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Irrational Games have said on its forums that its upcoming game, Bioshock Infinite, will run on a modified version of Unreal Engine 3, and also went on to explain the benefits that will come from the decision.

Here’s Irrational Games technical director, Chris Kline:

We’re talking about a world where entire buildings are moving around in the sky, you’re fighting AIs at 90mph on Sky-Lines as you dangle high above the earth, and racing through vicious weather to rescue Elizabeth while battling your way through hordes of enemies determined to stop you at any cost,” he said on the developer’s site’s forums. “Right from the outset we realized that this was going to be a monumental undertaking on the tech side, but decided it was a challenge that we simply had to take on in order to give gamers the kind of quality experience they’ve come to expect from Irrational Games and BioShock.”

He also said that the original Bioshock game was released on a modified version of Unreal Engine 2.5, but that it became outdated on engineers wanted to stick with Unreal Engine, so they modified the latest offering, Unreal Engine 3.

“Everything in Columbia is capable of moving,” he said. “The very ground beneath your feet could fall out of the sky at any moment, which makes for some awesome gameplay and visuals but required us to create a completely new technology that we’re calling ‘Floating Worlds’. You saw a little of this in the gameplay video(s) and you’ll be seeing a lot more of it in the future.”

“To meet the aesthetic goals of our art team, our rendering gurus had to write a whole new renderer for BioShock Infinite based on deferred lighting and on top of that they’ve developed a proprietary per-pixel dynamic relighting scheme that allows characters and dynamic objects to receive global illumination.”

Interesting read there.

Bioshock Infinite comes available in 2012 for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.