It’s hard to separate BioShock from Rapture. When Irrational announced BioShock Infinite in 2010, many critics were surprised to see the franchise departing the iconic underwater city it launched in 2007, instead opting for the bright, wide open spaces of Columbia.

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“ Looking back at old levels that we had, it was like ‘we can’t really use any of this stuff,’ because everything was built to be broken.

Concept art of pre-fall Rapture.

“ Rapture after the fall is mostly lit by the greens and blues of the ocean, where here the colors of the interior space are very much about the lights in the space.

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“ For BioShock 1, Rapture was the main character. For Infinite, I will say that Elizabeth is the main character. Now we have our two leading ladies playing opposite each other.

While 2K Marin revisited Rapture in BioShock 2 and fans who have completed Infinite are well aware of its ties to BioShock’s original city, Irrational’s first proper return to Andrew Ryan’s failed utopia will come in Burial at Sea , the two-part story content revealed in July In an interview at Irrational, IGN spoke with creative director Ken Levine, lead animator Shawn Robertson and level designer Amanda Jeffrey about the process of returning to Rapture, including rebuilding assets from scratch in Infinite’s engine and comparisons to Columbia.“We’ve always wanted to see Rapture before the fall,” Robertson told IGN. “And we created these systems in Infinite that would allow you to walk through Main Street and the fair and interact with these people, so we had a bit of technology in place that would allow us to explore that. We quickly realized that everything that existed in Rapture was old and dilapidated and we kind of had to go back to the drawing book a little bit on, well, what does Rapture really look like without having its civil war taken place, and everything’s broken down, and broken windows, and water everywhere, and really take a step back and think about, ‘how does this feel? How airy is it? What are people doing, and how are people interacting with each other as they walk around?’ It was good to kind of break out of that, what people are doing in Columbia, and bring in some of that technology – though, not necessarily the aesthetics – over into Rapture and start exploring that space.”“Looking at the library and looking back at old levels that we had, it was like ‘we can’t really use any of this stuff,’ because everything was built to be broken and to have a patina on it and to be used,” Robertson added. “And these new objects that we’re building have to be beautiful and chrome, and big, bold statements that don’t have the patina on and are taken care of every day and are very much part of a living city. So we could use some of the underlying shapes and ideas that we had in BioShock 1, but really had to translate them into new areas and relearning what art deco really means, and not getting too noodly with tiny shapes. Really thinking big and bold.”“I don’t want to get too deep into the areas that the player will specifically be seeing and what they’ll be exploring, but we wanted to treat these areas like new because they are new, as opposed to ‘here’s this room with a giant pillar that’s broken down and the water gushing in,’” he continued. “When you start thinking about that in a pristine place, you’re changing enough of it that, for all intents and purposes on our side, it is a new object.”“We actually talked about palette a lot when we started on this DLC, about sort of the gem tones of the look and the kind of color saturation we’d have, the way the light would play off things,” Levine said. “Rapture after the fall is mostly lit by the greens and blues of the ocean, where here the colors of the interior space are very much about the lights in the space as compared to the lighting of the ocean. And I think that’s one thing the artists identified very quickly as a visual difference that this would have in identifying what pre-fall Rapture looks like.”“We definitely have some systems from Columbia that we bring over to Rapture, but really Rapture is its own place,” Robertson explained. “We don’t want to try to shoehorn technology from Columbia into Rapture just because we have it. You do have to switch gears, just like we switched gears when going from BioShock 1 into Infinite, going from dark corridors and ‘everything is dilapidated’ to this beautiful bright blue sky. Now we have to shift gears back into interior spaces, different coloring, different views outside the window, but still maintaining that everything is perfect and pristine.”“With Columbia, everything was open air, and if you went down a side corridor, you felt quite threatened,” Jeffrey said. “Whereas in Rapture, if you suddenly find yourself in a slightly more open area, you feel exposed. You want to be hiding in the shadows and keeping out of sight because you don't know what's going to be around the next corner. So I feel that they have very much a different tonal flavor in terms of game, in terms of oppression, in terms of the sort of taste of the world you have about it.”Despite the change of setting, Levine emphasized that Burial at Sea is still very much the story of Booker and Elizabeth. Like in Infinite, they remain the focus of the experience rather than the city itself.“BioShock 1 is about Rapture, really, and Infinite is about the characters, and I put this very much in the place of being about the characters,” he explained. “And that’s not to say we don’t wring the environment for all it’s worth, for every ounce of coolness we can get out of it. But the whole point of Infinite was moving on to tell a story about characters, and that doesn’t mean we have to back away from making that backdrop great, but it’s definitely Booker and Elizabeth.”“Elizabeth’s presence really is a defining factor as far as tying these two areas together, and that relationship comes out again,” Robertson explained. “The back-and-forth banter between Booker and Elizabeth, and in the way that she reacts to the world, although this way is a little different. She’s not wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, fresh-out-of-the-tower Liz. She’s different this time around, but some of their interactions definitely will feel familiar to those who have gone through Infinite. But again, we’re telling a different story. So, even though the underlying technology and the underlying voices are still the same and the actress is still the same, the actual story that we’re telling is going to be different. So, it’s a weird combination of the same but different, but I do think the presence of Elizabeth definitely helps tie that together.”“One of the things I’m most excited for in the first DLC is that the first half of it has no combat,” Levine teased. “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.”No specific release date has been announced for Burial at Sea’s first episode, but all of the content in BioShock Infinite’s Season Pass is due to arrive before the end of March 2014.Look out for more from our talk with Irrational on IGN next week. Until then, find out even more about BioShock Infinite in our wiki guide , and read about how playing as Elizabeth will change Infinite in our previous interview with Levine and Jeffrey.

Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following @garfep on Twitter or garfep on IGN.