose that upgrade path.”
Much like Infinite’s powers, characters have changed since we originally saw them. Compared to the original gameplay demo in 2010, Elizabeth has become younger and kinder looking, and her powers appear to have evolved. While the Elizabeth we first met got hurt by using her powers for too long, there’s no evidence in the first few hours of the game that this is still the case. Elizabeth also provides Booker with assistance during battle, tossing ammo, health and more as she finds it.
Levine told us Elizabeth is still “very much the same character,” but that the team “really wanted to give her even more of a role as your partner, not just Tears and narrative, but really to spin her into every aspect of that journey.” Levine explained that Elizabeth is “always aware in the world. Always present and always observing things and paying attention to things and commenting on things, looking at things, interacting with things. She can pick locks for you, and there are these cryptograms you come across that she can help you figure out once you find the ciphers. She can help you figure out what leads to some good loot for you. We really just wanted to weave her into every aspect of the game, but we never wanted her to do the things that you do. We wanted her to do totally different things.”
Comstock has evolved as well. The Comstock discussed in the past was Zachary Hale Comstock, a younger politician who rules the Founders, a group responsible for the founding of Columbia that’s at war with a group of rebels named the Vox Populi, fighting for control of the city. While the Vox Populi is still present and that civil war could very well still be a part of Infinite’s plot, Comstock himself is now a bearded father figure. Known as Columbia’s Prophet, Comstock is Father Comstock and more of a religious leader than a politician.
Levine confirmed on Twitter earlier this month that Father Comstock is still the same character as Zachary Hale Comstock, but we still don’t know how much of the original plot elements are still present. We do know that Comstock still claims to be the hero of the Battle of Wounded Knee, and that other characters including Booker and Captain Cornelius Slate have reason to doubt him.
Possibly the most interesting changes come to Booker himself. Irrational’s first non-silent protagonist, Booker’s backstory has evolved since we first met him. He’s still an ex-Pinkerton agent, but it’s also been revealed that he’s a war hero, a member of the 7th Cavalry at the Battle of Wounded Knee. That revelation appears to have been added fairly recently, or at least is something that Irrational was keeping under wraps even in the Beast of America trailer released in October.
Recent designs show Booker as a bit more realistic as well. Booker has plenty of baggage that you’ll discover early in the game, and Irrational wants players to be aware of it as they play. Including historical references was just one way for the studio to achieve that. As explained by Levine, “I would see events that happened and I’d say….I don’t want to spoil anything, but ‘could Booker have been there?’ You know, what would have happened if he was there? Would that be interesting? What would happen if this other character was there? It’s much more tied historically to reality than BioShock 1 was.”
“And as you explore the world of Columbia, you’re also exploring Booker and Elizabeth to some degree,” he continued. “I don’t mean that in any creepy sexual way, I mean that you’re learning about them because we’re not a company that says ‘here’s the autobiography of Booker DeWitt you can read’ or ‘here’s the autobiography of Elizabeth.’ You’re discovering about them as you go through. And there’s some surprises there and some things that you go ‘oh, okay, that makes sense,’ and some of those historical events are tied into that.”
When most people think of BioShock Infinite, they think of the incredible demo shown off at E3 2011. Indeed, that demo led to Infinite being named as IGN’s E3 2011 Game of the Show and led to how most people understand the mechanics of the game.
Unfortunately, that content isn’t actually in the game. Playing through the first few hours of Infinite, it’s easy to find repurposed versions of what was shown at E3, but that specific content doesn’t appear in the final product. For example, Elizabeth famously uses her ability to open Tears in order to save a dying horse in the demo, leading herself and Booker to a 1980s street in front of a theater where Return of the Jedi is playing.
That specific scene isn’t in the game, but a version of it is. When the player first encounters Elizabeth on Monument Island, Elizabeth opens a tear on a painting of the Eiffel Tower, bringing her to a Paris street where a theater is playing La Revanche du Jedi. Like in the E3 demo, an ambulance whizzes toward her, and Elizabeth quickly closes the tear to avoid being hit.
Similarly, the most memorable chunk of the E3 demo -- the incredible sequence when Booker takes down a blimp after flying back and forth across Skylines -- has been repurposed into a slightly less exciting (but still awesome) sequence early in the game. Before reaching Monument Island, Booker finds himself on a blimp owned by Comstock, briefly meeting Columbia’s Prophet face-to-face before getting a chance to blow the vehicle straight to hell. It’s still effective, but very much truncated to fit into the game.
Lastly, a short scene from the demo has become arguably the most effective part of BioShock Infinite’s intro. As Booker and Elizabeth search for Comstock house in the demo, they come across a postman being put to death in a public execution. “Leave him alone,” Booker shouts, before immediately being recognized and chased. In the final game, this has been repurposed into The Raffle, a disturbing scene early on that explores many of Infinite’s major themes, including Columbia’s inherent racism.
Without spoiling exactly what happens, the team at Irrational did an awesome job of taking an interesting concept and fleshing it out into part of Columbia, and that seems to be exactly what the E3 demo was for. That demo was a proof of concept for everything that BioShock had the potential to be, and the final game is a realization of that potential.
BioShock Infinite won’t hit stores until March 26, 2013, but what we’ve seen so far indicates that it will be everything Irrational has promised and more. During an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit yesterday, Levine promised that more videos are on the way, so expect to see BioShock Infinite in motion in the new year.
Until then, read our hands-on impressions of the first few hours and our full interview with Levine on reinventing BioShock Infinite.
You can also find out plenty more about Infinite and its characters, enemies, powers and more in our BioShock Infinite wiki guide.
Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s associate news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest BioShock collectibles he’s been buying by following @garfep on Twitter or garfep on IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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