It has been nearly three years since Irrational Games released BioShock, a critical darling and a financial success. Somehow, designer Ken Levine and his team have managed to keep their new project under wraps until now. The mystery ends today, with the unveiling of BioShock Infinite. Set in 1912 (making it a prequel!), Infinite will look unlike anything you'd expect from a BioShock game.

sky city in 1912? where's the technology to do that.

Big Daddy in the sky ? Bring it.

so, uhm they discovered a rare species of bird that dramatically increase tissue regeneration?

2012 release. Dont think we'll be able to play it.

hmmm

not enuf tits in bioshock 1 and bioshock 2

hopefully there will be lots of tits in bioshock infinite hohoho!

Why is this not posted?

Bioshock Infinite World Exclusive Gameplay Video:
http://www.gametrailers.com/episode/gametr...v/104?ch=3&sd=1

It starts around 14:11

It's just a teaser, but it looks really good.

big daddy lobot

Also I need to clean my room now from the excess jizz

Enlighten me guys. Is the first & second installment of Bioshock as exhilarating as this Bioshock Infinite's clip?

Normally trailers are all beautiful.. but when comes to real game.. It looks lik shiat..

I think the graphics should be the same as this trailer, it's not pre-rendered. Pre-scripted maybe, but all the graphics rendered in real-time.

Some time ago, game designer Ken Levine commented wryly about the shallow pool from which video game creators get their ideas.

"Most video game people have read one book and seen one movie in their life, which is Lord of the Rings and Aliens or variations of that," he had said. "There's great things in that, but you need some variety."

At the time he and his team at Irrational Games were a half-year way from releasing BioShock, a first-person shooter set in a failed underwater utopia rusted with Ayn Rand Objectivism, a philosophy of exclusionary excellence that had failed the sunk city.

"Look, I just steal from other sources," he freely admitted.

Four years later, the influences for Levine and Irrational's next big game are just as atypical: a photo of a dead horse, a horrible fire that occurred 100 years ago this week, and even the spirit that motivates the Tea Party.

The ideas are helping to animate BioShock Infinite, a highly-anticipated game set in 1912 aboard a fantastic floating city called Columbia that is rife with conflict between a group called the Founders and group called the Vox Populi. Much of their motivations remain a mystery, but their schism emerged, Levine has explained, over the concept of American Exceptionalism, over the nature of America's place relative to the international community. Columbia's patriots preciously guard their gun rights and fret over the influx of non-whites to their society.

BioShock Infinite is a video game, one in which the main, advertised action of the 10 minutes that have been shown of it so far, is shooting. The games Irrational makes these days, however, are not just about what you do in them but what you experience. They're intentionally transportive software that treats, in the words of the game's lead artist Shawn Robertson, "a city as an actual character in the game."
How BioShock Infinite's Creators Are Crafting Adventure from Labor Strife, Dead Horses and the Energy of the Tea PartyNate Wells, art director for Irrational Games' BioShock Infinite, on the first of several reference photos that helped inspire his team's upcoming game: "This image is really the foundation of how Irrational believes a story should be told. Use simple, direct imagery that communicates a clear message with environmental content, without inserting a sign which reads: "Isn't This Tragic?". Provide a striking visual, and free the player to generate their own emotional response and personal stake in the narrative."

The city the BioShock builders are creating draws from influences captured a century ago. At PAX East, a gaming convention held in Boston earlier this month, Levine and three other senior creators on the game showed a series of photos — and some amazing early gameplay videos — that helped inspire the look and feel of their Columbia. (Those photos, including the arresting one of a dead horse, are presented again in this story, with captions by the game's art director.)

"We want to create a world that's interesting to explore, a society that's interesting to explore and discover," Levine said. "And you can't have a society without a battle of ideas."
How BioShock Infinite's Creators Are Crafting Adventure from Labor Strife, Dead Horses and the Energy of the Tea PartyWells: "We passed around the book Devil in the White City, and started talking about the Chicago World Fair 1893 and the sense of optimism and the sheer volume of innovations on display at that event. It just adds so much to the palette.

