Questions answered for the highly anticipated Bioshock 2
Bioshock is just around the corner and before the release, we had a privilege of being in a conference call with the Developers of Bioshock 2 were we listened to many questions being answered. The team we got to speak to during the call was:
2K Marin’s Creative Director – Jordan Thomas
Lead Designer – Zak McClendon
MP Lead Programmer – Jesse Attard.
Lead Environment Artist – Hogarth De La Plante.
On the Multiplayer side we had from Digital Extremes:
MP Art Director – Mat Tremblay
To start off the call, Jordan gave us a quick synopsis for Bioshock 2:
Bioshock 2 takes place 10 years after the events of the first game. The player takes on the role of a prototype Big Daddy called subject Delta. He is separated from the Little Sister and wakes up 10 years later to find it to be a much more dangerous place. He comes into conflict with Dr. Sofia Lamb, an altruist and a former political rival of Andrew Ryan. She united the city into a cult called the Rapture Family and the player, as an individual, became a big threat to her plan.
The multiplayer takes place between the years of 1959 and 1960. You take on the role of the average citizens of Rapture, thrown into that conflict. You grow your character and participate it in that classic BioShock play, but in a much more therapeutical Utopian, you take on the city before the war tore it apart.
Beware the Big Sister.
And now, The questions:
How does the sequel expand on the original BioShock Story?
Jordan: A few different ways. The focus here is on choice and that the player is defined by the moment he was granted free will this time around, in contrast to the original. Unlike other Big Daddies, Delta is not enslaved to the city and you’ll have to make a number of ethical decisions which shape the outcome of the plot in a way that wasn’t possible in the original. Andrew Ryan is now dead and in his place, Dr. Sofia Lamb has control. She is a very different thinker, kind of based on John Stewart Miller or Karl Marx. She is unwilling to allow any individual to compromise her plan.
What are the elements from BioShock that you most wanted to keep and what were the aspects that you most wanted to improve upon?
Zak: The big stuff that we obviously wanted to keep from BioShock, from a gameplay perspective, was the focus of a sort of clear choice and getting the kind of role, your own shooter, and play the game you wanted to play and the diversity of that tool set. The deep story with the actual sort of moral choice.
From the gameplay perspective that we were trying to improve was a lot of that core gameplay and make it more accessible to people in the way that you can combine your weapons and plasmids at the same time. We also wanted to deepen the growth mechanics of the game. You can upgrade all of your plasmids by three levels, they have new functionality as you go through the game. The tonics are a lot more open-ended and we also wanted to grow the ecology of the world. BioShock 1 has the great Big Daddies and Little Sisters dynamic and we sort of wanted to expand on that idea of this world having its own sort of self-sufficient system. Which of part of where the Big Sister, who lives at the top of that Atom ecology, kind of came from. So a lot of it was improving on aspects that were already there or finding a way to make them more accessible and friendly to a wider audience.Why are you playing as a Big Daddy and what’s the purpose of BioShock 2?
Zak: Playing as a Big Daddy was actually one of the first things that we decided on the project. Making a BioShock 2 was really challenging. We were looking for ways that we could reevaluate a lot of things about the gameplay and the change of protagonists was one of the best quirks. Knowing that you can play as a Big Daddy we got to reexamine how his weapons work, how the character feels, how the balance of combat would be. It would really be a good thing for us to bring a fresh perspective to all the gameplay of BioShock. Beyond that, it was just something that was hugely receipted by fans and by people who played the first game. It was something you got a glimpse of at the end of BioShock 1 in a way that made people really want to have that drill or the rivet gun and all the cool things that you expect from BioShock 1.
So on the Big Daddy how does this prototype differ from the original BioShock?
Zak: The original Big Daddies, you know, the Bouncer, the Rosie, they’re very well encumbering powerhouses. With something for sort of the length of a single player game, we knew that level of power was really seductive to people, we knew that we couldn’t do an entire game where you were trudging around at the slow, lumbering pace of those Big Daddy characters. Delta is a lot more agile than the classic Big Daddies, he obviously can use plasmids, regulate the weapons, but the big difference is, of course, that he has free will and he’s able to make his own choices and really whitty, moral choices in the story, as the story goes along as well.
Who is actually in the Big Daddy suites?
Jordan: The first game states, outright, that they are humans abducted from the city of Rapture and augmented heavily with Atom and sort of graphed into diving suits. The story of the protagonist of BioShock 2 is more of a mystery and we won’t spoil that one.
We know Big Daddy played a typical protecting role in BioShock 1, where were the Big Sisters in BioShock 1?
