BioShock Infinite’s Elizabeth and Her AI are Explained

BioShock Infinite is less than one month away! To add to our already-mounting excitement, IGN and some crew members from Irrational Games give us a look at the incredible AI behind our future companion, Elizabeth.

The video, which is courtesy of IGN, gives us a peek of some 13 minutes of gameplay that takes place after Booker and Elizabeth's Meet-Cute. Needless to say, SPOILERS AHEAD!

You wake up as Booker DeWitt on Battleship Bay, where Elizabeth is instantly distracted by the sound of music coming from the edge of a pier. She dashes off with your permission and starts dancing, taking in her first few moments of absolute freedom and wonder.

Ken Levine says that they actually had to change that scene, since Elizabeth would initially just run off, leaving the player to kind of resent her disappearance in light of the injuries Booker suffered to get her out of the tower. To remedy this and get the player to see Liz in a favorable light, they changed it so that Booker now gives Elizabeth permission to go explore, rather than just abandoning him.

Once you exit the pier, Liz starts to show more autonomy and will poke around and interact with different objects in the environment. The team calls these points of interaction "opportunities" in the environment and can be anything from having Liz run up to a bunch of medicine balls and try to lift them or having her perform a tightrope-walking animation at the top of some steps.

Every feature in the environment, including people, are marked and can either be "less interesting" or "more interesting" for Liz. She'll interact with these objects and people without getting in the player's way or interfering with their actions. They had to be very careful to make it so that Liz's attention wouldn't be attracted by everything, otherwise she would seem like a dog who kept seeing squirrels.

View the video below and see how Liz reacts to different stimuli in the world! And look forward to seeing her explore her world when BioShock Infinite drops on March 26th, 2013 for Xbox 360, PC, and PlayStation 3.