BioShock 2 had you playing a lumbering Big Daddy in search of the Little Sister you were meant to protect. Minerva’s Den is a separate story for the same game: you play a different Big Daddy with a different goal. You’re looking for The Thinker, a punchcard-driven artificial intelligence developed to run Rapture’s automated systems.

That means you start from scratch, in terms of weapons and abilities, but they come fast enough for you to quickly tool up for the play style you like. The additions to the combat formula are all worthwhile, but don’t change it dramatically. That means it’s still creative and fun, but doesn’t feel refreshingly new.

There’s a Gravity Well plasmid that sucks enemies into a singularity and spits them back out – entertaining, but a pretty slow way of dealing with the least dangerous enemies. And the new Ion Laser weapon is a very straightforward damage-dealer, as is the new Big Daddy type that uses it.

The most enjoyable novelties are the new security bots: firing rockets, lasers and electricity. When hacked to follow you around, the electricity one is a hilarious and handy companion, repeatedly shocking your enemies so you can take your time with their fate.



Minerva’s Den takes around five hours to play, and the story is intriguing and substantial. It’s also focused: there’s almost no peripheral backstory lying around, every audio diary you find is a piece of the puzzle.

Accordingly, it asks you to do more exploring than the main BioShock games. Most areas are large hubs with no clearly marked goals, riddled with Adam, Tonics and Plasmids to upgrade your abilities.

For the most part that’s great, but you’ll occasionally hit a dead end and be unsure how far you’re supposed to backtrack, or what you’re looking for. And if you miss a major audio diary, the plot makes less sense.

Not that it makes perfect sense even if you don’t, of course – it involves powerful ideas, but operates under the same magical logic by which a secret city on the ocean bed is a viable thing. The main thrust of the plot requires a credulity leap of that kind, which is a shame, but it doesn’t prevent the game being engrossing.



As with both BioShock games, the antagonist isn’t nearly as convincing or interesting as the conflicted characters along the way, and his taunting wears thin. But Minerva’s Den is more consistently engaging than BioShock 2, because the meat of the story isn’t diluted by a lot of empty philosophy. The sting in its tail isn’t quite as potent as either of its predecessors, but it’s a satisfying ending once you make sense of it.

One warning: you need to buy the DLC through Games for Windows Live, even if you didn’t get BioShock 2 from there. Once it’s downloaded, run BioShock 2 normally and find it under Extras

Last year's Bioshock Infinite reveal was spectacular, an introduction to the fascinating flying world of Columbia so immacuately choreographed that people doubted whether it was actually being played at Gamescom, or whether the guy with the controller was just finger-syncing.

This year's demonstration was the exact same way. It looks so stunning, so dramatic, action-packed exciting, that it feels like it's either going to be inhibitively scripted or that the illusion will break as soon as the player decides to toodle around rather than look where they're supposed to.

On the other hand, it's dramatic, action-packed and exciting. Every corner of the world is packed with detail. It's funny. It's better written than anything else I've seen at the show. The characters have real character. If it does turn out to be little more than a scripted rollercoaster ride, then I'm glad it's through a world that looks like this. I've included my frantically typed moment-by-moment of the presentation below.

First, a little background. Designed by Ken Levine, he of the original BioShock, Infinite uses some of the same principles to explore a different world. Instead of a city at the bottom of the ocean and a story that explores objectivism, it's a flying city, held aloft by balloons, and a world defined by early 20th century ideas of American exceptionalism.

There's an off-putting 1:1 ratio in all of the elements that made the original BioShock great. Big Daddies are gone, but there's the Songbird, a flying, robotic protector for Elizabeth. Plasmids are gone, but there are bottled vigors in their place, gifting you similar abilities.

The player is Booker DeWitt, a former Pinkerton agent on a case to find Columbia - lost for years in the clouds - and to rescue a woman named Elizabeth. The Songbird keeps her locked in a tower, and is programmed to feel betrayal should she escape.