Jordan: They’re actually grown up Little Sisters. Only a few that escaped the great cult. Those who have grown up, have become physically unstable as the atom, that they have been injecting for years and years and years, have been a manifest. That’s really where they were, they were gathering from corpses.
Big Sisters design is amazing, what experiences did you draw upon to create them? Any unique features for design decisions that you would like to point out?
Zak: The obvious is the Big Daddy classic diving suit. The Big Daddies have this kindly, old man; weary, lumbering appeal to them. The Big Sisters were meant to embody this awkward adolescence phase where your body is larger than what you’re used to dealing with and so they’re very wise and a little awkward in their posing and they have leg braces. They’re still very graceful in their kind of awkwardness. Beyond that, we try to break through the softer edge and have some more of those little girl feelings since these are Little Sisters who grew up too fast. There are some smaller details that you may not notice during gameplay are the ribbons on the baskets that they use to carry the Little Sisters, small child-like drawings on her tank and other small details in the character design that if you stop and take a look at it, you’ll notice.
Have you made the choice whether or not to harvest the Little Sisters any harder this time around? In the first game you lost out on enough by saving them to make it a simple choice before they become this powerful regardless of whether you saved or harvested them.
Zak: Yes, that’s been a common criticism in the first game and it’s something we tried to make those choices around the Little Sister, a little bit more play. It’s harder to be good and more rewarding to be really truly evil with the Little Sisters in BioShock 2. If you straight up save the Little Sisters in BioShock 2 and never engage in the adoption gameplay, you are going to be starving for atom for the entire game. On the other hand, if you are as terrible a person as you possibly can, you go around and adopt and partner up with the Little Sisters and then you harvest them later, you’re going to be really flush. But if you’re a player that really wants to work for it and gather atom from bodies and save Little Sisters, you can keep pace with the best player who harvest them outright, but you’re going to be doing a lot more work for it. For those battles that get a little more difficult as the game goes on, it’s a lot more alluring to sort of cash in on a Little Sister immediately by harvesting her and get that quick reward rather than doing it the hard way of gathering from bodies. So that gameplay choice is a little bit more reflective of the choices that go on in your head when you’re trying to deal with complex situations.
You can explore the ocean floor, correct? Are there added bonus or advantages to look forward to?
Zac: The big event is being able to see Rapture from the outside for the first time and that was what was compelling about it to us is seeing this gorgeous, amazing city from a different perspective. Rapture from the inside is this dangerous, intense place. Some people would play the first game and we’d talk to them and they would say that they never felt safe and how they never got to really enjoy the beauty of the environment. Beyond that, there’s some exploration value of the outside areas and you can find some of the original atom slugs out in their original habitat and use that to grow your character a little bit more and those are hidden in some of the outdoor spaces as well.
What are the puzzles going to be like in BioShock 2? Will players have a new set of puzzle challenges and will the rewards be greater?
Zac: On the weapon upgrade side, there is a third upgrade for every single weapon and what we try to do there was instead of an incremental stat increase, each weapon would have different functionalities. So with your standard second upgrade, you get a larger clip size and it does more damage, but the third upgrade adds a sort of an ease element. You hit that with repeated shots, it will light them on fire. For the drill, the third upgrade actually adds kinds of a big, giant, magnetic coil on the end of it so it can reflect projectiles back and its incoming attackers. So the upgrades have the third one that people will want to work for and once they’ve got to it, will change up their gameplay style a little bit. On the puzzle elements, BioShock 1 had the minigame for hacking and we changed the hacking system substantially to try to get it to integrate it with the core gameplay, but you’ll have to balance between the combat that is going on around you at the same time.
The original BioShock added a few side attractions, such as hacking and photography, to the gameplay. Will there be any other side items to give some additional flare to the game?
Zac: The photography and research definitely makes a return but on hacking we went out of our way to sort of integrate it into the core FPS combat loot and really use it as an opportunity to lure the people into using the more complex tools. So, it’s now under the metaphor of a video camera unlike the still camera in BioShock 1. When you tag a splicer or enemy with this research camera, you’re basically graded for a short period of time, whether you have 30 – 45 seconds to combat that splicer in a creative way and at the end of that time, you are rated on a standard scale on how well you did and how creative you were. As you get research points, you unlock upgrades and different perks and new tonics and things like that. But the hope is that players will really experiment with it and not sort of use the same tactics over and over again.
"Adding multiplayer was tricky, and was a huge challenge"
Now for some questions regarding the Multiplayer:
With this being BioShock’s first into the realm of multiplayer, how tricky was it? Describe the fine line between keeping the atmosphere in the single player mode and creating an involved, exciting multiplayer aspect to the game.
