The creator of BioShock Infinite has responded to criticism about the length of newly released Burial at Sea Episode 1 DLC.

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“ I think if [length] is your primary metric, this probably isn't the thing for you.

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“ I never pick the particularly smart approach. 'Hey, let's not build Rapture, let's build Columbia. Hey, now let's build Rapture but completely afresh with new assets and a new engine.'

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Speaking to Eurogamer , Ken Levine acknowledged that while the new content can be finished in under a couple of hours despite the $15 price tag, the team had focused on quality rather than quantity."If you zip through it then it's not a hugely long experience but if you dig deep it's probably three hours plus, if you really dig deep," he said. "It's not the longest thing in the world."I'm very respective of people's time and money. Journalists often ask me to tell their audience why they should buy something. I'm always very uncomfortable with that question because I don't read people's household budgets and I can't tell them what they should buy. We chose quality over quantity. As a gamer that's a choice I usually make. Very few people would judge a movie based on how long it is."Though the first part of Burial at Sea can be finished in less than two hours, even players who take their time and search for every Easter egg will most likely have seen all there is to see by the three hour mark. When compared with the meaty BioShock 2 DLC Minerva's Den, some may be horrified by the comparative brevity of Infinite's DLC, but Levine has explained why this time around he opted for a different approach."We had a choice," he explained. "Minerva's Den is terrific - I love it and it is effectively what we call a 'kebash' of BioShock 2. They take existing assets and modify them to make a new story. They did an amazing job with that. But we wanted to do something completely different. If you look at it, [Burial at Sea] is really the first level and a half of a new game - or maybe not a new game, but of a sequel. And we knew that meant it wouldn't be the longest gameplay experience."[From early on] we knew we wanted to do something with Booker and Elizabeth and we had a sense that Rapture could be the thing. And probably foolishly we thought we'd go back in and 'kebash' a load of BioShock 1 assets. Then we thought no, god, that's a terrible idea, that's not fair and it's not going to look good."I never pick the particularly smart approach. 'Hey, let's not build Rapture, let's build Columbia. Hey, now let's build Rapture but completely afresh with new assets and a new engine. Hey, let's take all of game systems we designed in Infinite and modify them so they belong in Rapture. So we have basically three versions of BioShock combat now - BioShock 1 combat, BioShock Infinite combat and the hybrid that appears in Burial at Sea."We have this new engine so we should take advantage of it. And, hey, let's make all the shops and build 3D scenes out of the window which we never had in BioShock 1. And let's put people in the world and make it all huge and shiny and build everything fresh - or almost everything fresh. So yeah, we got carried away a little bit, I won't deny it. But, hey, I don't want to work on something that I feel is kind of a B in quality. You might as well go for it. The company is okay with it, so why the hell not?"If you haven't seen it yet, our review of BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea Episode 1 is live now

Luke Karmali is IGN's UK Junior Editor. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on IGN and on Twitter