Which is exactly what Elizabeth has done, with your help, as the demo begins. Since breaking free, Elizabeth has discovered she has powers that she doesn't understand and can't control. Booker is taking her to meet one of the Founders, about whom we know little, but who apparently should be able to provide answers.

Booker and Elizabeth head into a shop called Major's Notions, Sundries and Novelties. It's filled with clutter, random pieces of tat, and extremely colourful.

The first really different thing here is that Booker, the player character, talks. And often. He talks when you pick up a weapon in the store. He has great banter with Elizabeth. At one point, she calls Booker over, and when you turn, she's wearing a novelty oversized Abraham Lincoln head and doing doing impressions. It's all just lovely.

Which is when the heavy breathing starts. Elizabeth hides behind a desk, and Booker does the same. The Songbird is outside, looking for the two of you, and beaming coloured lighting into the room for his massive, seeking eyes. There's stuff in the audio that's like the smoke monster from Lost, a messy mechanical terror.

The songbird moves off, and Elizabeth peeks through the door. "Promise me," she says. Booker cuts her off. "I will stop him." "No. That's a promise you cannot keep. Promise me, that if it comes to it, you won't let him take me back." She's wrapped your hands around her neck as she talks.

You move outside, and the city is bright and beautiful. It strikes me that the closest analogy is another, real world paean to American exceptionalism: Disneyland. It's a flying Disneyland, clouds wafting between the floating streets.

The next weird thing: Press X to euthanize horse.



Elizabeth has found a dying horse in the street, and she wants to use her powers to bring it back to life. "It's just an animal." says Booker. "It's too powerful, we won't be able to stop it."

"I wasn't asking for permission," she says.

Booker doesn't just talk, he has a personality that is his own. It's slightly jarring - I'd quite like the horse to not die, but my representative in this world feels different. But it seems worth it for what is gained: conversations that reveal character, and not just plot. It's worth it just for making Elizabeth a living part of the world, and not just a speakerbox standing behind unbreakable glass. The conversations the two have make the whole adventure feel like Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood, or Nick and Nora Charles.

We don't find out how Elizabeth would react if the player had followed that button prompt, though, as the player in this instance doesn't press it, and Elizabeth starts to use her powers to open a tear.

As she does, Columbia is painted over with a different reality. It spreads out along the ground from where Elizabeth crouches, and then surrounds them both. Her first attempt paints the world around us as a beautiful garden, before we snap back to Columbia. She tries again and, this time, the world becomes a city street. And not a street in 1912, but much later. A cinema on one side of the street is showing Revenge of the Jedi, which was the original title for Return of the Jedi.

A car streams down the road toward Elizabeth and just before it hits, she snaps the tear closed again. Booker and Elizabeth are back in Columbia. The horse is not.



From here, they move up some steps, and emerge into larger city streets. There are more balloons visibile in the distance here, and massive posters for an orgnisation called Vox Populi. The streets are cluttered with debris here, and fights are breaking out. Booker points a gun at someone to drive them away when they're eyeballing Elizabeth.

There's a lot of colour. Streets are draped in red banners, on to some of which a woman's face is being projected. I couldn't quite hear what she was saying, and then Booker and Elizabeth entered a town square centered round an large, golden statue.

There's a small crowd here. A man is about to be lynched, accused of crimes he denies. As soon as people see you, though, they start screaming. That's Booker! Combat explodes. Multiple people start shooting you at once, and one man starts cranking an enormous megaphone device. Booker kills him before he can get it revved up, but there are explosions and bullets and soon, Booker and Elizabeth are pinned down.

Here, we get a glimpse of another of Elizabeth's powers. She's able to magic into existence different objects, and with clouded representations, gives you a choice of three here, one of which is a new door in a wall, another of which seems to be a train. Booker selects the train.

