BioShock Infinite ‘Burial at Sea’ DLC Part 1 Won’t Feature Combat

BioShock Infinite will be returning to its roots in Rapture for the upcoming two-part DLC series “Burial at Sea.” However, in an IGN sit-down interview with the game’s creative director Ken Levine, he stated that there will be a different gameplay style than that portrayed in the original game and its recent combat arena DLC “Clash in the Clouds.”

"One of the things I’m most excited for in the first DLC is that the first half of it has no combat. It’s just playing in that world, you know, the Rapture you’d never really seen before, and watching Booker and Elizabeth use their wits to solve a problem and just soak in the atmosphere."

One of the biggest criticisms of BioShock Infinite was that the brilliance of the story and its philosophical ideals clashes rather harsh with its face-grinding, blood-spraying, chaos-inducing gameplay. In fact the term to describe this conflict, ludonarrative dissonance, was coined in a critique of the original BioShock. BioShock Infinite is just one in a line of games to create a gap between a player’s conscious reality and fictional reality while being played.

The Burial at Sea DLC will take place before the fall of Rapture, meaning that whatever problem Booker and Elizabeth have to solve might set in motion the inevitable fall of the underwater city. How they plan to solve their problem without resorting to combat could be an interesting take to an immensely popular title.