You also can't have an Irrational gaming city without those ideas, according to the game's art director Nate Wells, who said, "We can't build a building or lay a street until we know what the story is."

The ideas thing is unusually important to the BioShock enterprise. It's a sort of thought-as-theme that doesn't emerge in the finished product of many other video games. "I say this as the hugest World of Warcraft fan in the universe," Levine remarked," What are the philosophies of the Horde and the Alliance? That's kind of hard to say… I think they are very visually distinguished from each other, but we start with what are the ideas, and how do we make the visuals reflect those ideas."

The original conflict of ideas for BioShock Infinite was going to be a rift between technologists and Luddites. "The more we played with it, the more it felt like this is not a conflict that feels organic and would tear the city apart."

They found instead the energy of nationalism, the spirit Levine and team see around the worked, in the literature they've read — he cites Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here — and throughout American history, through the John Birch Society and the Tea Party.

"We thought of this before the emergence of the Tea Party," Levine said, batting off a suggestion that this game, a game specifically about an America movement, set to be released during a Presidential election year, is a commentary on the politics of now. "I think these are themes that happen over and over again," he said. "We looked at some of the extremes of what ultra-Capitalism could bring [in the first BioShock] before the [real] collapse of the financial system. It's not that we have a vision of the future. We have a vision of the past."
How BioShock Infinite's Creators Are Crafting Adventure from Labor Strife, Dead Horses and the Energy of the Tea PartyWells: "While it's never our intention to give a wholly accurate historical representation in our spaces, sometimes a piece of reference emerges that gives such a compelling portrait of a different era we have to draw from it. In a time before large-scale image reproduction, there was only hand-painted text. This storefront, and the entire street on which it sat were dominated by an overwhelming mass of it, with whole cities looking as though they had papered-over with book pages. Though it doesn't call out a specific date, it is so clearly not now. It's also interesting that this store, at photographed around the height of mass immigration in America, has text only in English."

The Irrational team also found their game energized by the the passions of labor conflicts. The same fervor for worker's rights that motivated recent mass protests in Wisconsin and awoke a nation following the fire at the Triangle shirt factory in Manhattan on March 25, 1911 deepens the rift in BioShock Infinite's Columbia. Levine said he is working on a level of the game now that draws on the events of that tragic fire, a disaster of employer negligence that killed more than 100 immigrant workers who toiled in intolerable conditions.

There isn't much Lord of the Rings in all that, and maybe only a dash of Aliens. Yes, a dash. More specifically, of Alien, the first movie in that sci-fi series. There's one scene that's set during a meal. A spaceship's crew is chowing down, joking with each other. Suddenly one of them chokes, writhes, and, in a bloody instant, a small alien bursts from his chest. "I remember sitting outside the theater afraid of that movie and watching that scene through the glass of the door," he said. Today, he marvels at it because it was so horrifying while being so…. brightly lit.
How BioShock Infinite's Creators Are Crafting Adventure from Labor Strife, Dead Horses and the Energy of the Tea PartyWells, on an influence for BioShock Infinite's airborne floating city, Columbia: "After settling on Columbia, we immediately started digging into period architecture and photography and it became clear in about five minutes that this was going to work really well, but also, it was going to be extremely difficult to pull off."

BioShock Infinite is not a dark game, not dark like the first BioShock or like most of the games with guns that are popular today. At PAX East, art director Nate Wells showed how the new game was going to be dark, was going to have dark skies, but then they turned them bright blue. He, Levine and the rest believed they could evoke mood and emotion in their game without what they believed would be the easier path of dark streets and mood lighting.

They could make a brighter game and still make their player feel the gravity of a tough situation and the drama of a place. They can make their game about a 1912 America that feels modern, one that is set on a city rising beneath a blue sky, set aloft by the drifts of history and the zeal that drives those who see themselves as patriots, back then and right now.

Back in August, Ken Levine claimed that like the first BioShock, there would be no online multiplayer in BioShock Infinite. Some investigation into Gamasutra's job listings may have given lie to that statement.