By this point, events are happening in the demo too fast for me to note them all down. Booker uses magic to make things float and Elizabeth smashes a trailer through them and you jump on to the rail and you're skyhookingaround. You're speeding past so many posters and bits of art. There are other guys chasing you, speeding by on the rails, swinging between them, leaping, chanting. It's so pretty. The clouds. Another person cranking the big megaphone thing, and this time a flare is fired into the air.



Which is when the airship arrives. Apparently, this isn't a scripted thing. It's a boss. It's a Big Daddy as a zeppelin; a patrolling airship you can climb aboard and blow up from within.

You ask Elizabeth to create a turret, and she can't do it yet. It's too soon since her last magic use. The airship starts firing at you, dozens of rockets smashing into the ground and walls behind you as you're again leaping between the rails. Again, it looks scripted, but it's not, just tightly rehearsed. It's thrilling to watch. I want to explore this world.

Evventually, Booker gets high enough that he can leap on to the airship, shoot his way inside, and blow up the engines within. It quickly catches fire, and Booker makes a hasty escape by jumping out and into the clouds, being lucky enough to land on one of the skyrails.

Elizabeth comes over to you. "Booker, that was amazing."

"Good, because I don't think I can do it again."

Which is when the Songbird arrives and hurls you through a window, into the top floor of a building. The Songbird is pitched as a controlling, abusive husband, and he's really, really pissed at you. It tears off the roof of the room you're in and thumps down inside, and is about to crush you when Elizabeth leaps in to stop it. Songbird gently pushes her aside and returns to end you whe she yells "I'm sorry!" He softens, and she asks to be taken back, back to the prison she earlier described as being worse than death.

She reaches out to you for a second as she's carried away, but your hands never quite meet. And after a second's pause, Booker dives out the gaping hole in the building, off the floating island it sat upon, and back on to the skyrails in pursuit.

On May 31 we'll finally be able to get our hands on the Minerva's Den DLC for Bioshock 2. The expansion pack will go live on the Games for Windows Marketplace for $10.

The announcement, made on the Cult of Rapture, follows the recent release of the Protector Trials DLC for free. 2K Games originally never planned to port the DLC over to the PC, but changed their minds at the request of Bioshock 2 fans. As a bonus, 2K have put up the first part of a developer diary by lead designer Steve Gaynor that fills in some of the backstory surrounding the new DLC.

Minerva's Den provides a new single player story centred around the increasing insanity of the AI system that controls Rapture. With Bioshock Infinite taking to the skies, this could be our last chance to explore the underwater city.

Several characters and institutions in Bioshock, like Sinclair Spirits and Robertson's Tobaccoria, were named after the writers and developers who made the game. Irrational want to do something similar for Bioshock Infinite, except this time they want to use names from their community. Blue's News spotted the compo on the Irrational blog, where Irrational say "we’re giving one of you the chance to become immortalized within the world of Columbia! You could end up as the namesake of a building, a character, a business–whatever our artists come up with. It’s the ultimate bragging rights."

To enter, all you have to do is enter your name and email address into the form on the Irrational blog post linked to above. The winner will be notified by email, and their name will find their way into Irrational's skyborne sequel. Check out our Bioshock Infinite preview, and the first trailer for more on the game.

The Protector Trials DLC for Bioshock 2 is out on PC today. The pack includes a series of single player maps in which you defend a Little Sister from hordes of hungry Splicers. The DLC was originally meant to come out on consoles, but so many fans asked for it that 2K decided to restart development and release it for free on PC.



2K broke the news on the Bioshock 2 site, saying that the DLC will be available to download and play today, along with small patch that will fix some mouse sensitivity issues. The Protector's Trials pack has had a bit of a chequered past. It was originally scheduled to come out in January, and recently it was accidentally released on the Games for Windows Live Marketplace for a price. It was quickly taken down, and 2K have confirmed that the pack will be completely free.

