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Released to immense critical acclaim, BioShock Infinite is a masterclass in game design, combining fast-paced action with impressive AI characters, driven by an intriguing storyline that forms an utterly compelling experience far more ambitious in scope than its predecessors. From a graphical perspective, the game may fail to rival visual showcases like Crysis 3, but its core technology is a perfect match for the game's artistic style, while the environmental and AI design brings the floating city of Columbia and its characters to life in unforgettable fashion.All of this is achieved through the use of a heavily modified version of the Unreal Engine 3 middleware. Changes here include the implementation of a deferred lighting set-up, adding dynamic illumination across the constantly moving buildings of Columbia, a customised animation system running over Natural Motion's Morpheme technology that brings more nuanced character movement to the screen, and a complete rewrite of the AI systems that govern the non-playable characters and enemies throughout the game - with a special focus on Elizabeth, an exceptional creation who accompanies the player throughout most of the adventure.
The technology is key to realising the BioShock experience, but how well does this translate across multiple platforms? Past BioShock titles were designed with Xbox 360 and PC in mind, with PS3 ports producing sub-optimal results. However, for this sequel Irrational Games has rewritten much of UE3, allowing graphics quality and performance to scale across multiple CPU and graphics cores, leveraging today's focus on parallel processing by dividing up workloads into smaller jobs that can be spread across multiple cores with ease. This is good news for PC and Xbox 360 of course, but in theory the approach should yield excellent results from the PS3's SPU set-up too.
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