The classified reads Irrational Games is looking for "exceptional individuals to expand our Online Infrastructure team, where our mandate is to leverage online connectivity to deliver added value and groundbreaking experiences to gamers worldwide, both at launch and over time."

In an inteview, Levine said "We are never interested in making a multiplayer mode you could just play in some other game. Because, A) that's not creatively interesting and B), financially, you're wasting your time. They're going to go play Halo. They're going to go play Call of Duty."

However, online may be being forced into the game by 2K Games to combat used game sales. We'll let you know if this rumor turns out to be true.

Bioshock Infinite Gameplay

Bioshock Infinite creative director Ken Levine discussing the Sky-Lines in the game, and how they basically amount to satisfying his hunger for vertical combat by being rollercoasters you can fight enemies on.

Check out the developer video below to learn all about those dizzying Sky-Lines.

Announced in a partnership back in 2009, the Tor and Take-Two undertaking of BioShock: Rapture, a novel detailing the events of Rapture prior to the original game, is finally making its way to bookshelves on July 19. Tor, in anticipation of this event, has published the first excerpt of the novel to the public, taken from the book's first chapter.

The prequel novel is written by John Shirley, an accomplished screen and songwriter, as well as the Bram Stoker-award winning author of Black Butterflies. He also wrote the script for The Crow, so Brandon Lee fans take note. To read the excerpt, hit up the source link below.

PRE-ORDERED! ....the book after reading the excerpt. I would like to know more about Rapture, and because I'm still looking for novel to read after reading Metro 2033, The Witcher series, and Gaunt's ghost series. Can't get enough of all these interesting world.

Where did you pre-order from?

www.amazon.com, shipping fee is the same price as the book. 

Ouch.

Let me know whether it is good, might try to get my friend to buy it for me in US.

Ken Levine, in the third developer video for Bioshock Infinite, discusses the Tears, which are "Windows into Other Worlds."

Elizabeth's magic isn't so much mystical as it is focusing on the physics research of the turn of the century, with such concepts as Heisenberg and Einstein being brought into fruition, and the concept of the multiverse, in which layers of probability can be explored by Elizabeth, tearing into the fabric of reality and bringing them into our universe.

This is, presumably, where the "Infinite" in the title comes from.

Check out the developer diary in the video below, and let us know if this makes you even MORE excited for the game.

Irrational Games' creative director Ken Levine thinks that developers need to take a more high profile approach to promoting their games in the mainstream. He recounted a telling experience ahead of the public premiere of BioShock Infinite's E3 demo on Spike TV to Gamers with Jobs [thanks GI.biz].

"We had a room full of college students, in some fraternity in some state school somewhere – this is about a year ago – and they had never heard of BioShock. None of them. Not a single one," said Levine. "I think as an alpha gamer you assume that, 'whether you've played BioShock or not, you've heard of it, right?' These guys had never even heard of it."

Levine cited the marketing mantra that consumers have to be exposed to something three times before they absorb it. While TV and outdoor advertising are becoming more prevalent, he wants the industry to go beyond that.

"I mean, how many times have you seen images of Transformers?" he asked. "Whether you want to or not you've probably seen it 15 or 20 times... We're making products that cost however many millions of dollars and have the potential to have a large audience, but... to get people who aren't alpha gamers there's a whole different kind of activity that you have to undertake."

"That isn't just about buying ads. It's the places you can reach [new people]... We need to be on mainstream shows, we need to be on NPR, we need to be on The Daily Show, we need to be in those places talking about what we do,” mused Levine. "We're still ghettoized as game developers, and Spike TV is a great place in the middle, but we really need to think about how do we reach out and talk to people so you don't have a room full of college kids saying, 'I've never heard of that damn thing.'"

