BioShock Exclusive Q&A - Story, Emergent Gameplay, and Optimizing for the Xbox 360 and PC
We sit down with Irrational Games' general manager, Ken Levine, to talk story, characters, design, and gameplay in BioShock in this exclusive interview.
Irrational has made a name for itself by creating highly open-ended games that combine elements of action, role-playing, and stealth, among other things. The studio is now hard at work on its upcoming hybrid action game, BioShock, which will place players in the ruins of an undersea settlement in the mid-20th century. According to the game's story, the settlement, known as Rapture, was supposed to be a social paradise where the strongest, smartest, and most beautiful members of society went off to live under the ocean, free of strife (and all that pesky government regulation). Everything seemed to be going well, until the inhabitants of the undersea city discovered the secret of genetic manipulation through a substance called "adam," which the inhabitants began to use to augment their already-peak physiques and minds.
The result was a disaster that has ruined the city, turned many of its inhabitants into homicidal, mutant monsters known as "splicers," and left behind a bizarre, three-part ecology in which recycled genetic materials are sought out by splicers and harvested from the corpses of Rapture by young gatherers known as "little sisters," who are guarded by powerful soldiers known as "big daddies." The game will let players explore the city in the wake of its crisis, pick up genetic enhancements for themselves to grant them mutant powers, and use enhancements for their weapons to defend themselves using first-person shooter gameplay. Irrational general manager Ken Levine explains.
GameSpot: Give us a brief update on the game's development.
Ken Levine: Right now, our focus is on the levels--getting them fleshed out so we have a fully playable game from start to finish. Then, we can move on to balancing and tuning stuff, which we'll be spending a huge amount of time on, as you can imagine.
We're also really working on the artificial intelligence to get it to "think," because one of the coolest, and most challenging, things about this game is all the interactions that AI [characters] can have, because of all the relationships they have with each other. The more complex you make your AI, and the more things you enable it to do, the more you have to make sure it does those things well. And because it's so emergent, things happen all the time that make us say, "Whoa!" It's sometimes what we want, and sometimes we end up in the Land of Weird Bugs. So, we're putting in a huge amount of work into our AI...much more than on any other game we've ever done. But it's definitely going to be worth it.
GS: Let's talk a bit about the story. Tell us about the world of Rapture--what's the general level of technology, and in what time period does the game take place?
KL: The game takes place around 1960. It's hard to answer the question of exactly what level of technology is available in the world because it's not really concurrent with any actual historical progression. This is a society that split off from the rest of the world after World War II. But, these people also cut themselves off with the best and the brightest technologists of the time, and they went off to build this utopia called Rapture.
So, you have the best and the brightest people, and you have no government constraints on technology. There's nobody in the government scratching their heads about stem cell research or cloning--[the citizens of Rapture] just do it. It's the nature of the social system they have down there...which is "business first, business first, business first."
So, between the brilliant technologists, no government restrictions, and the discovery of this sea slug, "adam," (which can essentially make stem cells out of human cells) at the bottom of the ocean, [the citizens of Rapture] have gone in a different direction than, and far beyond, where general society was headed, in many areas.
GS: We understand that Rapture itself is more or less deserted, and that the whole place has started to break down. How will the damage to the city affect the gameplay?
KL: The primary thing that players will see is the visual tension between the idealized, beautiful city that was created, and what actually happened to it--how it's falling apart. We're not using the world to create the usual action game with destructible environments where you carve through walls as a major part of gameplay. We're also not making the kind of game that has tons of "water puzzles," because that's a little hackneyed. Just because you're under the sea doesn't mean you need gameplay like that--we're not making a Mario [platformer action] game or anything.
Water does have some gameplay elements, like how some levels and obstacles are laid out, but it's primarily a story theme and a visual theme... That's "Theme" with a capital "T."
GS: What can you tell us about the character one plays as in BioShock? Who is the player character, and why is he or she down there?
KL: You've been asking me this question for several years. [Laughs.] I think you even asked me that when we talked about BioShock when we first revealed the game on GameSpot. [Laughs.] I don't think I can give you the answer without ruining the story, though.
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