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Every generalisation has its limits, but this one I'm going to risk: big-budget FPS games have terrible stories. One of the honourable exceptions is the work of Irrational Games, with a legacy that stretches back over a decade to 1999's System Shock 2. The twist in 2007's BioShock still, for my money, stands as the greatest 'wow' moment a shooter has pulled, and its combination (conspiracy?) of player mechanics as part of that narrative climax is - regardless of what comes afterwards - simply brilliant. So BioShock Infinite's story has a lot to live up to, even if it is in capable hands: Ken Levine, writer/creative director, alongside Irrational's in-house writer Drew Holmes.Rapture and Columbia make these games special; huge, coherent worlds faithful to their own internal logic, that are simply a delight to burrow into. I begin by asking Levine about the dialect of Columbia - a place that, initially at least, feels much less hostile than Rapture. "BioShock has a kind of slang to it," says Levine. "The patois of Rapture, how people speak in that place, and Columbia is more of a period piece. There's a formula there where if you read correspondence from the period it's a lot more formal than it is now. That's certainly not to say people were - like, I did some research and the term 'motherf***er' appears in a court record in the 1870s. It's not like Sam Jackson came up with that, you know? So people were using all kinds of language back then, but it's all about what makes the game feel right and feel real." So less of the vulgarity? "Well you use every word for a purpose - every single word matters," says Levine. "A lot of the enemies in Infinite at one point had a lot of cursing, a lot of 'f***s' in their language, but not now - where BioShock has a lot of that kind of language. It's not because I changed my view on that kind of language, it just didn't fit with what we were doing this time. We cut a lot of the words because it felt like it was fighting the rest of the world."
Columbia is a setting that both Holmes and Levine bring back, at most opportunities, to Elizabeth. "We've set our sights on creating an intimate character-driven piece framed in this larger action world," explains Holmes, "but having a character like Elizabeth to really draw the player in - our hope is that they feel a very strong emotional connection to her, and that for us was the thing that no-one's ever really being able to hit."
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