"You can't find a more impressive set of guys than Ray and Greg from BioWare - they're medical doctors, they're MBAs, they run this company, they're brilliant game developers, but I haven't seen them on The Daily Show,” noted Levine. "It's not their fault. It's our fault. As an industry we need to think of ourselves differently. We need to think of ourselves that way and present ourselves that way... We have a responsibility. People like me, like Cliff [Bleszinski], like Ray and Greg, have a responsibility to educate people who don't think of games. Like the people booking those shows."

"A lot of it is getting the guys that book those shows past their own lack of knowledge and their own discomfort about games,” he added. “There's no material reason why a Tim Schafer isn't going to be as good a guest as some guy who wrote a book that sells 15,000 copies. But there's a natural discomfort that the bookers must have, and part of our job is to get in front of those people and say, 'Hey, we're out here, we're doing cool stuff, and we want to speak to a broader audience as well.'"

Jimmy Fallon has openly sought out major games like Donkey Kong Country Returns, Uncharted 3 and Gears of War 3 for the Late Show, but he's definitely the exception. Do you think Ken Levine should appear on The Daily Show to promote BioShock Infinite?

We've seen the hypnotic 15-minute trailer for Bioshock Infinite, but much more lies beneath the floating surface of Columbia. Levine revealed the method behind Irrational's madness in a lengthy interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun this week, discussing the stress to make Infinite perfect and the trials of living in a dream within a dream.

Levine wants the story and AI behind Elizabeth to run so smoothly that players fall in love with her, which means innovating her every motion with a mix of scripted scenes and environment-induced emergence. Levine said Irrational are also taking a psychological approach to the player's relationship with Elizabeth, through the heady ritual of self-sacrifice:

    I started thinking about how a very sick patient often rapidly feels an intense bond with their doctor, because they're in danger. The same is true of people in combat. This tuned us to the nature of sacrifice, and to what a character wants and will sacrifice to get it. Elizabeth wants to control her own destiny and she'd rather die than not control her own destiny. We thought that this was something people could empathize with, but we also thought that sacrifice rapidly builds connections between people.

After that, the interview takes a decidedly philosophical "Is this all a dream? Why are we here? Who is the boss?" turn, but if you're interested check out the full interview on Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The most striking moment of the thoroughly striking E3 demo for BioShock Infinite was, undoubtedly, the moment in which Elizabeth momentarily loses control of her powers, opening a rift to a much, much more modern world than that of the floating city of Columbia. It was surprising, effective -- and it almost didn't happen. In an interview with Gamasutra, Ken Levine explained, "It was supposed to be to this primeval forest kind of thing, and it just wasn't striking or different enough ... but we had assets from a game we abandoned."

Levine added that the development team "made a bunch of changes to really sell it, but we had all those assets just sitting around from a game we never shipped." Well, great. Now we're going to spend the day trying to guess what that canceled game was. Maybe The Lost? We don't know if a PS2 game could look this good, though. Maybe it's something secret, like Freedom Force: Rise of the Multiplex Menace.

No, that's probably not it at all.

he next game in the BioShock franchise is aiming to push close to 5 million, says analyst Mike Hickey at Janco Partners.  Hickey believes that Irrational is expected to ship 4.9 million units at release.

Coming from a note to investors, Hickey stated that BioShock: Infinite is capable of hitting a grand total of $221 million in overall sales, based on 4.9 million units sold.  Compared to 3 million on BioShock 2, this is certainly a step up.  BioShock 2 was not, however, developed under Irrational.  The first game in the series was able to hit 2.2 million shipped in just under a year, with a grand total of 4 million sold.  BioShock: Infinite is looking to surpass those figures by leaps and bounds if Hickey is on the money.

BioShock: Infinite is set for release in 2012.

Woof woof!!



http://www.flickr.com/photos/58826350@N02/...in/photostream/

Woof woof!!



http://www.flickr.com/photos/58826350@N02/...in/photostream/

what its cos play?
i thought its next gen graphics

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Added on September 2, 2011, 5:58 pmthis is the model btw

http://www.flickr.com/photos/58826350@N02/

Am so excited for this game.

to me hopefully its just a teaser and not the real game, the gun fights are really chaotic ..... half of the time, there are just too many of them flying in and out in the gameplay trailer ...

