PODCAST 14: CHALLENGE ROOM TRANSCRIPT

Elizabeth: Welcome to episode 14 of the BioShock podcast. I’m Elizabeth Tobey, community manager here at 2K, and today I’m talking to the guys at 2K Boston about challenge rooms in BioShock PS3. Hey guys, before we get started, how about you introduce yourselves and tell everyone your title and a little bit about what you did in the challenge rooms.

Dorian: My name is Dorian Hart, and a designer at 2K Boston and I’m the lead designer on the challenge room project.

Michael: I’m Michael Swiderek, and I’m an artist on the BioShock DLC.

E: You guys have recently announced challenge rooms for BioShock ps3. Can you explain what they are and give a brief overview for someone who’s never heard of them before?

D: Sure. Challenge rooms are basically standalone levels, each of which gives you some puzzles, some exploration, or combat. They have the ultimate goal to save a Little Sister in each one.

E: What made you guys decide to create the challenge rooms?

D: When we first got the project, to make downloadable content for BioShock, we brainstormed several dozen ideas. We had a wide range of stuff, but we had a certain set of criteria that most of those ideas didn’t meet. For one thing, we didn’t want the downloadable content to be something where you had to replay the entire game just to see small amounts of it. You know, adding new weapons or plasmids would’ve been fairly straightforward, but it’s not really right for a story-driven single player game like BioShock is. We wanted something that would offer new content right out of the box, so to speak. Something they could select from the main menu and just dive right into. We also wanted something that made good use of the BioShock toolset, which we spent a lot of time developing. We wanted something that made use of that in new and interesting ways, and encouraged player experimentation.

E: All the challenge rooms are going to be DLC, correct? None of them are going to be included in the full game?

D: That’s correct.

E: Going a little deeper into what the Challenge Rooms are, do these have anything to do with the story of BioShock? Will it expand on the storyline in any part?

D: Well, remember that BioShock’s storyline was a pretty carefully crafted and coherent piece of work. Honestly, I didn’t think we should mess around with it or try to shoehorn new characters or twists into the story, but we wanted the Challenge Rooms to look and feel and play like a BioShock product. So what we did was, we postulated that Sander Cohen, a character most BioShock players will probably remember fondly, had written a series of comic books about Little Sisters and danger and that the player would be playing out the fiendish setups of the comic stories. They’re kind of a fiction inside the fiction. They’re set in places that look like Rapture, but they’re new locations that we built for the downloadable content, and playing the game feels like playing a BioShock game, still, but it’s outside the narrative of the original game.

E: At E3, we saw a glimpse of one of the Challenge Rooms. Can you talk more about what was shown there, and specifically the challenges that you can reveal around this Challenge Room scenario?

D: That CR that was shown there is called “A Shocking Turn of Events.” The idea is that a Little Sister is trapped at the top of malfunctioning Ferris Wheel, and basically the player has to figure out several different ways to power it up. And of course, we don’t give the player ElectroBolt, which they’re probably all going to look for right away. Players will basically have to find other methods, like shooting it with electric buck from the shotgun or making use of trap bolts. And players, when they’re trying to solve this will have to find several different solutions, because they have to turn the wheel a whole bunch of times. We put in more solutions than are actually necessary to solve it, so there’s some freedom to mess around and try different things, but I don’t want to go into detail about what the solutions are.

E: Moving over to talk a bit about the art of creating the Challenge Rooms. We’ve seen the Ferris Wheel that is in this scenario before. Did you get to use a lot of art that didn’t make it into the full game to create these rooms? Did you create new art? What will you be looking at when you see these rooms?

M: Actually, we didn’t get to use much that didn’t make it into the full game. The Ferris Wheel was definitely an exception. Most of the art that didn’t make it into the first BioShock was cut for a reason, whether it was technical or us just narrowing in on the aesthetic of the game and it not fitting, or whatever. We did create a fair amount of new content for the downloadable portion of the game, whether it’s trim pieces or things that are specific to the gameplay of it.

E: In creating everything for the Challenge Rooms, what technically was the most difficult thing for you to build, design, conceptualize?

M: I wouldn’t say it was a specific thing, but the overall generation of content for the PS3 just has a slightly different pipeline, slightly different concerns, so as content developers, learning to work within that system and learning to generate things differently to get the most out of it probably was the biggest technical challenge for us.

E: Finally, just from your two opinions, what is your proudest achievement in creating these Challenge Rooms?

M: For me, I’d say the fact that I think we’ve been successful in creating something that is visually rich and as visually interesting as BioShock and lives within that world and basically gives the player an opportunity to revisit that world but in a different way.

D: I guess I’d say I’m proudest of the level of polish we’ve managed to achieve in such a short time. We’ve had a very tight cycle of testing iteration, trying to just nail all the details, both on the design side and the art side, and I think the whole team has done a really fantastic job making sure it plays smoothly and looks beautiful. I guess I’d say I’m most proud of the attention to detail.

E: Well, I want to thank you guys for being with me today and talking about the Challenge Rooms, and thanks for all your hard work.

D: You’re quite welcome.

M: Thank you.