Bioshock Infinite - Creating Elizabeth The Woman That Brought Her to Life

Bioshock Infinite - Creating Elizabeth The Woman That Brought Her to Life
Lead developer Ken Levine had created Irrational Games in 1997 out of former members from Looking Glass Studios. Their first game was System Shock 2, a sequel to Looking Glass's System Shock, and was met with critical success, though it did not prove a financial one. Levine had attempted to pitch a sequel to System Shock 2 to Electronic Arts, but the publisher rejected the idea based on the poor performance of the earlier game. Irrational would proceed to develop other games, including Freedom Force, Tribes: Vengeance, the canceled title Deep Cover, and the completed The Lost which was never released due to legal complications. At this point, Levine wanted to return to a game in the same style as System Shock 2, a more free-form game with strong narrative.

In 2002, the team had come up with a core gameplay mechanic idea based on three groups of forces; drones that would carry a desirable resource, protectors that would guard the drones, and harvesters that would attempt to take the resource from the drones; these would eventually bear out as the Little Sisters, Big Daddies, and Splicers in the final game, but at the time of the concept, there was no set theme. They began working on creating a setting for the game as to be able to pitch the idea to game publishers. A 2002 demonstration version was based on the Unreal Engine 2 for the first Xbox. This demonstration was primarily set aboard a space station overtaken with genetically-mutated monsters; the main character was Carlos Cuello, a "cult deprogrammer"—a person charged with rescuing someone from a cult, and mentally and psychologically readjusting that person to a normal life. Ken Levine cites an example of what a cult deprogrammer does: "[There are] people who hired people to [for example] deprogram their daughter who had been in a lesbian relationship. They kidnap her and reprogram her, and it was a really dark person, and that was the [kind of] character that you were." This story would have been more political in nature, with the character hired by a Senator. The team collectively agreed that this game was not what they had set out to make, and were having trouble finding a publisher. They considered ending development, but as news about their efforts to create a spiritual successor to System Shock 2 began to appear in gaming magazines and websites, the team opted to continue development, performing a full revamp of the game.

By 2004, 2K Games, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, offered to publish the game primarily based on the drone/protector/harvester concept, giving Irrational the freedom to develop the story and setting. By this point, the story and setting had changed significantly, taking place in an abandoned World War II-era Nazi laboratory that had been recently unearthed by 21st-century scientists. Over the decades, the genetic experiments within the labs had gradually formed themselves into an ecosystem centered on the three groups. This version of the game included many of the gameplay elements that would remain in the final BioShock, themselves influenced by concepts from System Shock 2. These elements included the use of plasmids and EVE, the need to use stealth or other options to deal with automated security systems, direction through the environment from a non-player character relayed over a radio, and story elements delivered through audio recordings and "ghosts" of deceased characters.

While the gameplay with the 2004 reveal was similar to what resulted in the released version of BioShock, both design and story changed, consistent with what Levine says was then-Irrational Games' guiding principle of putting game design first. These areas were also issued due to some internal strife and lack of communication between the various teams within Irrational, part of the result of having to expand the team from six to sixty members for the scope of the project. The environment was considered bland, and there were difficulties by the team's artists to come up with a consistent vision to meet the level designer's goals. A critical junction was a short experiment performed by level designer Jean Paul LeBreton and artist Hoagy de la Plante, setting themselves aside to co-develop a level that would later become part of the "Tea Garden" area in the released game, which Levine would later use as a prime example of a "great BioShock space", emphasizing the need for departments to work together. Levine also found that the cyberpunk theme had been overplayed considering their initial reject from Electronic Arts for System Shock 3, leading towards the underwater setting of Rapture.

The game's lead level designer was Bill Gardner. He cited Capcom's survival horror series Resident Evil as a significant influence on BioShock, stating there are "all these nods and all these little elements that I think you can see where Resident Evil inspired us". The team were particularly influenced by Resident Evil 4, including its approach to the environments, combat, and tools, its game design and tactical elements, its "gameplay fuelled storytelling" and inventory system, and its opening village level in terms of how it "handled the sandbox nature of the combat" and in terms of "the environment".