According to a report from Official PlayStation Magazine UK, a character in BioShock Infinite was “highly altered” after Ken Levine had conversations with religious employees at Irrational Games. Levine explains:
“I had some very valuable conversations. One of the characters in the game was highly altered based upon some very interesting conversations I had with people on the team who came from a very religious background, and I was able to understand they were kind of upset about something.”
“What I said to them was, ‘I’m not going to change anything to get your approval, but I think I understand what you’re saying and I think I can do something that’s going to make the story better, based on what you said.’ So I did that, and I’m grateful for them bringing in their perspective. The last thing I wanted to do was change something because it offends somebody, but the thing they pointed out was making it a lesser story.”
Even though Levine had these conversations with his religious colleagues, he still wasn’t tempted to pull anything from the game in order to avoid problems. This is not the first time the Irrational team has had to deal with tricky subjects like religion. Levine begins to draw comparisons to conversations he had during the development of the original Bioshock.
“I think that we had a similar conversation about Bioshock 1. It involves infanticide, I don’t think there’s a larger taboo in the world. There were people who were very nervous about that. We didn’t have that because we thought it would be cool. My feeling was if it’s not just there to be exploitive, if it’s true to the story and you’re telling something that you think is honest, then everything has a place”.