Matt: It was really tricky, a huge challenge. The world of Rapture is so rich with developments and the experience as a single player going through that world there is so much to look at and so much to experience. That’s really what made Rapture, Rapture, in a lot of cases. The trick was to take that and make it into a multiplayer environment where you have many more technical issues, such as ten players and have performance targets and all that type of stuff. But we worked really closely with Hoagy and everyone else over at 2K and set up some guidelines and really try to match the visual targets while maintaining all the technical targets that we were trying to hit.
How many different multiplayer modes are there and up to how many players can play at once?
Matt: We have seven modes and ten players max.
Will there be an online coop or will it be only multiplayer?
Jesse: Other than the team-based game modes, there’s no cooperative play in BioShock 2.
Which is the multiplayer mode that you think is the most entertaining?
Matt: There are clearly a lot of choices there, but I think Capture the Sister is really my favorite. Only because I spent a lot of time playing CTS in days gone by. But what’s really great about it is that there’s elements of the game that everyone knows and loves, with a Little Sister added in the mix there’s more personality there and lots of interesting little feedback type of scenarios that happen with her. It just adds a dynamic element to what is a standard game.
How do you approach bringing new players to the franchise while keeping BioShock players satisfied at the same time? Was it difficult to create a storyline that new and returning fans will appreciate?
Jordan: Yes. We knew that there would be people who were attracted to the choices that we made for the sequel, but who had never played the original and others who have probably gone through multiple playthroughs and for them Rapture was too familiar. Our approach to that was sort of a layered one, in that the introductory layers of the game are designed to make the players who know the events of the city kind of experience them afresh. For example, a child’s eye-view of Rapture is sort of a vision behind Ryan’s amusement, kind of like a propaganda theme park where the children of Rapture were kind of like shocked out of ever wanting to go to the surface. At the same time, for the new players, that perspective serves as a crash course in Ryan’s philosophy, the fall of the city and so forth. Past the Act 1 level, we start to break new ground that will be for both audiences equally.
"Who really is in the Big Daddy suit?"
Does the PS3 version of the game have special features and how are you taking advantage of the system this time around, as opposed to the first game?
Zac: As Hoagy mentioned, with the multiplatform development, we want to offer the same exact experience across the platforms and there’s nothing particularly exclusive to one or the other. Which ever one you buy, you get the same experience we intended.
If you could pick one aspect that you improved on, on the sequel, what would that be and how did you improve upon it?
Zac: The dual wielding, being able to use your plasmids and weapons at the same time. As I mentioned before, it’s really transformative to the whole experience and you no longer have to think, “I’m going to switch to my plasmids, use that, switch back to my weapons, equip the wrench and hit the guy.” It’s part of one fluid action for the players. It was one of the first things that we added and it just changed the way the game played, substantially.
During development, did you feel more in competition with the original BioShock’s narrative (especially considering the narrative is what most people consider the most memorable aspect of the game) or the game’s gameplay?
Jordan: I think there were significant challenges on both fronts in the sense that the gameplay, to be a legitimate sequel you need to combine these mechanics in new and interesting ways. There were a number of criticts of BioShock as a shooter, as compared to others. I think Zac had his work cut out for him to kind of bring it up to par. With that said, on the narrative front, you kind of have to flush what has been done before to offer a story that is as mysterious as the original. The challenge for us in the narrative department was kind of to meaningfully surprise people without having just said, “Oh yeah, all that stuff that occurred in BioShock 1, that didn’t happen. We’re taking it very loosely.” Or do some kind of simple minded reboot in the name of originality that would’ve pissed off, frankly, a lot of our core fans.
Was it difficult to get those floating bodies to look just right?
Hoagy: Yeah, that was pretty hard. A lot of the flooding sequences we did are just custom hand animated and hand treated by our tech artists to make them look just right in that particular instance. In terms of floating bodies and floating stuff it was tricky because our tech team had to tune the bliancy model so the stuff would be neutrally bliant so it floats in one place even after a period of time. So yeah, it was kind of tricky and it’s just right.
Does BioShock 2 feature multiple endings like its predecessor?
Jason: Yes, the sort of endings are at once kind of more dynamic, more triangular than the the original game offered. I think more importantly your choices start inform the story before the ending this time. We felt that offered a better ramp into, rather than just kind of finding out, “Gosh, I’m Jesus or HItler” five seconds before the credits roll.
And that concludes the Q&A. Thanks for 2K games to invite us into the conference and be sure to look out for our Bioshock 2 review later this week.
Tags: 2K, BioShock 2, PlayStation 3