Huge Bioshock Infinite Multiplatform Update
A lot seems to be happening in the world of BioShock today. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first.
At a BioShock Infinite event the creative director at Irrational Games, Mr Ken Levine announced to VideoGamer.com that the game would be hit with yet another setback and would now be releasing on the 26th March. So that’s another four weeks we have to wait for what I suspect will be one of the year’s best games. The good news is that the delay is due to them wanting to give us the best game possible.
“But at the end of the day, we’ve got to ship a great game. So if it’s three or four more weeks, then it’s three or four more weeks. So it’s March 26th now.”
The original release date was penned for October 2012 but was then pushed to February 26th with the reasoning that they wanted to make it better.
“to make Infinite into something even more extraordinary.”
Personally, I am generally fine with this, if they want more time to make the game better, then more power to them. Although it does cast my mind back to Rocksteady holding back the release of Batman: Arkham City on the PC. The Phys-X and DX11 features were told to be taking them some extra time in development, this is fine in itself, but when release day came the game was an absolute shambles. DX11 was literally unplayable for everyone, (at least everyone who wanted more than 15FPS) performance across the board was simply not acceptable.
Having said that, this isn’t a delay for PC tech reasons, and given the developers track record, including the awesomeness (it’s a word I swear) that is System Shock 2, I am openly confident it’s going to be a great game when it finally gets to our shores.
It isn’t all bad news though, you PS Vita owners out there have a glimmer of hope that at least some incarnation of BioShock will appear on the handheld. Speaking to Eurogamer this week Ken Levine told them it was something he was interested in, but it was out of his hands.
“Where the Vita stands right now, it’s in the hands of the business people at Take-Two and the business people at Sony working out, hey, what happens in these business people discussions? Fortunately I don’t have to take part in it any more because I sold my company a long time ago.”
It seems though, that most likely won’t be anything to do with BioShock Infinite, but will be based around the Bioshock IP.
“I’ve never said it was Infinite,” Levine said. “It will be something. I’m always hesitant to talk too much about things we don’t have anything to show about because it’s getting ahead of ourselves. I’m trying to be very careful.”
So whilst that isn’t a confirmation exactly, it seems like the cogs are turning and that they seem keen on developing for that platform. Nothing concrete on that, but as soon as we know, you will too.
The best news of the day, goes to you PC gamers. It seems that those nice people at Irrational are pulling out all the stops to make it as shiny as possible. PC Gamer have had some hands on and these are the options that were available to them.
- Anti-aliasing
- Texture detail
- Dynamic shadows
- Post-processing quality
- Light shafts
- Ambient occlusion
- Object detail
- V-sync
- FOV (a slider, with no listed value)
- UI margins
- Toggleable highlighting of “searchable” or “important” objects
The only thing there that is of concern is the FOV slider with no listed value. I would imagine this is an easy fix before release, as no numerical value to that would render it almost useless. That said, the rest looks nice and I am always happy to see developers making use of PC tech, given that the hardware in consoles now is somewhat archaic compared to even a mid level PC.
PC Gamer also hinted that even though the game ran on DX10 it would make use of DX11 options. So, good news there, it would be nice if this was just the standard for PC games, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.
One final piece of information from PC Gamer that involves all platforms and I think is the most interesting of all, is something Ken Levine has revealed about the ending of the game.
“So I can’t tell whether people will like it or not, I can tell you it is absolutely different to anything you’ve seen in a videogame.”
If you played the first BioShock I imagine you were as disappointed as I was with the ending, it was lacklustre to say the very least. So lesson learned? It would seem so from that, it certainly makes me curious to see what they’ve come up with. I don’t know about you, but March 26th can’t come quickly enough.