BioShock Infinite, the upcoming third entry in Irrational Games' BioShock series, will feature a computer-controlled companion named Elizabeth.
Elizabeth will do more than just tag alongside the game's main protagonist Booker, Elizabeth will be the most complete video game companion since Alyx Vance from Valve's Half-Life 2, according to Irrational Games creative director Ken Levine.
In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Levine spoke about the decision to create an AI companion character and why the team wanted to included Elizabeth in the game.
"There's not a lot of great AI companions," Levine said. "I really think Alyx was the last one. It's okay. People are generally okay with it - Skyrim is a great game, but their expectations are fairly low. We knew if we were going to have the player have a voice like we wanted to because we had done so many cyphers, we wanted somebody for him to interact with."
Levine told Eurogamer that the original BioShock's iconic Big Daddy and Little Sister Ai characters provided the foundation for 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," Levine said. "Because most of the time when you see an AI either they're doing nothing or they're just coming at you guns blazing. They 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."
According to Levine, the behaviors displayed by the Big Daddy and Little Sisters laid the groundwork for Elizabeth, but she is a far more complex character, who interacts with the environment and speaks.
"One thing AIs generally don't do is react to what's around them," Levine said. "They don't observe what's around them. They have no interest in what's around them. So we spent a lot of time making Elizabeth notice the world and react to the world and engage with the world."
Levine said that Elizabeth couldn't be like other AI companions that walk around like robots. He also said that making Elizabeth a fleshed out character was one of the most important things during the development of BioShock Infinite.
"We had to seed her with various emotional states that are primarily an overlay on the animation she does," Levine told Eurogamer. "And she has sounds to go along with all of those things. Making her present in the world was one of the most difficult things and one of the most important things."
BioShock: infinite will release on March 26, 2013 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms. You can check out Levine's full interview with Eurogamer here. Learn more about the game here and watch the game's official trailer below...
