How Playing as Elizabeth Changes BioShock Infinite

Irrational on whether this is “our” Elizabeth, using Tears and why Liz isn’t just “Booker in a dress.”

Big changes are coming to BioShock Infinite. As Irrational announced last week, new story content titled Burial at Sea is headed our way in the months to come, and in addition to bringing us back to the underwater city of Rapture, it features our first chance to step into the shoes of Infinite's female protagonist, Elizabeth.
While Elizabeth served as a stalwart companion throughout Infinite’s campaign, Burial at Sea Episode 2 will mark her first time thrust fully into the spotlight. BioShock creator Ken Levine told IGN last week that Elizabeth’s campaign is “more towards a survival horror game” than Infinite’s core experience, but many fans were still left wondering what exactly that will entail.
In an interview at Irrational, IGN spoke with Levine and level designer Amanda Jeffrey for insight into playing as Elizabeth, including how she differs from Booker and how players will be able to utilize her Tear abilities without breaking the experience.

“With the player getting the opportunity to see how Liz is experiencing the world through first person, we have to be ever so careful to not betray what the player has already experienced of Liz in Infinite and what they're going to experience of Liz in the first part of the DLC,” Jeffrey told IGN. “That's always foremost in our mind, because 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, and players would just feel like it was a cheap way out, and that's not something that we want to do. So we don't have all of the answers yet for it, but we are very, very, very much aware of all of the dangers that we need to try and avoid.”

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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.

“Booker, as a character, is an ex-soldier. He's very much about storming the gates, or taking it head on, and he has these other tools available to him, but generally he's all about going head to head with his enemy and taking him down because he's the stronger man,” she continued. “Now, even in Infinite, Elizabeth was a much more thoughtful person. She would be more considerate about keeping out of danger, and assisting you with various different things, and looking for things around in the environment and keeping an eye out for stuff. She's more aware of her surroundings, and how she interacts with those things. She's the one who's rifling through the drawers, or leaning against the walls, or whatever it is that she may be doing. And for that to transfer over to gameplay is, I think, 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.”
According to Jeffrey, that means playing as Elizabeth is less about combat and more about strategy, often avoiding combat altogether.
“Elizabeth has to take things more from the side view,” she explained. “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. So, how that pans out and how that plays in the environment, I'm awfully excited to do. It'll be fantastic.”

At the end of BioShock Infinite, Elizabeth fully realizes her ability to use Tears in order to manipulate the environment around her. While Booker utilizes guns and Vigors in Infinite, Elizabeth’s secondary power will be Tears, and Irrational is fully aware that it has to be careful not to let that mechanic break the game.

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Elizabeth and her tear abilities are not necessarily a ‘win button.’ She has an understanding of this universe and the various universes that she can visit.

“We're still trying to work out exactly how extensive Liz's tear abilities will be in the playable Liz sequence,” Jeffrey said. “I hesitate to say too much about what we have just now, because it's entirely possible it will change in the next few weeks. I will say, though, that Elizabeth and her tear abilities are not necessarily a ‘win button.’ She has an understanding of this universe and the various universes that she can visit, and she knows, once again, constants and variables. There are some things that she can change, and some things that just won't make a difference if she changes them or not. So she's not entirely godlike in her abilities. 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!’ Because, on the one hand, that wouldn't be any fun. And on the other hand, I think that, unfortunately, things are never gonna be that easy for Liz. She has to fight for her happy endings. She's never that happy.”
Jeffrey and Levine also addressed the idea of whether this is the same Elizabeth we spent time with in Infinite, or whether it’s another instance from a separate timeline. While neither developer would outright confirm that this is “our” Elizabeth, both made it clear that she’ll remain very much aware of the events that took place in the core game.
“I’m not gonna say what happens, but at the end of the first part of Burial at Sea, Elizabeth goes into another sort of realization and, to put you then in her shoes, we thought was gonna be something very powerful,” Levine said. “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.”

“I'll say that Liz in Rapture is very much a continuation of the Liz that we saw in Infinite,” Jeffrey added. “This is not some brand new, ‘we have no idea who this person is.’ We're going to be learning an awful lot more about the Liz that we meet in Rapture. She's got an awful lot more to give in that respect. She's got some depth to her that I think will surprise players in incredible ways. She's going to keep surprising players. There's no way that you're going to be sat there thinking, ‘oh yeah, I could see that coming.’ It's not going to be the same story that we've had before.”

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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 stressed that Episode 2 of Burial at Sea is still quite early in development, and not everything has been ironed out just yet. Episode 1 is entering beta, allowing Episode 2 to ramp up development in the days and weeks to come. Moving forward, the team is focused on delivering a new experience that operates within the parameters of the original game.
“Some things for the playable Liz will have to be the same,” Jeffrey confessed. “We don't have enough time to make an entirely new game. We're building on an existing set of systems and all the rest of it. We're not all of a sudden going to go ‘it's going to be a top-down game,’ you know? This is not something that we're going to take on here. However, I will say that, more than anything, we are trying to focus on making sure that the feel of playing as Elizabeth and just moving through the environment is a very different experience, both in the way that the player interacts with their control pad or the mouse and keyboard, and in the way that the player's thinking about the environment. Because they say that most of the game is played in the player's mind, and it's almost like we want to take some of what we lost, or what we moved on from, in BioShock 1, and bring some of that back, where the environment is very much this threatening character in the world, and you're understanding that this environment has some malice to it and you're always unsure whether or not it's going to come round and get you, or if there's going to be someone around the next corner.”

“We just want this feeling of tension and depression and this really thick atmosphere to be really pressing down on you every time you're moving around the place,” she continued. “And there will be moments of bright sunlight and relief and everything like that, because even Shakespeare had his comedic relief moments, but this is very much about not feeling like you're the god of guns, running through the skies of Columbia, leaping around the place like you have no care in the world or anything like that. This is very much grounded. This is very much intimidating and feeling like it's rich and full. Elizabeth should feel like this is part of the world and it is out to get her. She can't just take it easy and just saunter through it all. It's not gonna work that way.”
When we asked Jeffrey about Elizabeth taking the spotlight, she insisted that Liz has been the protagonist of Infinite all along, but admitted that this story will focus on her in a way the main game wasn’t able to.

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For the second part, where you're playing as Liz, this is very much her story.

“First I would say that, being the horribly biased person that I am, Elizabeth was the lead in Infinite,” she told us. “For the DLCs, I will say that, once again, this is a story about Booker and Elizabeth, and in the first part of this two-part DLC, we see very much the relationship between Booker and Elizabeth in Rapture. For the second part, where you're playing as Liz, this is very much her story.”
“Booker’s character has a smaller arc than Elizabeth’s does because you play him. It’s more of just about discovery rather than transformation with him. That was a choice we made,” Levine added. “So with Elizabeth, by the time you get to the second part of Burial at Sea, we felt that we had developed her enough that actually an interesting thing to do was to merge the player with her. I think we had established who she is. She’s different. She’s got a sort of different role to play in Burial at Sea in terms of where she’s at in her arc.”
Irrational hasn’t released details on the timing for Burial at Sea just yet, but all BioShock Infinite Season Pass content is expected before the end of March 2014.
Look out for even more from Irrational about BioShock Infinite’s DLC on IGN later this week. Until then, find out even more about BioShock Infinite in our wiki guide, and be sure to read our interview with Levine for more information on Burial at Sea’s first episode.