Back in 2007, BioShock caught awe and gasp from many people. BioShock 2 was released this year, but the then developer Ken Levine wasn’t involved in this BioShock 2, which was created by several sister studios and was set in that undersea city of Rapture. Levine’s team is one of the most acclaimed and secretive in game development. Since the ’07 BioShock, which they made in partnership with 2K Australia, Irrational gave no hint about what they were working on, no clue that they were making another BioShock. But Irrational, which had, for a time, been known as 2K Boston, is indeed back on the franchise.

BioShock Infinite isn’t complete yet to say the least. It still has at least 16 months from completion. We won’t be playing it until 2012, a century past the year in which the game is set. In the interim, more will be revealed. The Skyline, for example, will be a emphasis of a future showcase for Infinite, according to Levine. It is that important. Levine was non-committal about multiplayer, saying only that it would make sense to have some for the game if Irrational could think of something special. He would not divulge the reason for the word “infinite” in the game’s title, teasing only that it has significance. “The name has meaning,” he said.

The game takes place in a flying city called Columbia, and Levine explains that “this is not a floating world’s fair. Columbia is a Death Star.” In the lead-up to the events of Infinite, Columbia is embroiled in an international incident of unspecified horror and then disappears into the clouds. Our character, a “disgruntled former Pinkerton agent” named Booker DeWitt, is contacted by a mysterious man who knows where Columbia is. In that city, DeWitt is told, is Elizabeth, a woman who has been raised there and who the man wanted to rescue. DeWitt accepts the mission, which will be ours as a player: to rescue Elizabeth and, with her super-powered help, get out of the patriotic-turned-violent Columbia. And the game goes on.

If you’ve played the BioShock 1, you’d spot the impending dynamic gameplay. Guns on your right and powers are on the left. The gameplay sequence began with DeWitt walking up one cobblestoned street of Columbia. A floating bell tower teetered and then collapsed in front of him. Up the street, he passed a woman sweeping in her doorway while the building behind her blazed. A dead horse was in the road, being pecked by birds. Columbia’s a weird place. Sounds a bit like a mysterious ghost town but this time up high in the sky.

Columbia looks American, particularly a style we might call, kindly, American Obnoxious, though Levine describes it more technically as an age of American Exceptionalism. It was built, in the fiction, at a time of swelling U.S. pride, when the inventions of electricity and radios and the progress of the American people could, theoretically, spawn a floating city that waves the flag and, more distressingly, exhibits imperial racism. A flying city actually reflects back to history long time ago, when the U.S. wants to build a flying city. But back then they can’t even build a functional television.

SOURCE via Kotaku