Bioshock Infinite - Interview @ NowGamer

NowGamer interviews Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea Producer Don Roy to talk about why Irrational decided to return to Rapture.

Why did you decide to go back to Rapture? Was that in any way a response to the positive feedback going back to Rapture in Infinite or was that something you already had in mind?

We definitely didn’t have it in mind. The feedback was great. It really stemmed out of two things – when we finished Infinite and we decided we were going to do the DLC and putting all of our chips into it, two things came up when the idea of Rapture came along. 

The first was, 'can we take the learnings of Infinite and how we built those worlds and how we created living characters walking around in a setting that felt real and bring it back and show Rapture in its heyday, before it fell' – which we knew was going to be a challenge, but that was exciting. 

The other was, ‘is there a compelling narrative story that can stand on its own that connects the two worlds’? We figured both those out and wanted to take on those challenges, so that’s how we ended up in Rapture. 

You mentioned taking some of the stuff you did with Infinite in terms of building worlds. It feels like there is a mix of the two in Burial at Sea in that the first half feels like Infinite, showing you the world, and the second half feels more like the original Bioshock that we know, so is that the case, that you’re trying to take something from Infinite and the original Bioshock?

Yeah, I think it was really compelling to us to take the idea of town centre in Infinite and show that level of life and activity in rapture proper, so that people could see what it looked like before the fall and see people living their lives and what the idealized Andrew Ryan world looked like. 

Because in Bioshock 1 you have his PSAs [personal service announcements] and you have the messaging and you see the branding, but you don’t get to see the people actually living there. We had the ability now and we had lessons learned that we could actually build it out and show people what it looked like when people were living that lifestyle.