Ken Levine: ‘BioShock Infinite’ Won’t Favor Close-Range Weapons, Or Ayn Rand.

Ken Levine continues to wax awesome about BioShock Infinite and other topics, recently dropping comments on BioShock’s weapons system and thematics.

Joystiq:

Ken Levine and the team at Irrational Games are switching things up forBioShock Infinite  — instead of being based on the Objectivist society of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged,  Infinite  is aiming for more of an Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City feel, with a focus on physics rather than gene splicing. Irrational is also switching up some of the most recognizable gameplay from the first two BioShock games, namely the ability to beat them almost entirely with the shotgun and Electro Bolt, Levine told  PlayStation.Blog.

 “One of the first things we did when we started on BioShock Infinite was to draw a graph with y and z axes, and to say that one of those axes was the number of enemies in an encounter and the other was the range of those enemies,” Levine said. “In the original BioShock, the entire game lived in one corner of that graph — few enemies, all at close range – so the Electro Bolt and shotgun were perfect. BioShock Infinite is going to have much greater ranges and, potentially, far more enemies, so we’re greatly increasing the spectrum of encounters that are possible, and that requires the player use a broader set of tools.”

Noooo! to losing the Electro Bolt and shotgun tandem. It’s carried me through several playthroughs.