BioShock Infinite Claims Infinite PC Bells And Whistles

After reading Alec's impressions of BioShock's star-spangled salvo against American exceptionalism, I got quite excited. So of course, I proceeded to do what any rational, well-adjusted human being would: list off all the potential ways it could go horribly, horribly wrong. Nefarious hacker code theft, of course, was up there, as were natural disasters, a scenario in which total destruction of Infinite was the only way to disarm a city-obliterating bomb, and the very real possibility that Ken Levine replaced all the audio diaries with recordings of himself taunting us about how there's never going to be another Freedom Force. Or, you know, it could just straight up not work. But that last one, at least, seems significantly further outside the realm of possibility than the others, as Irrational's suggested that BioShock Infinite's PC version will actually work quite well.

You'll remember that the original BioShock - aka, Irrational's previous game - played Little Sister to Games For Windows Live's abhorrent Big Daddy and came saddled with field of view restrictions regardless of which resolution you played in. This time around, however, Irrational's not cutting any corners. Technical director Chris Kline explained:

"Fifteen years ago, Irrational Games got its start making PC games, and the PC gaming experience has always been near and dear to our hearts. But it’s been a long time since we released the original BioShock, and PC gamers have come to expect a lot more for their money."

"We’ve fully embraced widescreen gaming. With our implementation of 'horizontal plus' widescreen support, the wider you go, the more you’ll see of Columbia’s gorgeous vistas. And for the true aficionado, we support multi-monitor gaming with AMD Eyefinity, NVIDIA Surround, and Matrox TripleHead2Go. You’ll also have separate controls for aspect ratio, resolution, and display mode (fullscreen, windowed, and fullscreen windowed)."

Also on the rather predictable, but still much appreciated list: full support for both DirectX 10 and 11, six graphical presets, full custom graphics options, day-one high-res textures, and Steam Cloud support. So basically, it's yet another standard bearer for how triple-A PC support should work.

Well, assuming it does all actually work, anyway. We won't know for sure until March 26th, but things certainly seem to be looking up. Could BioShock Infinite finally usher in the era of lovably, regrettably-un-squeezably soft videogame clouds we've all been waiting for? Fingers crossed. But not these fingers. They're really icky.