2K are also planning to bring the more lengthy Minerva's Den DLC to PC as well. This adds an alternative single player campaign in which you play as Big Daddy who must fight his way into the heart of Rapture to shut down the rogue AI program that keeps the underwater city running. 2K haven't said whether they'll charge money for the pack, and there's no release date just yet, but they'll be be "making a similar announcement to this one as we get closer to a firm launch date for that pack."

In 2007, PC Gamer commissioned artist Drew Northcott to produce a series of pieces inserting game [..]

Over the weekend the Bioshock 2 Protector’s Trials DLC appeared for sale on Games for Windows [..]

A recent update from 2K has confirmed that the Protector's Trials DLC is on schedule to enter certification at the end of January, while Minerva's Den should be finished up by the beginning of March.

2K Elizabeth made the statement on the 2K forums, saying: "as of today, we’re tracking to submit the Protector Trials to certification at the end of January. Minerva’s Den has some more work to be done on it still and is tracking to submit to certification in the beginning of March."

Certification means the DLC is essentially finished and is being submitted to Microsoft to clear and release.

The Protector Trials contains six different scenarios in which you must protect a little sister as she harvests Adam from a corpse. Minerva's Den presents a self contained single player story in which you play an Alpha series Big Daddy who must fight his way into Minerva's Den to take out the rogue AI that controls Rapture.

There is also a final Bioshock 2 patch in the works. 2K Elizabeth says " I don’t have a final patch list for you yet, either, but one item I know many of you will look forward to: we have fixed mouse sensitivity issues and many v-sync option bugs."

2k announced that work had resumed on the DLC last year, when they also announced that the Protector Trials and the patch would be released for free. Pricing plans haven't yet been announced for Minerva's Den.

When 2K Games announced that Bioshock 2's Minerva's Den DLC would not be coming to PC due to "technical and timing issues" we foolishly believed them, but now, thanks to a ton of feedback from fans, 2K have revisited their decision and have decided to finish Minerva's Den and release it on the PC for free.

Senior Marketing Manager, 2K Elizabeth broke the news on the 2K forums, saying "we are a company of gamers making awesome experiences for gamers - and given the conversations we've had over the past two weeks, we've decided to go back and finish the PC patch and Protector Trials," adding that "we are projecting that the patch and the Protector Trials will be ready to cert in December and I'm happy to announce that they will be available free to the community."

The Protector Trials pack contains a series of single player challenges in which the player must defend Little Sisters from waves of attackers. Each of the six events take place in a different location from the main game. The challenges are sure to make good use of the often hilarious cocktail of powers and weapons available in Bioshock 2.



Even more exciting is the fact that Minerva's Den will be making its way to the PC. Unfortunately, it's a lot further off than the Protector Trials, and 2K say they're "not certain how much longer it would take to complete the project to our standards", but when it does eventually come out, there's plenty to look forward to.

Minerva's Den is a single player story that runs parallel to the narrative of the main game. You play as subject Sigma, a different Alpha series Big Daddy to the one you played as in the main story. Over the course of the three levels you venture into the heart of Rapture's Central Computing system to take on the AI that controls Rapture, an entity known as The Thinker. The update will contain new weapons and plasmids, and feature an entirely new type of Big Daddy.

With Bioshock Infinite set in the stratosphere, these updates could be the last adventures we have in Rapture for a while. We'll bring you more on the release dates for the new content as soon as they're announced.

My first glimpse of Columbia, the floating city where Irrational have set their follow-up to BioShock, is of a sneering caricature of a Mexican face, reminiscent of racist US propaganda from the turn of the last century. Then the camera pans to a similarly twisted Asian face. Finally, it pulls back to reveal that we’re looking at a mural of a heroic George Washington, chin up, perfectly lit, surrounded by these sketchily drawn foreigners. Below it, the words ‘It Is Our Holy Duty to Guard Against The Foreign Hordes.’

