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BioShock 2 Interview: Part One

2-May-2009 Jordan Thomas talks Rapture, hacking and having a big twist...

There are a lot of questions surrounding BioShock 2 right now.

So hey, let's ask those questions! With BioShock 2 drawing more and more attention as information is slowly dripfed to us, we decide to sit down with Jordan Thomas, the Creative Director at 2K Marin to cut through the hype and ask him... what's really going on with BioShock 2?

Thomas talks about Rapture, the return of old locations, big twists, linearity and... well, just read the interview!

Why decide to stay in Rapture?
It's threefold. In Bioshock 2, we wanted to go back to what people know about Bioshock 1 and kind of wall jump off their expectations. Secondly, the strong edge metaphor - I'm in a contained space and I have to move through that space to survive was something we thought worked really well. For anything with a "-Shock" in it, you know. Finally, as Hogie mentioned, we feel that Rapture is so core to Bioshock it has to feature in some form. It's one of the characters we don't want to let go.

When you finished developing first Bioshock, were you left wanting to make a sequel or was it only when the money came in that the sequel was thrust on you?
Man, let's see. I had just finished Cohen's big scene in Bioshock 1 when the art director Scott Sinclair wandered into the room. And he was all ablaze about the possibilities and we had this giant discussion that ended up going well into evening. And various parties would kind of stagger in and crawl out of the "what could we do?" conversation. We were pretty psyched about it, we didn't have a strong concrete plan for what it would until the Marin concept started to boil. But we always thought there was enough untold story, I mean it's a huge city and you only visit a few places in it in Bioshock. It seemed like fertile ground for more narrative.

Will there be the return of original locations that have decayed further?
You may have caught a familiar image from the demos. In that vein of making sure that the player of Bioshock 1 gets to appreciate the effects of chaos, kind of fractal-like from the top looking down on Rapture. Old sections have flooded and are being reclaimed by the ocean, and new sections that you've never seen before are closely linked to those. We're going to make sure you can see some of that familiarity but we're going to twist it in a way that makes it fresh for people who've already been there in Bioshock.

What about the way the story is told - will Bioshock 2 still use the voice on the radio and audio logs, that sort of story development?
We're doing a couple of different things. On one hand we think that radio play is super important, to the type of game Bioshock is for a couple of reasons. First is that we never want the player to stop moving, we want you as the player to wrap the story around the experience that is owned by you, and so radio works really well as a writer on top of the interactivity. On top of that, the ear is very easily immersed. Your detection mechanisms for real vs. not real are nowhere near what they are with the eye, and as much as possible we want to make this world feel like it is textured, it is genuine, and so the emotion coming across from somebody's voice and sound effects in the background lend further credence to the world around you.

But! We did get a lot of feedback in Bioshock that "so, y'know, a lot of story took place over the radio and when I met those people they were turning away in shadow and going 'no interviews please!'" So with Bioshock 2 we're actually going to make sure that you have some strong and unforgettable encounters with unspliced characters that you can develop genuine empathy for, who will not be trying to hide their face from the camera. They're very much front and centre. So there's a blend between that audio drama that rides very well on top of the Bioshock experience AND those moments where you were meant to connect with somebody and you've finally found them and you really need them to be genuinely delivered.

What about the pressure to have a big twist in the game? Do you now feel like you're obligated to trump that?
I'll say this. I can't talk a ton about Bioshock 2's approach to narrative specifically because it would spoil things for you. If your whole goal is to surprise the player, the best possible way to ruin it is to let them know there's a beartrap six feet in front of them. I will say that what I got out of the Bioshock twist as you call it was the unity, specifically that it spoke to the kind of game you were playing and it spoke to the kind of interactivity that was supported by the world and that is something I consider critical to the Bioshock series and I wouldn't ever want to let go.

Now you can walk around outside. One of the mechanics of Bioshock was you were trapped on a linear path. It enabled storytelling in very specific way. Does opening up also mean losing control?
We absolutely do have mechanisms in place. The story is our primary mechanism for controlling that path. I can't spoil a ton about why the edge metaphor can expand and remain more or less intact, but I can say that is a core part of the player's presence in the world and what makes him special. From there, you're just going to have to speculate for a while. (Laughs)

Big part of the gameplay was the hacking. Now you're a Big Daddy and can trash stuff, is hacking still a part of the game?
Absolutely. Somewhat, I guess, one of the core values of Bioshock an IP from Marin's POV and Australia teams working on the second one, is the sense of player identity, and the authorship of the identity being very much a consensual experience. That rather than stepping into the shoes of something that does one particular thing, we ask you a bunch of questions about what kind of player you are and support those choices. So hacking is part of that manipulator play style. Part of the play style that wants to have every advantage and kind of put the threats the world has to offer through an environmental Cusinart before laughing down at their decaying corpse and crushing the skull.

As a Big Daddy, you're a faster, more lean Big Daddy as the prototype, but you're still quite a burly character. So we're having to do new evolutions of the plasmid system, and some of the other systems like hacking, that allow you to further fork your play style and still play as a subtle player if you're interested. So for example in Bioshock one of the things we heard a lot was "I'm kind of the necromancer, I like having a bunch of pets following me around, and I wish I had the ability to develop more of a relationship with them." In Bioshock 2 most of the hacking-related tonics and hacking-related behaviours to further support that style rather than keeping you apace of the mini-game. So, one of the ones I think is cool actually allows you to heal your bots. So if you have one of your friendly bots flying around behind you, you've named it Spot, you wanna give it the odd pat on the head after a good fight, you can top it off and keep that one with you. And so coming back to your original question, things like hacking remain important because the player's expression, and we're trying to make Bioshock 2 a more expressive game, rather than a less expressive game just because you happen to play as an iconic character.

Does hacking still use the Pipe Dreams-esque minigame?
A: We're still working on the exact details of hacking circa Bioshock 2. We're not really willing to go deep into those yet because I don't want to tell you guys something and have it come out and be radically different. But we're examining it closely and we want to be sure that it scales well.

Come back on Monday for part 2 when Thomas talks Big Daddy, Big Sister and multiple endings!

Tristan Ogilvie