BioShock: Infinite ready for "psychopathic" and "alcoholic" players

BioShock: Infinite director Ken Levine believes games should be designed to account for all sorts of extremes of player behaviour.

At a PAX East panel reported by Destructoid and Kotaku, Levine diuscussed the difficulty of designing games which cater to player freedom.

"Sometimes we don’t know what’s going to happen. We’re writing a scene where the lead actor is like this psychopathic, alchoholic, because you don’t know what the player is going to do," he said.

"They’re unpredictable. What the f**k are you guys going to do? Chill.

"You have to embrace that lunacy, if you fight it and you lock the player in place it's not the player's game, it's our game - but it has to be your game."

Later in the panel, Levine spoke about Elizabeth, an AI companion whom Irrational Games hopes won't be as utterly useless as all her precursors to date.

"I hate to say this, but she’s a giant machine, full of all this different content. All this writing all this acting, all this animation all this motion capture," he said.

"All these things that can happen, but may or may not. She’s a machine with all this human content put in, trying to yield this person."

Level designer Amanda Jeffrey, one of the four women most involved with Elizabeth's creation, said Irrational's solution to how to make Elizabeth valuable in-game was to give her eyes.

"Every time we were trying to make Elizabeth a better character to experience the game with, so generally the first thing we did was making her awareness of the world absolutely impeccable," she said.

"She has these incredible eyes that she can see the world in a completely different way, Liz can see what's important to her."

BioShock: Infinite releases on March 26, which is midnight tonight where I'm sitting, on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.