Columbia is more than just a city: it’s a floating World’s Fair, travelling from country to country on vast hot-air balloons, a shining example of American endeavour. Beautiful colonial buildings hang in the void, tethered to each other by travel rails, parting clouds as they glide. It looks peaceful, but it’s a façade. Following an unexplained international incident, Columbia’s true nature is revealed. As Irrational’s creative director Ken Levine puts it: “it’s a DeathStar.” Columbia disappears up into the sky, and becomes a twisted symbol of what it once was. Years pass, countries fear its arrival, but it remains hidden from public view. Like Rapture, the ocean-floor hugging art-deco neighbourhood from the original BioShock, Columbia is another city cut off from the world, a place where an idea has festered, infecting the population. Here, American exceptionalism has twisted into evangelical xenophobia.



It is 1912, years after the city vanished above the clouds. You’re Booker DeWitt, a disgraced former Pinkerton Agent (19th century detectives and skull crushers). He’s been asked to find a missing woman, Elizabeth. She’s in the sky. She’s on Columbia.
Same but different
At the game’s announcement event in New York, I asked Ken Levine how all this fits into an Ayn Randian world of Big Daddies, crushing fathoms of water and notions of free will? How can this possibly be the same universe that the original BioShock was set in?

“There are two things we think are essential to a BioShock game,” he said. ‘Put away all the things with Splicers and Little Sisters and all these... they’re important, and in Rapture they were important to BioShock, but they weren’t the centre. The centre was being in a world that is amazing and weird and strange and fantastical, but also grounded in the human experience and believable, and then exploring that world.

“The second thing is having a huge suite of tools and a huge range of problems coming at you, and you determining how to deal with these problems with your set of tools. To make a game and have those things – and we weren’t done with those ideas – and to put it in another city and not have it be a BioShock game would not be, I think, really honest.



“It is a BioShock game. BioShock has never been about Rapture, it’s been about those two core ideas.”

So while there are plasmid-like powers and metallic, groaning beasties to fight, Infinite is looking like a clean slate on which to write ‘fuck everyone’ over and over and over again.

The demonstration continues. A robot horse drags a cart along a cobbled street, passing Booker.

One of the reasons BioShock Infinite is taking so long to develop is that Irrational are rebuilding everything from the ground up. Or in this case, from the sky up. Their new tech allows every building to float independently. A colonial building, gorgeously white, on top of an airbag, pitches forwards, thumping into the road. The bell on top clangs to the ground, swinging towards Booker. Columbia is broken.

Booker continues through the streets, passing a building engulfed in flames. A woman sweeps in the doorway, framed by the fire. Columbia is all the creepier for setting scenes like this in bright daylight. Ken Levine’s touchpoints, he says, are an imaginary July 4th, 1900, with hopeful, perfect blue skies, and the films Blue Velvet and The Shining.



The first dead body I see is a horse still attached to its cart, slumped on the ground and being eaten by flies. The feeling here is that, once again, the infrastructure has collapsed and insanity is taking hold. Not as badly as in Rapture, at least not yet. But you can feel a breakdown coming.

As Booker steps over the horse, a voice swells from a garden. “The needs of our great city of Columbia must come before the desire of any foreigner, whether they be enemy or friend. For I have looked into the future and one path is filled with amity and gold, and the other is fraught with the perils of a hostile and alien world.”

Booker enters the garden. He passes a man sitting on a bench, surrounded by birds, and approaches the speaker. This is Mr Saltonstall. He’s preaching to no one, dressed in a suit that looks like it was made out of the American flag, surrounded by placards warning about the theft of your guns.

Is Saltonstall BioShock Infinite’s caricature of the activist Tea Party movement in America? Not quite, according to Levine: “Those are not new movements in this country, those are recurring movements in this country and we started work on this before those things happened. Unsurprisingly, because these things come around every X number of years, you have the nativist movements, you have second amendment movements, you have things that are often combined, it’s very, very common, and it occurs with some frequency.”


