Irrational Games unveils alternate BioShock Infinite cover

If you found the box art for BioShock as bland and generic as other fans of the games, here’s some good news. Irrational Games have revealed an alternate cover for the retail copies of its upcoming steampunk FPS.

The cover was chosen through a poll where fans got to decide which alternate cover the company would include in copies of the game. This was done because many found the original cover very generic and said nothing about the game other than the fact that it had guns. The alternate cover is reversible, so you can change your game’s cover whenever you like.

The reversible cover for Bioshock Infinite has the steampunk Songbird

Earlier this month, Ken Levine had explained why the game will not feature multiplayer modes, and will be focussed on single player. “We look at this way: we play around with a ton of things,” Levine told IGN. “So much of it is experimental that you really have no idea… In a game like this, where we start this thing and we’re like ‘okay, it’s in a flying city in 1912 and you’re this guy and there’s this girl who can change the nature of reality,’ you don’t quite have a lot of guidelines to go with. We probably tried 40 different versions of [Songbird] before we found the right one.”

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

“So, like everything, you try certain things, and the multiplayer, we got to a point where we said ‘okay, this is the you-know-what or get off the pot moment,’ and we decided to get off the pot because it wasn’t there yet. But that makes it sound like I’m dissing on what the guys did. No. Actually, I think they did some really extraordinary stuff, but we felt we didn’t have the resources and time to finish the experiment to the level we wanted to. And we weren’t going to ship something that was not consistent with the overall package.”

That makes the modes sound pretty mysterious, but Levine isn’t talking about what exactly set them apart from the average multiplayer shooter. He declined to elaborate, saying that “you never know when we’ll go back and revisit something. There was some really cool stuff there, but it just wasn’t ready for what we were doing.”

Levine had revealed that the game would not have multiplayer back in November through a tweet. The tweet by Levine was an answer to a fan asking, “can you clear up whether or not BioShock Infinite will have multiplayer modes?” Levine responded with a simple “Nope”.

The lack of multiplayer in the next game ensures that the company will spend development effort on the single player campaign. This gives the promise of a much more polished experience than we would get if multiplayer mode was to take up development time.

BioShock Infinite is the third game in the BioShock series and is set in 1912 in the sky-city of Colombia, “designed to demonstrate to the world by example the founding democratic principles of the United States, the product of American ideals, endeavour and industry,” according to the description of the game.