LAST Q&A
Last week, I rounded up some of your questions on the 2K forums to compile a final Q&A with the BioShock team. And while there were way more questions than we had time to answer in depth, I pulled some of the best ones and sat down with Ken during Wizard World this weekend too give you one more Q&A before BioShock ships. Enjoy!
We wanted to do a game that brought forth the spirit of other games we had created before, but expand on them and really bring them into the next generation. We really wanted Rapture to start in the post-war period, after World War II, and the 1960s was a natural choice. The art and architecture of the period was so rich and a draw to our artists.
Oh yeah. All game development has that happen. Either it’s awesome or it’s out. The only things we ever took out we ditched because they weren’t awesome, or it wasn’t up to the standards of everything else in the game. The game was to be consistently “wow” the entire time.
No, to us this is just another way to reach a new genre of fans. We wanted to make a great game that would draw in new fans but that would be totally comfortable for our older players. And I think as a gamer we pulled that off.
It wasn’t really a juggle. We thought SS2 was a great game, it just wasn’t a great shooter. So we kept everything that was great in SS2 and added the great shooter part. And we had way more time and way more money than we had when making SS2. BioShock is a game we would have liked to have made 10 years ago if we had the resources.
No, but we learned a huge amount about realistic melee combat from making the X06 BioShock trailer and the artists studied that video in detail during the Splicer and Big Dadddy combat in first person. We incorporated a that vibe into actual gameplay.
All Splicers gauge the combat situation and act appropriately, including running to medical machines to heal themselves. Of course, you could hack the medical machines to poison the Splicer instead.
It makes the game different.
No. just like in SS2 it is a tool to gauge how effective your attacks are.
BioShock is an extremely open playing environment with lots of player-driven objectives. You can literally spend over 10 hours doing stuff that has nothing to do with the quests. And that’s not even counting just exploring the environment and taking in the amazing sights of Rapture.
As fans of horror movies we believe that sometimes a sense that something is going to happen is often scarier than simulating it happening. You see in the beginning of the game – we give a sense of drowning to the player – and the rest of the game we hold that threat over his head.
BioShock is not a System Shock game. However, we were the developers of System Shock 2. BioShock advances literally every design principle(and much, much more) that we establish in our previous games and then some.
It’s wonderful to come out of the shadows after working on this game for so long and realize that we weren’t entirely crazy. We love that people get what we were trying to do and feel that the hard work was vindicated. However, the real reward will be watching the reaction of the gaming community when they get the full game.
People are now taking vacations. Personally my wife and I are looking forward to time off, but right now with promoting the game we haven’t had a chance.
The launch party is going to be an amazing event to celebrate all the hard work we have put in on the publisher and developer side of the game, as well as celebrate all the fans and bloggers who have stuck with us and supported each update, video, and trailer we have put out over the past few months. We’re going to pull out all the stops to make the event feel very Rapturian and give BioShock the party it deserves. It’s really going to be nice to see everything come together and toast to you guys – our fans – and thank you for helping us make this game.
