Shock and Awe Tactics

I think what we realised, which really started that transition back at Irrational, we were doing games that I'd say were mid-budget - maybe USD 3-4 million - that there was no real market left. You'd have to do something like what EA is doing and go into the casual market, or you've got to go for a really big blockbuster - just because of the economics, especially for the small independent developers, you're really squeezed out of the middle.

I think you can probably still get contracts for that kind of work, but there's not a lot of hope there for developers being able to survive - just not enough money to develop new IP and keep staff going.

I think you'd have to see the future to know that. It's curious - I'm not sure it's the natural evolution of things, that there are two markets that are now just separating, whereas before they were just muddled, and this is a good thing - or if people have been left out in the cold.

I definitely think there's a market for a shorter, more casual experience - something that's a little more light-hearted. And we hope there's a market for people who want very cinematic, very emotional experiences that are also intelligent and made for adults.

So we're hoping to take what we did with BioShock and take it even further with this next title. But it's interesting that during the development of BioShock that we were trying to capture a little bit of that casual audience. We came from a heritage of games like System Shock 2, which was critically acclaimed, but didn't sell very well.

Our whole goal with BioShock was that we knew it was a great kind of game, in our hearts we knew, but we wanted to find a way to bring that to a wider audience - not specifically the console market, but to figure out what it is that's keeping that kind of game experience from being accessible to a bigger audience, and why that is.

Moving more of the interface elements into the world, make it easier to just jump right in and start playing - a lot of it's just introducing the game in the right way. With System Shock 2 we realised we just dropped people in at the beginning with all these user interfaces, all these options, and people have no idea what to do - it's just so overwhelming.

But with BioShock we thought we were doing a better job on that, and I remember we did some focus tests, where you put people behind a one-way mirror and just sit and watch them for three hours, and in fact one person never made it past the first room - just couldn't even find the door. That's disheartening in a way, but it's also a good experience, because you're sitting there working for four years on a title and you get too close to it.

It's important to realise there are people out there that need to be gradually introduced to the game - and as a result of that we completely re-worked the first three levels of the game to step-by-step introduce new concepts and new ideas to people, so that hopefully by the fourth level they understand they can mix and match the Plasmid powers, or they can build their character this way on the weapon track - gamers are pretty intelligent, from all types of demographics, but information needs to be presented in the right way.

I think that's a good point. One of the things we tried to focus on in the game was that if you have a lot of complexity in the world, the world has to behave reasonably. So we focused a lot on basically trying to say yes to the plan.

So if you can light something on fire, but you can't set somebody on fire - or you can't take one burning object and use to light another object - it just breaks the whole experience. So a lot of the difficulties we went through were just trying to make the world consistent, but in the end hopefully that draws players in more because they're encouraged to experiment more with ways of manipulating the creatures in the world - how you can use the environment in the world to your advantage. I think that helps to maybe simplify a little of the complexity because it helps the world to behave a little more like the real world.

We're hoping to take that even further in our next title.

Well that was an important aspect of BioShock - there's an aspect of graphics from the point of wanting to have something that just blows people away when they look at a room - it's got to light correctly, it's got to have all the greatest graphics features.

But more important than that is the emotion, and that's something we struggled with for a long time on BioShock. Our original plan was to take the kind of games that we loved to make in the past, some kind of Shock-style game, and bring it to a bigger audience.

At first we wasted a lot of time because we interpreted that too literally, and started making a sci-fi game that was technically quite correct - the systems were working the way they were designed, but people didn't really have the emotional attachment.

One of the key things we realised maybe half way through about the game was that the exciting thing wasn't the AI, or how great the face looks, or the sheer number of systems - the key is that when somebody walks into this world they have to be filled with wonder and mystery and a sense of majesty. That's really what draws people in and keeps them moving forward in the game.

This is something that we've owned up to a little bit is that when that feeling of mystery goes away - which it does at a certain point in the game when you've sort of resolved the big mystery - people felt like maybe they had a little less reason to keep going.

I think some of the levels after that point in the game were some of the best - if not the best - in the game. The gameplay was awesome, but you really need to have that mystery and wonder driving you forward.

