BioShock Infinite

There's going to be a lot of character variety in BioShock Infinite, in the same way that we try to tell stories with the environment. As you're walking through the city and you soak it in and you take the time to explore you're going to be told a story. We're going to try that also with these characters.

We really want that tension of you're not quite sure if he's going to attack you or not. It adds another element of suspense and uneasiness to the game.

First off, it's a brand new engine. It's based off of Unreal Engine 3. We have an amazing tech team. They wrote a whole new rendering engine for us, a whole new lighting system. The floating world technology. I don't know if you noticed, as you're standing at the gazebo, before you start sniping the guy the whole world's whirling around and undulating. That was a good piece of tech we put in.

From the get go we wanted to make the player feel like they were in the sky. We couldn't just put puddles of water around to make them feel like that. It was a different problem to solve than BioShock 1.

Once we knew we had to go really big with this, then problems became apparent. Our tech team stepped up and gave us all these tools. From an art standpoint, we really went at this full board. It provides a huge blank canvas for artists to experiment with.

Even early on we were experimenting more with art-nouveau than the Americana stuff you see. We got to a point where we were basically just building Rapture in the sky. It was still dark. It was still claustrophobic because we had the clouds really set in.

We took a step back and looked and said, you can't just do this again. We have to think about what we want to save and what we want to throw out from BioShock.

We ended up throwing everything out and starting from scratch. Again, artists love a blank canvas. It really gives us an opportunity to build that up and create a new vision.

BioShock to us has always been more than the city of Rapture. When we sat down and we were thinking about what is BioShock? Is it Rapture? No-one felt BioShock was Rapture. BioShock is more than that. Then what is it?

Our core values for BioShock are making a fantastic place that's immersive, the player wants to visit and wants to be in and wants to explore, and take their time to explore. Even if there's no AIs and there's no external story, you would still understand elements of that city and why it was there because the environment is rich enough that you could pull a story from it at your own pace.

The other element is providing the player with a wide enough variety of tools and problems that they can use their imagination and the tool set in how they want solve these problems.

We couldn't call this BioShock 3 because it doesn't have anything... Or does it? Anything to do with 1 and 2. Like I said, BioShock is bigger than Rapture. Calling it 3 would just imply it's either a straight-up sequel or prequel to BioShock 1 and 2, which it's not.

We will reveal more in the future about the actual relationship, if there is one, between the other BioShocks. It's one of those things where ultimately the idea of BioShock transcends Rapture.