Sending tweets
When Booker DeWitt grabs one of Saltonstall’s weapons, it all goes a bit BioShock: Saltonstall’s face glitches and flickers, his eyes glow and he sets his henchman, Charles, on DeWitt. Charles is the guy surrounded by birds. He launches a murder of crows at Booker, as Saltonstall leaps up and hooks onto one of Columbia’s travel rails, which whisks him away. From amid the diving black cloud of birds, Booker manages to snipe Charles, who falls over the edge of the garden. Booker peers over the wall: the body has caught on a platform below. He uses his telekinesis power on it, and a bottle Charles was carrying swooshes towards him. Drinking it gives him his foe’s power over birds.

That’s interesting. Certainly easier than gathering Adam from the dead body of a little girl. (What, you saved the Little Sisters? Wimp.)

Saltonstall’s invective echoes through the floating city, and Booker turns to look for him, affording me a wider glimpse of Columbia in the process. The buildings move gently in the breeze, cutting through clouds. Below is the checkerboard pattern of fields – a long, long way below. I want Booker to spend more time admiring the view, so that I can take in the remarkable world of floating buildings, teetering on dirigibles, and all moving independently of each other. But Saltonstall’s escape, while cowardly, was also tactical. He’s retreated to a big god-damned cannon.

There’s a distant crump, mixed in with Saltonstall’s threats, and a flaming ball arcs over the serene view. It crashes down near DeWitt, who grabs a hook on a travel rail. He’s taking the Eddie Izzard approach of fighting someone with a giant gun: head towards them. He’s whizzed along the track through the floating city, dangling with one arm free. Another of Saltonstall’s men heads towards him, hanging from another rail. DeWitt swings a wrench at him and whacks him off the rail. He ragdolls into a building and drops out of the city altogether.



I suspect a lot of people will die as victims of Columbia’s sky-high locale, which Levine confirms. “Verticality and movement is much more important to us. The goal is more than little inspired by the original Halo where you’re in these dungeony sequences and then you’re out and moving at 60 miles per hour. We wanted that variety because it’s cool and it’s exciting, but also it adds a lot more to your toolset.”

Booker swoops through a Parisian floating archway and lands near Saltonstall. The crazed political preacher turns and fires again, but Booker escapes... into a nearby pub. Whereas everyone was against you in Rapture, things aren’t so clear cut in Columbia. The pub patrons, seemingly oblivious to the concussive cannon shots outside, ignore Booker’s presence at first, at least until more of Saltonstall’s men arrive and attack. There are way more of them than you’d get attacking you in Rapture, but this is tempered by Booker being able to dualwield his powers and weapons. He plucks a shotgun from one attacker, cocks it and fires it mid-air before it even reaches his hands. When he does grab it, he can blast away while also firing electrical bolts and unleashing his murder of crows to make an escape. He emerges onto the street, and Saltonstall is waiting. With a gun.

Saltonstall fires, nearly point blank. Booker grabs the projectile out of the air with his telekinesis and fires it back, sprinting away without looking to see if Saltonstall survived.

Still fleeing, Booker is forced to duck behind a train of wooden trucks. He seems overwhelmed. I’m starting to wonder if the game is unbalanced, when Elizabeth, the woman Booker has been sent to rescue, appears.



She’s been trapped on Columbia since her childhood. It’s not explained why you’re here to get her, but it’s clear her powers are a factor. As Booker cowers behind the train, she creates a localised storm above his pursuers: the blue sky disappears and the day darkens. “Hit it,” she shouts and Booker zaps the cloud with a bolt of electricity, launching the 15 men into the air, scorching them all with a hairraising blast of crackly power.

Elizabeth is present in combat to provide a different way of fighting. She can use her powers to change the flow of a battle, although you’ll be free to ignore her if you have a different plan.

