Bioshock Infinite Creators Discuss Recreating Rapture in Buried at Sea DLC

The Buried at Sea DLC for Bioshock Infinite may be one of the better DLC packages this year, as the two-part DLC will transport players into the role of main character Elizabeth as she explores the setting of the first two Bioshock games, Rapture. The DLC is set to appear sometime this year, and lead animator Shawn Robertson told IGN that the creative team at 2K Marin had to go back and recreate the underwater city to reflect the state the city was in before it began to deteriorate before the events of the first game:

"We've always wanted to see Rapture before the fall, and we created these systems in Infinite that would allow you to walk through Main Street and the fair and interact with these people, so we had a bit of technology in place that would allow us to explore that. We quickly realized that everything that existed in Rapture was old and dilapidated and we kind of had to go back to the drawing book a little bit on, well, what does Rapture really look like without having its civil war taken place, and everything's broken down, and broken windows, and water everywhere, and really take a step back and think about, 'how does this feel? How airy is it? What are people doing, and how are people interacting with each other as they walk around?' It was good to kind of break out of that, what people are doing in Columbia, and bring in some of that technology - though, not necessarily the aesthetics - over into Rapture and start exploring that space."

While some fans may be concerned about the switch from the flying city of Columbia, which was much more open and featured a much sunnier and brighter aesthetic, to the darker and confined city of Rapture. Robertson revealed that some game mechanics will have to translate from Columbia to Rapture,  as some others are being changed to work better in Rapture:

"We definitely have some systems from Columbia that we bring over to Rapture, but really Rapture is its own place. We don't want to try to shoehorn technology from Columbia into Rapture just because we have it. You do have to switch gears, just like we switched gears when going from BioShock 1 into Infinite, going from dark corridors and 'everything is dilapidated' to this beautiful bright blue sky. Now we have to shift gears back into interior spaces, different coloring, different views outside the window, but still maintaining that everything is perfect and pristine."

Look out for more Buried at Sea news, including the release date for the two part DLC, right here.