BioShock Infinite dev talks Burial at Sea DLC

BioShock Infinite developer Irrational has revealed new details of Elizabeth's playable role in the second half of Burial at Sea, the game's upcoming Rapture-set expansion.

It's unclear exactly how Infinite's Booker and Liz find themselves in the underwater city - and before its fall, shown in the original BioShock - but Irrational told IGN that the duo would remember something of their adventures in Columbia.

"Liz in Rapture is very much a continuation of the Liz that we saw in Infinite," BioShock Infinite level designer Amanda Jeffrey said. "This is not some brand new, 'we have no idea who this person is'."

Burial at Sea's first part sees players control Booker, while part two stars Liz. BioShock creator Ken Levine teased that something specific would trigger the change in perspective.

"At the end of the first part of Burial at Sea, Elizabeth goes into another sort of realisation and, to put you then in her shoes, we thought was gonna be something very powerful," Levine explained. "She is very much Elizabeth, but also has a character. She's affected. She's definitely changed by what she's done. I will say certainly you are picking up after the events of Infinite, and this is a person who has seen all the things you've seen in Infinite, and that's had an effect on her."

Irrational said that, as Elizabeth, players will be armed with tear-creating abilities, but the developer is still deciding how powerful these will be.

"We're still trying to work out exactly how extensive Liz's tear abilities will be in the playable Liz sequence," Jeffrey said. "She will have far more powerful ways of interacting with the world than we saw in Infinite proper, but at the same time, it won't just be a case of walking to a space and going, 'I'm just going to press a button, and now happy ending for everyone!'

Another crucial factor is that, even in first-person, controlling Elizabeth must be a noticeably different experience from playing as Booker.

"Liz is such a different character to Booker, and if we were to just put Booker in a dress, then that would be the most awful betrayal of what we're doing for Liz," Jeffrey concluded. We would be betraying her character again if suddenly she's got these huge biceps and she's running around the place with a ginormous machine gun.

"Elizabeth has to take things more from the side view. She needs to be kind of thinking in a roundabout way of how to deal with her enemies. And, sometimes, that might mean completely bypassing the enemy entirely, because she doesn't need to. It may mean, in another situation, using the enemy's strength against them. There's all of these different kinds of ways of being more thoughtful, and - I hesitate to say it - almost more feminine way of approaching a problem, where there's all of these people and, to be very brutally honest about it, they have the advantage in strength. But Elizabeth has the advantage in smarts."