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Feature

BioShock 2 Interview: Part Two

4-May-2009 Jordan Thomas talks Big Daddy, Big Sister and multiple endings...

Want to know about BioShock 2? You've come to the right place.

So you've read through Part One of our interview, where Creative Director at 2K Marin, Jordan Thomas, has talked about returning to Rapture, big twists and the hacking mini-game.

Now we'll get him to talk about the big changes. Playing as a Big Daddy, fighting the Big Sister... and, of course, the whole issue of what they're going to do with the ending.

About the demo, there's a moment where the splicer gets freaked-out and just runs...
Haha, the drill emote!

Is that a scripted thing?
Yes it is. The splicers fleeing from you is something that actually can occur when they get pared down enough. We're still tuning right now the degree to which that happens when you're dealing with the sort of yard trash splicers.

They'll actually be intimidated if you're one-on-one?
You're a Big Daddy. It's an important part of the fantasy that occasionally you get to see them react to that with genuine fear. The demo one specifically if you look closely you can tell he's got an extra sort of special animation, but that's something that we feel like - if I'm going to be a big daddy, there's no way that everybody wants to fight me with the exact same fervour when I was Jack Hands with my chain tattoo.

In terms of the other Big Daddies, are they also proto-Big Daddys and have more powers?
Absolutely not. Big Daddys in Bioshock 2... as I say there have been big changes, I can't talk about them yet, but the player is unique. And the prototype model is much more versatile and it's one of the things that differentiates you and makes it very clear that from the word go there's nothing else quite like you. And that's one of the things that informs your relationships with the Little Sisters and to the Big Sister.

Is the harvesting siege the standard encounter with the Big Sister?
It's environmental, the dynamic sieges, are truly systemic, they actually pull from the environment you're already in. So if the environment you're currently in is full of top predators, the new splicers we've been talking about, it will take from those and balance the encounter accordingly. As you go through the game, new enemies are introduced, and those enemies change quite a lot. And when you reach a threshold, when you've gone through enough Little Sisters, you have another dynamic encounter with the Big Sister. She's the one who will hunt you and you have this countdown to prepare, you'll hear this creepy little girl voice over the radio talking about the fact the Big Sister is coming.

Does that happen regardless of if you harvest? Does Big Sister show up with roughly same frequency?
Still has interest in you. Still tuning the amount of interest she has in gathering vs. harvesting vs. saving and so on. Actually have independent control of all those. Thing that wouldn't happen would be if you didn't use the Little Sister to gather with, you don't create the dynamic sieges, you just get the Big Sister interactivity. It's all pretty much opt-in, we still really want to strongly motivate the player to get Adam, but we feel that consent is so core to Bioshock that we made sure it was part of both the adoption gameplay and the Big Sister gameplay.

For the first game, the pre-release hype was very self-consciously intellectual. Are you doing the same this time? This one's based on a different work, that sort of thing? Or was that just scene-setting for Rapture as a concept?
I think - so as far as Bioshock narratives are concerned, I think there's a kind of iceberg model where there's the part of it that's above sea level and there's the vast shape that's beneath sea level, and it's critical to Bioshock that the idea that inform our characters are ideas from the real world and they invite the player to think if he or she is interested. And so if Bioshock was anything to me it was an indightment of extreme, and Bioshock 2 has to introduce some fresh ideas, right, and they will be presented in a similarly extreme form.

As in....?
Well, so Bioshock is very much rational self-interest in the form of objectivism, Randian perspective set against characters like Tenenbaum who had come through a kind of redemptive arc and ended up in an altruistic space. Well, there's a lot of texture to altruism, and it all provides a pretty good foil for the kind of mythos of Rapture and the ideas it was based on. I can't go into a ton of detail, because it would spoil the plot, but I will say it's very important to me that the player of Bioshock 2 gets introduced to ideas in the way they probably were in Bioshock 1. Or at LEAST introduced to a cool take on those new ideas.

Big Sister. In the demo, Tenenbaum refers to her as her infecting other people.
Making Little Sisters...

So she doesn't duplicate in the sense of making more Big Sisters. There's only one.
Right. But she is making new Little Sisters from girls she's abducting from all around the world. She's basically jump-starting Rapture, returning it to the place of her memories.

Do you think that Rapture and Bioshock are so tightly linked, if there were a Bioshock 3 that would be another story within Rapture?
I think Rapture remains fertile for as much expansion as a team sees in it. I absolutely belive that there might be future games set in Rapture in whatever time period, but I would also say that I think that the Bioshock brand is big enough that it could evolve. Currently, we find Rapture fascinating, that a city that large begs further exploration, a city with that much history, but I can't speak to specific sequels past Bioshock 2 now, but I could speculate and say merely that the type of experience that type of experience Bioshock is is flexible enough to see lots of expansion down the road, and a lot of different directions. Whatever it is, it has to surprise the player. Whether you stay in Rapture, or go elsewhere, it's got to bring you somewhere unlike anywhere else, unlike any other game. So there's a pretty broad range if that's your thesis statement, right?

I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on Bioshock movie, because first game was sort of a beacon as how great storytelling can be done in games and how arguably superior it can be to film, especially when you don't do 20-minute cutscenes and all that stuff. So, what are your thoughts on the movie?
I'll say this. We're not really talking a ton about the movie, it's really early days and so it's difficult to say where it'll go. I will say that I think the ideas that Rapture was founded out of, the kind of mad rush into kind of frankly, post-religious thinking - Andrew Ryan was very much this kind of villain who was a sceptic, about altruism in all forms being a kind of lie. That is a compelling narrative on any kind of axis and you can tell a good story there. What they do with the medium to make it work in film is very much up to the creativity of that team. I would hesitate to endight anything because it comes in a different shape to a videogame. My instinct will be that Bioshock will be pretty damn compelling source material to any medium.

How does it feel to have someone else take your team's baby and adapt it? Are you apprehensive?
Well, we have a ton of respect for the team involved, from there we're all just very curious.

Given the ending was considered one of the low points of the original game, that players got to the ending at all in the numbers that they did is still quite impressive. Are you going to shoot to have the twist at the end, have a wizz-bang ending?
I will never point to where any possible twist would occur! I will say this, though, you guys are pretty savvy Bioshock dudes, and your questions are pretty targeted, so... I was referring early on to kind of greater moral agency and the ability to kind of author your role in the narrative, more so, in Bioshock 2.

I am very interested in allowing the player more control, more intentionality in the way the game is resolved. In Bioshock 1 the game had a pretty binary ending and there was a point where it was irreversable and you were put into Box A or Box B. This time around, my goal is to make sure that along the way when the player is making choices that are going to resonate in the end-game, they're aware of it every step of the way. They have elected to choose where they want to end up, to choose what box they end up in. I will also say that Box A and B were so broad and so sweeping in what they were saying about you that they maybe weren't as targeted as they could have been. And so my goal this time will be to have enough boxes and have enough agency over the decision points that when you get there you are satisfied with the way your destiny is resolved.

So there'll be a given number of multiple endings and you'll know which one you're heading towards?
That is my goal, absolutely.

Jon Hicks