BioShock: Infinite director Ken Levine spoke about player freedom in the game and the AI companion Elizabeth at the PAX East. The game is available now for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.
Levine diuscussed the difficulty of designing games with player freedom. “Sometimes we don’t know what’s going to happen. We’re writing a scene where the lead actor is like this psychopathic, alchoholic, because you don’t know what the player is going to do. They’re unpredictable. What the fuck are you guys going to do? Chill. You have to embrace that lunacy, if you fight it and you lock the player in place it’s not the player’s game, it’s our game – but it has to be your game.”
Levine also spoke about Elizabeth, the AI companion. “I hate to say this, but she’s a giant machine, full of all this different content. All this writing all this acting, all this animation all this motion capture. All these things that can happen, but may or may not. She’s a machine with all this human content put in, trying to yield this person.”
Level designer Amanda Jeffrey talked about Irrational Games’ solution to how to make Elizabeth valuable. “Every time we were trying to make Elizabeth a better character to experience the game with, so generally the first thing we did was making her awareness of the world absolutely impeccable. She has these incredible eyes that she can see the world in a completely different way, Liz can see what’s important to her.”
