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Ken Levine: Our feeling was, we never came up with a reason why there should be a thirdperson mode. The word mode in general always makes me nervous because movies don't have modes and books don't have modes, and we're one of the few storytelling mediums that has modes and I'm not really sure why... it should just be as organic as possible and this game just never had a reason to have it.

Xavier Garcia: What was the most challenging part of the design process? What features were cut in the last minute to accommodate the schedule?

KL: It was a weird combination of almost everything being challenging because we were doing so much stuff that people haven't done before. There's so much simulation  Big Daddy and Little Sister, their relationship... if a Little Sister gets in trouble the Big Daddy picks her up and puts her behind him or actually throws her up on his shoulder. Can you imagine how much work that was? Oh my God  it was so much work.

The big thing we cut in the beginning was all this environmental stuff that we originally planned to do, but then we came back in a different way. We originally had all these other ways to do environmental stuff but we came back in I think a much more direct much better way later on, so that was the only thing.

Philippe Buteau: Are you worried that BioShock is too complicated for your average FPS player? Or are you fine with only getting the attention, and in turn the dollars, of the HalfLife and System Shock fans?
KL: That was a huge concern when we were building this because this game has so much depth and we always want depth without complexity... We focus tested months beforehand and that was always my concern. We actually ended up moving the complexity earlier in the game because I think we [initially] overreacted to previous games we had worked on. We have this dynamic training system; we have a very sort of deliberate introduction of game systems as it goes on and by the time you get to the third or fourth level you're playing with everything. But we actually ended up moving some stuff  the medical pavilion  up earlier because the focus testers were like, Dude, come on! I get it. I get it! And I think the guys did a really good job of training people and introducing things and our dynamic training system is usually helpful there.

You know, my wife brought an old friend of hers who had never played a videogame before, since Pong, to [a recent press event]  and he had never touched firstperson shooter or a 3D game before  and we couldn't drag him off of it until 1:00 in the morning at the event, so I think we really knocked that one out of the park.

Mike Thomsen: I'd like to know about how you approached putting together the soundtrack, both musically and the soundscape, given the openended nature of the gameplay. Is music used to cue certain enemies or important objects/areas, or is it all an organic loop?

KL: It's a mix. We have certain music cues that are very specific when we want an emotional moment, usually when the player first sees something or first has an encounter of a certain kind. And there are some inengine scripted sequences that we support with music really well. There's also a huge amount of ambient stuff. We licensed a ton of period music, which if you saw the E3 demo you got a sense of some of that. That's just coming in now; we just finished our licensing pass. We also have just a huge amount of great sound and great sound effects like announcements to the world and audio advertisements from Rapture that you just hear around the world. So, the audio space is very full and for us the challenge is usually making sure it doesn't get overcrowded, not as compared to most games where it's just like occasionally you hear a cool sound.

James H: The A.I. in BioShock seems very complex. What was the biggest hurdle in balancing the A.I.?
KL: Well, there's balancing it in terms of how much damage [enemies] do, and then there's sort of making them work properly and making them work to our intentions. Like for instance, you saw those teleporter guys who were in the X06 demo. They turned out to be really tough and really hard to hit, which we wanted them to be because they're teleporting around, but they ended up having too many hit points, so it got to be very frustrating. We knocked them back a bit... Last cannons is the term we use for them because they deal a huge amount of damage and they're really hard to hit, but if you get 'em just right you can knock 'em down.

But in terms of the A.I. itself, getting it all to work, we're still working on things and we just included a feature where if a melee guy comes up to you and you have a pistol or range weapon out, he'll attack you or he might even run off  but if you've got a melee weapon out he'll come up to you and he'll even taunt you because he knows you can't hit him at range. So he's kind of aware of what weapon you have out. Then we have Big Daddy and Little Sister  you've seen a lot about them and their relationship is very complicated to get right, but I think we're really there with them. 
 

 

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