BioShock Vita won't be a port, may be partially outsourced

Reaffirming that a planned BioShock game on Vita won't be a port of an existing game, Ken Levine has said some development may be outsourced - but only if the right partners can be found.

"There are never enough resources to do anything, you know? We're always stretched," the Irrational Games boss told Joystiq, adding that the Vita game could "potentially" be made with assistance from a third-party - but not if it lowers the bar.

"We have a Metacritic average of something like 88 or 89 percent. And the way you do that is you're very careful with your bets. We made that bet and now we're very carefully proceeding to make sure that it's a game that stands tall within the franchise," he said.

"It's just hard to find the right partners or the right people to hire."

The technical realities of Vita - while impressive - mean a vanilla BioShock game is out of the question, and Levine has no intention of stripping the game back in order to squeeze it onto a handheld."

"It has to sort of have its own voice in the franchise. If it just feels like a quieter voice in the franchise, I don't think that works. For us," he added.

"I think there's room for every kind of game and every kind of approach. But just for what we do, I'd rather do something that's an experiment and that's a little different. And is unique for the franchise."

In earlier comments, Levine had said the Vita project is "its own thing being built from the ground up".

Levine announced the Vita game at E3 2011, alongside Move support for the PlayStation 3 version of BioShock Infinite in one of Sony's famous word-eating reversals.

Thanks, Kotaku.