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BioShock 2's Creative Director On The 'Balancing Act' of Making a Sequel

Posted February 5, 2010 by James Brightman

IG: Morality in video games seems to be something that more developers are dealing with. Lionhead and BioWare both seem to incorporate it, and obviously the first BioShock gave gamers the choice to either harvest or save the Little Sisters. What's your take as a developer on dealing with morality in games? Do you feel that games need to have these choices or that developers have some obligation to show consequences for actions?

JT: I don't think it's an obligation; I think it's a variable worth considering. Games do not need to have any particular form of choice. I have no desire for a “harvest/rescue” prompt to pop up over a ghost in Pac-Man. That said, I do feel like personal catharsis and self-expression are values that become more interesting to you as you age, and the average gamer who buys a 360/PS3 game is climbing. The desire to learn something about yourself from the way in which you participated in a simulated subset of reality by anybody's rules is something that I think is more mature but it's gaining steam. In BioShock 2, we have increased both the granularity and – for lack of a better term – ambiguity of several of those choices. Your relationship with the Little Sisters carries now the flavor of fatherhood, and they afford you instant parent trust. And that really changes the way you behave around them; you can adopt them and take them around with you and gather Adam together, and then you have to decide their ultimate fate.

But that's more of an iteration, whereas what's entirely new is the presence of characters like Grace Holloway, for example, who was based on [1930s blues singer] Bessie Smith and she lives in Pauper's Drop. And she is an enemy of yours who has a lot of prejudices, but her hatred of you is partially based on a misunderstanding. By the time you arrive, in her lair essentially, you have been exposed to her at her worst and you have to kind of decide what to do with her. And in so doing, you're shaping the outcome of the story.

IG: It seems like mature content like BioShock is having a tough time finding a home on the Wii. Was there any thinking about trying to bring the BioShock property to the Wii?

JT: Nothing beyond speculation presently. Anything that's brought to the Wii tends to need to be purpose built, or fairly fundamentally re-architected. There are few games that use Unreal that made it across to the Wii. It doesn't mean that it's out of the sphere of possibility, but it's not something we considered for BioShock 2.

IG: Yeah, a number of publishers have pulled back on Wii core games lately.

JT: Well, I hear [Silent Hill] Shattered Memories is supposed to be pretty bad ass. Every friend of mine seemed to simultaneously text me (which is creepy in its own right) to tell me to play that game.

IG: In terms of the online component, you've now added multiplayer to BioShock, but what do you feel is the next step? Could we see something like an MMO in the BioShock universe potentially?

JT: Personally, I value the intimacy of the BioShock experience. I have not seen an MMO successfully convey that, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. I would be more interested – speaking purely hypothetically – in a BioShock- like game that explored more personal cooperative play, rather than a big amusement park style design.

IG: Any final thoughts on BioShock 2 before we wrap?

JT: Well, our big goal with this sequel was to imbue Rapture with new mystery without sacrificing its integrity, which was a balancing act. What we kind of rallied around was the desire to bring player choice to the fore in a first-person shooter, and in a polished, visually compelling first-person shooter. And I think we've succeeded at offering the player hard choices without strapping them down and saying, “Hey, we've got all this backstory we want to dump on you.” I think it's balanced very well and the narrative doesn't get in your way. So it'll still feel like BioShock despite the fact that you are shaping the outcome of act three in a much more dramatic way. Similarly, your choices in the mechanic space are a lot more detailed – as you begin to invest in this tool or that tool, it becomes more spectacular over time and continues to change tactically. That, to me, is another success metric because we're seeing people favor groups of tools that are complementary in a way that wasn't as prevalent in the first game because there wasn't as much interconnectivity between them or tactical variation as you went through the game. So we're proud of those things.

IG: Finally, now that you're about to ship the game, how do you guys measure the feedback from gamers, from the press and apply it to what you're doing next? What's the process like for you in these next few weeks?

JT: We pay attention to reviews and the 2K forums, and there's a huge amount of anecdotal feedback that filters back slowly. We look at focus groups and what achievements or trophies they get – things that basically tell us which decisions they made, as well as concepts that they found easy to grasp or places they got stuck. And we compile a big kind of post-mortem, for lack of a better term, on the project's successes and failures. We try to boil that wisdom down to something we can build into the core values of the next project.

IG: Great, thanks for all your time today. Good luck with the game's launch!

 

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.