Irrational Games creative director, and co-founder, Ken Levine, recently joined Eurogamer for a particularly enjoyable interview that explored the tribulations, and difficulties associated with making BioShock Infinite‘s Elizabeth the best AI character possible.
It’s easy to miss the connection at face value, but Levine attributed the studio’s work on Big Daddy, and Little Sister as a prototype to BioShock Infinite‘s (far easier on the eyes) Elizabeth. Ken Levine explains how the disturbing duo serve as the groundwork to Elizabeth:
The Big Daddy and the Little Sister were a very very rough prototype of that AI who is just around you in the world that you can observe, who aren’t scripted. Because most of the time when you see an AI either they’re doing nothing or they’re just coming at you guns blazing.
Levine then went into further depth, while elaborating on how these AI traits ended up benefiting, and working their way into Elizabeth:
[Big Daddy, and Little Sister] have a bunch of behaviors. Sometimes they interact with objects off a script but you don’t know where it’s going to happen and you don’t know when it’s going to happen. You don’t know if the player is going to get in the way. All those things were the very rough training grounds for Elizabeth in the sense that she had to be present and observable and not breakable. But of course the content bar for her was infinitely higher. She wasn’t mute, for instance.
Don’t downplay yourself Levine – Big Daddy may be mute, but I still have bittersweet memories of a little girl desperately urging that undersea titan to murder me.
Do you remember Big Daddy and Little Sister interacting with Rapture’s environment in ways above your standard apathetic AI? Let us know in the comments.
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