BioShock creator Ken Levine says the Burial At Sea DLC is meant to offer “a whole new experience” rather than a lengthy one.
In his review of the first part of the Burial At Sea DLC for BioShock Infinite, Paul Goodman describes it as “too damn short,” saying it clocks in at around two hours, “even if you do some exploration on the side.” If you hustle, you can wrap things up even faster.
But Levine said it’s about “quality over quantity,” and while he thinks that players who “dig deeply” should be able to squeeze at least three hours out of it, he also acknowledged that it’s not particularly long, and it’s not for everyone.
“I think there are definitely people who are like, ‘Well, I want hours and hours of gameplay’. I think if that is your primary metric, this probably isn’t the thing for you,” Levine told Eurogamer. “If you want to feel like, ‘Wow, I just got a whole new experience’ – that’s what you get out of this.”
Levine said Burial At Sea can’t compete on length with something like Minvera’s Den for BioShock 2 because while that DLC reused existing assets, Burial At Sea features a completely rebuilt Rapture. “[From early on] we knew we wanted to do something with Booker and Elizabeth and we had a sense that Rapture could be the thing. And probably foolishly we thought we’d go back in and ‘kitbash’ a load of BioShock 1 assets. Then we thought no, god, that’s a terrible idea, that’s not fair and it’s not going to look good,” Levine said.
“We have this new engine so we should take advantage of it. And, hey, let’s make all the shops and build 3D scenes out of the window which we never had in BioShock 1. And let’s put people in the world and make it all huge and shiny and build everything fresh – or almost everything fresh,” he continued. “So yeah, we got carried away a little bit, I won’t deny it. But, hey, I don’t want to work on something that I feel is kind of a B in quality. You might as well go for it. The company is okay with it, so why the hell not?”
Still, two hours? That’s pretty damn short. BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea comes out tomorrow.
Source: Eurogamer
