COMMUNITY Q&A 3
The next Community Q&A is now here. These answers come directly from Ken, and the questions range from particular devices used to tell story in BioShock to what Ken has been playing recently.
And, to keep you updated on the NEXT Q&A, I've been collecting more questions from the forums, but if you have another question for Ken or the team, I'll be up in Boston again in April, and will try to get an answer for whatever question you have. Send me an email and I’ll add it to my list.
Burning Crusade with my new Draenei and some Titan Quest expansion.
Mercenaries, Syndicate, Goldeneye are just some of the game influences that helped inspire BioShock.
There will always be innovation and there will always be people out to make a buck. I feel lucky to be allowed the budget and resources to try to innovate.
We have two separate teams working to make each set of gamers feel at home in BioShock no matter what sku they play. Remember our last game was a PC shooter. We’re customizing the controls and HUD for each version.
We’ve been really lucky that for the most part, by the time we realized something wasn’t working, we had a new idea that was so much cooler we didn’t have any second thoughts about moving on.
By far the Little Sister and Big Daddy relationship really showcases the AI ecology we’ve labored over in BioShock. Seeing this walking tank gently help the Little Sisters is touching and yet creepy at the same time. And it continues to evolve according to the situation, you can see their protective behavior when the Sisters are threatened giving BioShock this whole new experience of emotional attachment in an FPS. In addition, the enemy AI’s have believable reactions to their circumstances. For instance, AI’s will react to dead bodies they find in their patrols or if they are set on fire, they will run to a body of water and throw themselves in to put out the fire.
There’s about a zillion ways we tell the story of Rapture. The first, most important way is what you see. The rule was that every AI should tell a story. Even the dead are communicating a piece of the Rapture puzzle. For instance, a player might come into a bedroom and there are the corpses of a couple in a final embrace. They have the photo of young woman between them, and there are several bottles of pills on the nightstand. That’s a story.
Diaries are found everywhere in Rapture that might tell you about places in the city you’ve haven’t even seen yet. You might encounter a ghost like resonance of a victim, playing out their final moments of life. You might encounter desperate survivors, wheeling and dealing with you for one last chance to make it out of the city.
BioShock is gamer driven, not designer driven. Players have the choice to turn these systems off.
