BioShock Infinite Release Date Delayed To February

BioShock Infinite will not be part of this holiday season's lineup after all. 2K Games announced this morning that they're pushing the first-person shooter's release date to February 2013.

Infinite was originally slated for a mid-October release. Now it's scheduled for a February 26th worldwide launch.

"When we announced the release date of BioShock Infinite in March, we felt pretty good about the timing," said Irrational Games creative director Ken Levine. "Since then, we've uncovered opportunities to make Infinite into something even more extraordinary. Therefore, to give our talented team the time they need to deliver the best Infinite possible, we've decided to move the game's release to February."

My first guess is that they're going to add multiplayer to the game. Levine hinted back in 2010 that they were considering an online component. However, he stressed that they would only do it if they could think of "something new." If they do include multiplayer, then, it will be a bit unconventional. In other words, it probably won't be anything like BioShock 2's multiplayer, which was fun but also kind of vanilla.

Multiplayer might make Infinite a more commercially viable game. However, BioShock never needed to be more than a single-player series for me. The best part of the first game, for me, was the initial bathysphere ride into Rapture. The process of exploring this dystopia and investigating what happened to it is what appealed to me. Fighting Big Daddies and splicers was fun, too, but it was of secondary importance. Infinite's multiplayer, no matter what form it takes, would be built around the shooter side of the game so I'm not hugely enthusiastic.

Who knows, maybe it isn't multiplayer, though. It's possible Irrational has thought of some other completely different feature to enhance the game. They might also be polishing what they already had. The only certain thing is that this delay sucks a lot.