So am I, particularly interested in the story.

When it comes to the development behind BioShock 1 and BioShock Infinite, Irrational Games studio head Ken Levine described his role as that of "editor of a magazine ... but I'm also a writer for the magazine," putting things into terms that my word-addled brain could understand. "I believe more in editorship. Auteur sounds like you do everything," he began, making a point to preface his following description with a nod to the other 100-ish folks employed at his Massachusetts studio.

That aside, Levine was clear that his role on Infinite is absolutely that of creative lead, not just creative oversight. "This is my game. And I love the fact that we sit down and chat with each other [Levine and other game devs outside of Irrational], but at the end of the day ... this thing's gotta be my decision."

When it came to the translation of BioShock 1 from game to film, however, Levine's role changed -- even though he had been creative lead (head editor?) during the game's development. "If I were to make a game that was based on somebody else's franchise, you need somebody there who's going to say, 'This is true to the franchise, this isn't true to the franchise.' So that was more my role in the film," he explained.

It's his belief that the film is now in capable hands, even without his direct supervision. "Unless for some reason I decided I'm gonna go be a screenwriter or something, but then that's a particular job and I have a different responsibility there, which is writing a script instead of the guy who protects the franchise and makes sure the film is true to the franchise."

While we were on the subject of films, I prodded Levine for any more info on the infamous "Revenge of the Jedi" scene in BioShock Infinite and its origins in a canned Irrational Project. Unsurprisingly, Ken was reticent to say much. "There's a reason we didn't proceed with it. From our studio's perspective it wasn't the right project for us at that time. And we sort of fell in love with the idea of doing this -- with the BioShock world," he allowed. "But I can't talk about what it is," he concluded with a smile.

Irrational Games' Ken Levine declares BioShock Infinite "my game," but he doesn't like being labelled its grand auteur, he believes "more in editorship."

The studio boss loves getting to sit down with his staff to "chat with each other," but in the end it's "gotta be my decision." Levine wants film 'true to BioShock'.

The Irrational founder described his role as like an "editor of a magazine... but I'm also a writer for the magazine," and he doesn't like being thought of as the single driving force behind the BioShock experience.

"I believe more in editorship. Auteur sounds like you do everything," said Levine.

He is absolutely its creative lead: "This is my game. And I love the fact that we sit down and chat with each other, but at the end of the day... this thing's gotta be my decision."

A film of the underwater antics of Rapture is in the works, so what role is Ken Levine playing in its production? "If I were to make a game that was based on somebody else's franchise, you need somebody there who's going to say, 'This is true to the franchise, this isn't true to the franchise.' So that was more my role in the film," explained the developer.


He believes the project is in safe hands: "Unless for some reason I decided I'm gonna go be a screenwriter or something, but then that's a particular job and I have a different responsibility there, which is writing a script instead of the guy who protects the franchise and makes sure the film is true to the franchise." It doesn't get his direct supervision.

BioShock: Infinite releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in 2012.

Irrational Games' creative frontman Ken Levine started Occupy Wall Street in a city in the sky, a year before the first tent was pitched on the ground in Manhattan -- and if his timeline of events in BioShock Infinite is any indication of our own future, we'd better start building some evacuation skyhooks yesterday. Levine draws parallels between the fighting political factions in Infinite, the Founders and the Vox Populi, and the OWS and tea party movements, in an interview with the Washington Post. But it doesn't start -- or stop -- there:

"In this world, we came up with the idea of looking at what was happening at the time of the game [the 1890s], with the jingoism movement and the nationalist movement versus internationalist movement," Levine said. "This was before the tea party, before Occupy Wall Street. Actually, when people saw that demo, they thought we were aping the tea party; they thought it was a hit piece on the Tea Party. But these movements tend to happen. There have been nationalist and nativist movements many times through history.

"As we developed these opposing groups," Levine continued, "the Founders versus the Vox Populi, it was interesting to see this play out in real time, so that the fictional movements we're creating that are set in this heightened past are almost being duplicated in reality."