It was also something we struggled with the Big Daddys and Little Sisters in the game - originally the Little Sisters were giant slugs, basically, squirling around on the floor. We did a whole prototype demo of getting the Splicers (they were called something different back then) and the Big Daddys working.

And we got them working, but it was kinda hard for people to get any emotional attachment to a slug.

[laughs] That's not the right kind of emotional attachment...

So yeah, we spent a lot of time trying to find a design that would allow the player to have empathy for this character. We went through everything from some frog-looking thing to a dog in a wheelchair...we had these sort of weird goblin-looking creatures too.

But it wasn't until we went away from the fantastical and came back to this idea for somebody that you might find on the street, or somebody who was in your family, that people starting having this emotional bond - and that really helped us draw in everything, with the visuals and the story.

It was a very conscious decision, and actually was a production trick. We felt like a lot of studios, and you're seeing this now with games like Mass Effect and Half-Life 2, they're pushing very hard on trying to create realistic human companions that are there for you to talk to and interact with. Not only did we think that it wasn't quite there yet, but we just felt that we couldn't compete with these guys, because they're the best at what they do.

Often with audio I think you can get 90 per cent of what you want with maybe 25 per cent of the effort - that's actually not true, there's a lot more effort on the acting side and the story side. But I think we're still a little bit limited by what we can do with graphics - the human imagination is much more powerful than any graphics card you can plug into your machine, so we really tried to leverage that.

This is something you see with film-making too, with voice-overs and evocative music - allusions to things without really explaining them, so we decided to give that a go on BioShock too.

That character of Atlas actually went through a number of revisions, and one thing that most people don't realise is that most of that story and script was written extremely late - really most of the game was developed with just a loose idea of the general idea of Rapture, and the general archetype of this character - we actually rewrote and re-recorded Atlas about five months before shipping.

I was having a long talk recently with some friends about production - why do we keep crunching, why can't we seem to do scheduling and development and HR processes as well as we think maybe other industries like the film industry does?

Games are an interactive medium, and that extends to production as well. In the film industry you have some guy who writes a script, and you have a bunch a people edit it and say how it's going to go, then another guy comes up with how it's supposed to look - then they all get together and have a party for a few months and then they're done.

But in games - at least the kind of games that we make - often we only have this sort of emotional idea of what the game might be, and development is an exploratory process for everyone involved - everyone is sitting down bouncing ideas off each other, trying to see what works.

A good example is Atlas - we had this character written, and a few months before shipping a bunch of the QA team guys got up enough courage and went up to Ken [Levine, studio head] and basically said that nobody liked the character. He had a completely different voice, no Irish accent.

So Ken asked what was wrong with him, and the character had a much more imperative tone, telling you what to do - and people were asking why they were helping this guy, there was no reason for them to help him. He had to feel vulnerable, so you'd want to help him.

I don't know where the Irish accent came from - we tried out a bunch of different ones, and this one worked. The best thing is that you have to have great actors for these things, and we got some really good people to work on that title.

Well, without going into any details on future projects, I think one of the things we were really excited about was how we've taken this complex, mature, intelligent gameplay - something that was previously restricted to a niche hardcore audience - and brought it to a much wider audience. That was our goal, and I think we were pretty successful with that.

I wish I could tell you a little bit about our next project because it's pretty amazing, but I think we're excited about doing that again and reaching a bigger audience. But even now, looking back I think maybe we can go a little bit deeper this time. We understand a bit better about how to introduce things to the player, how to present stuff - we know what we think some of the failings were in BioShock - and I think this time I think we can make a game that's even deeper, yet still accessible to a big audience.

We've always felt under pressure. I think it's what keeps you going, this industry is full of people who never feel satisfied with what they've done before, and those are the people that all of us want to work with - the guys who try to one-up themselves every time.

So I'd say most of the pressure we feel is from ourselves - we have to outdo ourselves. It's also very exciting at the same time. We realise that people are expecting us to do something great, but more than that we just want to keep working with each other, because we have a team that's great, that's been together for six to ten years, most of them.

And we want to keep making the kind of games we love to make - and the good news is that hopefully we'll get an opportunity to do that again.