She’s clearly a useful ally to have: as Saltonstall’s men keep coming she shows off another of her powers. As she sweeps her arms in a wide arc, the tops pop off the little train carts, and every metal object in them rises up and welds together with a satisfying clang. She holds the ball above her head and Booker hurls it at his enemies with his telekinesis. It wipes them out.
Dapper Dan
Rest? Recover? There’s no post-fight lull. A ratcheting, cranking noise breaks the briefest respite you could hope for. A Big Daddy has arrived. Except this oversized, half-man, halfrobot can’t be a Big Daddy. It’s similar to the lumbering giants of the deep, but it’s something else, and currently labelled ‘Alpha’. It looks like an oldtime barber gone wrong: on top of an exaggerated, frighteningly powerful body that houses a beating heart in a glass dome, there’s a slightly confused, moustachioed face with pomaded hair. He looks sad, and Levine later confirms he wanted the creature to be crying during the attack. However sad he is, it’s not enough for me to feel bad for him. Standing on the bridge Booker and Elizabeth were trying to flee across, he picks up a horse and tosses the whinnying thing at them. It misses, and Booker and Elizabeth team up again. She focuses her power on the bridge’s overhead structure: it glows and weakens. Booker zaps it and it collapses onto the bridge, crashing right through it, catching the Alpha and dragging him over the edge.

Elizabeth collapses, bleeding from the nose. Booker says: “That was the one that was chasing you?”

“No, that wasn’t the one.” She’s staring over Booker’s shoulder.



There’s a huge metallic clunk. Booker spins around: settling on top of a nearby building is the gigantic, birdlike robot seen at the start of this feature. It screams and the demo ends.

I feel breathless. My initial worries about the linearity of what was shown are dismissed by Ken Levine. This was a brief taste, only ten minutes of a game so unfinished that he’s still writing it.

“The way we work is when you see a demo, that’s very representative of what the game’s going to be. When we show a demo, we are very confident about this aspect, or that aspect. Until we’re confident about something, we won’t show it. You noticed we’re not talking about a ton of characters in the game. Some of them are evolving; some of them are yet to be created. Like, when I first started showing BioShock there was no Anna Culpepper, there was no Dr Steinman, they didn’t exist when I showed that first demo. They evolved. Though I had a medical level, I didn’t know who the doctor was on that level, I didn’t know that he was going to be, you know, putting up these paintings of faces that he was transforming, or exactly the nature of his insanity. That’s all evolved.”

That medical centre sequence of the original BioShock is BioShock Infinite in miniature: structured as a hub, with ‘spokes’ extending into the world beyond. Each spoke, or in this case building, is host to some of the characters Ken is creating. Little dramas are unfolding there, until the player peels back the curtain midperformance, peering into the ghastly mess of people surviving in their own world, isolated from the crumbling nightmare outside.



Structurally it creates a place for Irrational to explore themes not often touched by games, as Ken explains: “I’m thinking a lot about how to make the characters in this game not just a paradox, or these people building something that is abstract, but how it relates to what we all go through in our lives on various scales. None of us are going to create a utopia, but we create little mini utopias in our lives, and sometimes we let those creations drive us, no matter what data presents itself.

“This is a new utopia. But it’s fractal, right? So you have this large thing and all these things are reflections of it. I think that people are utopian by definition and that’s why you get a lot of people who say ‘well if we just did it this way, everything would be perfect and there would be no flaws’, and that’s just an endlessly fascinating topic to me. One of my interests in this is how do you go from Andrew Ryan, to Fort Frolic, down to the individual man with his wife and the book he’s writing, and this and that, and how do you have that make a fractal expression rather than a broad expression? These little petri dishes of mini societies are interesting because cultures form, and they define and coordinate these intellectual principles, and it’s interesting to dig into those.”

The game is a shooter first, and it’ll always be about the accurate positioning of crosshairs, but every person you meet will have a backstory. Their role will be shaped by their beliefs; they’ll make you wonder about how they got there. Bigger, bolder, BioShock Infinite already feels epic. It has its head in the clouds, but that’s exactly why it’s so exciting.