The polarizing views in the game mirror real-life partisan perception of the BioShock games, Levine said, with people on both sides vilifying them for opposing reasons. Infinite demonstrates a possible outcome of such political extremes, with Columbia seceding from McKinley-era America and devolving into violent drama. "I hope the real-life movements don't head to the same place, though," Levine said. "I'm not going anywhere nice, I'll tell you that much."

Man this game is going to be so huge, wonder how much is the Collector's Edition going to cost =/

Ken Levine and the team at Irrational Games are switching things up for BioShock Infinite -- instead of being based on the Objectivist society of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Infinite is aiming for more of an Erik Larson's Devil in the White City feel, with a focus on physics rather than gene splicing. Irrational is also switching up some of the most recognizable gameplay from the first two BioShock games, namely the ability to beat them almost entirely with the shotgun and Electro Bolt, Levine told PlayStation.Blog.

    "One of the first things we did when we started on BioShock Infinite was to draw a graph with y and z axes, and to say that one of those axes was the number of enemies in an encounter and the other was the range of those enemies," Levine said. "In the original BioShock, the entire game lived in one corner of that graph – few enemies, all at close range - so the Electro Bolt and shotgun were perfect. BioShock Infinite is going to have much greater ranges and, potentially, far more enemies, so we're greatly increasing the spectrum of encounters that are possible, and that requires the player use a broader set of tools."

That sounds like a challenge if we've ever heard one. You're on, Levine. You're on.

Irrational Games co-founder Ken Levine, known for System Shock 2 and the critically acclaimed BioShock franchise, is one of the industry's creative leaders. Levine has demonstrated a knack for building engrossing, immersive and sometimes politically charged worlds that instantly suck the gamer in. IndustryGamers wanted to find out more about Levine and his thoughts on the industry, so we sat down with him to pick his brain in our latest "Better Know" feature.

2K Australia, which is based in Canberra, is helping a developer with a BioShock title again. 2K Australia had assisted 2K Marin with BioShock 2, and are now helping Ken Levine's Irrational Games (formerly 2K Boston) with BioShock Infinite.

Interestingly, 2K Australia had been assisting 2K Marin with the XCOM first person shooter reboot. XCOM has recently been delayed til 2013. One must wonder if 2K Australia is free to work on BioShock Infinite due to the XCOM delay, or if the XCOM delay is due to a prioritization of BioShock Infinite over XCOM.

BioShock: Infinite is due to be released in 2012 on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

So we don't run the risk of burying the lede, let's start with the news: MVC Pacific reports that the Canberra, Australia-based arm of developer 2K Marin is once again known as 2K Australia and is now working with former sister studio Irrational Games on BioShock Infinite. When asked for comment, Irrational boss man Ken Levine said, "We had a number of open positions on BioShock Infinite. When we found out our former sister studio 2K Australia was becoming available, we thought they would perfectly fill those roles."

He added, "If every decision was this easy..."

Now, some history. In 2007, after Irrational Games was purchased by Take-Two and just before the release of the original BioShock, the studio was split apart and renamed 2K Boston and 2K Australia. Since then, 2K Boston has become Irrational Games, once again, but 2K Australia hasn't had it so easy.

After working with 2K Marin on BioShock 2, it was decided that 2K Australia would lose its name and become a part of 2K Marin (which is a tad geographically misleading, no?) and help develop the XCOM reboot. Less than a year later, the 2K Australia studio head Martin Slater resigned and just last month it was reported that 15 employees were cut from the studio.

And now, over four years after the creation of 2K Australia, 2K Australia is back and once again working with Levine's team in Boston. We've reached out to 2K Games for any additional commentary on the shuffle and whether or not 2K Australia has any more involvement in XCOM. But while we're waiting, we wanted to say "welcome back" to the team in Canberra. Oh, and enough navel gazing. BioShock Infinite isn't going to make itself.

I hope there would be 4-packs for Bioshock Infinite on Steam as well.