What Happened to Bioshock: Infinite?

One of 2013's most anticipated titles, 2K and Irrational Games' "Bioshock: Infinite" finally graced gamers world-wide with it's presence last week on March 26. However, some who played the game (in it's entire 9 hour campaign) were left wondering what happened to the "Bioshock: Infinite" we saw in 2011, and why the one we got was so....bland.

This image, courtesy of Reddit user TheCynicalGamer , contains excerpts from a post they made calling to a gameplay video from 2011 showing a game that is vastly different from the finished "Bioshock: Infinite" that hit the shelves.

 It's obvious that not all games are always 100% like their trailers and initial videos, just see SEGA's recent fiasco with "Aliens: Colonial Marines" for that; but it's also no secret 2K and Irrational had a difficult time during Infinite's development. 

In August 2012, Gamasutra ran an exclusive story on two key members of Infinite leaving the game:

Tim Gerritsen, director of product development, and art director Nate Wells have both announced their departure. Wells was a 13 year veteran of the studio, whose distinctive style was heralded in the original Bioshock. 

That's not all, after it was speculated that Bioshock's delay from October 2012 to Febraury 2013 was due to the inclusion of a Multiplayer mode, which, according to Kotaku's Kirk Hamilton via Kotaku sources, fell apart before going into single-player.

That mode, internally dubbed "Spec-Ops," was similar to the Spec-Ops mode in the most recent two Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games. In it, four players would cooperatively work their way through levels lifted from the single-player game. The mode wasn't working, however, and some of the multiplayer team was taken off of it and tasked with getting the 2011 E3 demo into shape.

This all came from their source reporting Epic Games' "Gears of War" producer Rod Fergusson was brought into Irational to get Infinite shipped and ready to go, which was confirmed by Fergusson himself days later, lending credibility to Kotaku's insider.

In an interview with Polygon, Ken Levine, leader of Irrational Games, spoke of a cut portion of the game known as "Shantytown":

Ken had been in level reviews numerous times. Then one day, the Finkton team was doing a play test, when Ken decided the entire stage was wrong. It looked like the residents lived in garbage. It needed to be beautiful, because Columbia was designed so that even the poor lived beautifully.

It was all wrong. And it had to go.

Wells was furious. Levine had been looking at this for months. In August of this year, Wells announced his new role as art director at Naughty Dog Studios.

Strangely, Shantytown reappeared, much dumbed down and duller than promised, lending to the idea the final product of Infinite was a mash-up of stuff the team had made and redone over the past 4 or 5 years. In the same interview, it's revealed Levine hired writers on late into development, after being the games' sole writer:

Levine has tried to streamline this process. Most recently, he brought on fellow writers — until late in Infinite's development, he was solely responsible for the story. 

It's clear, all the way from the 2011 gameplay to many other videos, that the games story and focus changed drastically through development and that much content was cut for whatever reason or another.

In another interview done by Polygon, this time with Bill Gardner, Design director of Irrational Games, it was revealed about how much was actually cut.

"We cut off enough things to make five or six full games," he said. "It is alarming."

Gardner says that it was "kind of gross" how much they cut but ultimately all that matters is the final product.

"I mean, it pains you when you are talking about about cutting one of your babies but ultimately you got to to look at the final piece," Gardner said.

Despite all of this, the mainstream crowd has taken a loving to 'Infinite' with the game currently sitting at a 95 on Metacritic,  and Topping sales-charts in the UK .