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Xbox 360 | Action | BioShock

Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Irrational Games
Release Date: 08/21/2007
Genre: Action
Number of Players: 1
ESRB Rating: Mature
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103 screen shots

GRAPHICS: 5.00
SOUND: 5.00
CONTROL: 4.75
FUN FACTOR 5.00
AVG USER SCORE 4.8
AVG CRITIC SCORE 4.9

Winner of the GamePro Editor's Choice Award

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Feature: Interview: Ken Levine

Feature by Sid Shuman | 01/07/2008 | 16:13:02 PM PST

Creative Director of BioShock Ken Levine speaks on working with AI, the Creative Process, and what nearly didn't make it in the game...

GamePro: I played System Shock 2 back in the day, and I'm sure you have been hearing a lot of this here lately, but it really made an impact on me.

System Shock 2: The forerunner of BioShock

Ken Levine: Thank you very much. I hope we didn't disappoint with BioShock.

Not at all. I'm really happy to see you guys get some respect.

KL:Thank you. I am just happy that we are able to demonstrate this type of game can be commercially successful. That is important to me both as a developer and a gamer. I want to play more of these types of games.

Can you talk about how the artificial intelligence (AI) dynamic works between the Little Sisters and the Big Daddies?

KL: Generally, and again, this is the something that John Abercrombie and the RVID programmers were responsible for, the goal that was set on the design side for the programmers was that the Big Daddies would essentially be emerging creatures. They would not be scripted by the Little Sisters, but rather would seek out an event where she was. The Little Sister would find a body to harvest, navigate to it, and do a bunch of things on the way, like get tired sometimes, look at things in the world and point them out, or be afraid of the player, though her primary role was to get to a body which she harvested. When she was done with that, she would want to go back home, get tired and talk about that, all the while the Big Daddy would follow her and protect her. That was a first for a video game.

AI was a very complex sequence of events, especially when you throw in the fact that it can get interrupted by other AI's as well as the player. All the work going into it, especially when you get into animations that are synched together like when the Big Daddy picks a Little Sister and puts her on his shoulders or holds her up by the scruff of her neck, is a real tribute to our AI leader, John Abercrombie and Sean Robertson, our animation lead, who had to figure all that stuff out. Even in a cut scene when a Big Daddy picks someone up, they are not actually being picked up in reality. There are animations playing that just happen to be visually synched together. The Little Sister has to be in a spot where the Big Daddy can pick her up and he has to adjust to where she is, and that is very complex. Whenever you have AIs interacting together, it is very complex, especially in an FPS. In a fighting game there is a lot of that, but that arena is usually entirely flat and very controlled. In BioShock we didn't have any of those things.

Was that dynamic something that was always planned to be in the game, not necessarily in the form of Little Sisters and Big Daddies, but was that kind of a dynamic something you were interested in even from the earlier stages of the game?

KL: That was probably the first thing we ever came up with. That was, if I recall correctly, the first thing I ever conceived for the game; these two AIs, one who would protect the other and one who needed protection. That became the genesis of BioShock. I was watching a nature show and I saw worker ants and solider ants and realized that when you watched those ants and their relationships to each other, you didn't need an explanation of what those relationships are. They are clear; they are either the protector or the protected. If red ants attacked the workers then the black solider ants would protect them, so you just understood that all. I wondered if you took complex relationships like that and put them in a video game, if the player would understand that relationship. So that is where we started.

Were there any crazy plasmid abilities that you weren't able to get into the game?

KL: Yeah, actually, and if we cut some things, and we did cut a lot of plasmids, the reason we cut them was because the game went through design changes when we realized where we wanted to position it for marketing purposes, and I'm certainly being very honest about this, as a shooter. We thought that was really important, so we also worked from the position of, goddamn it, if it's a shooter it better be an awesome shooter. So, we sort of did a lot of redesign of the game at that point. Though I think System Shock was a great game, I don't know if it was a great shooter, if you know what I mean.

With BioShock I wanted the best of both worlds (Shooter and RPG) and I had the resources to do it. I think the thing that we did was we looked at a lot of our plasmids we had at the time that BioShock was more like RPG, and used that to tell how much damage they did, but we didn't have any of the stuff like electricity conducted through water or fire spreading around. We didn't have any of that stuff. When you just have numbers you can do a lot more in terms of quantity of spells and plasmids and things like that. When we determined all the plasmids we were going to have in the simulations and the impact it would have on the world, we knew they would have to be very different from each other, so a single player doesn't have to read a single line of text about them. So that said, a lot of these plasmids didn't make the grade so we cut them.

Like a particularly strange, weird, novel plasmid or ability that just didn't shape up where you guys said, this didn't work?

KL: For the ones that were really interesting and intellectually made you think and we found a way to make it work. We have this video of the X06 where you had the hornets coming out of your arms and that was such an implacable notion that, originally, it was just like another kind of damage and we said: how can we make this meaningful versus something like incinerate where they lit people on fire and they ran around and took damage over time? We had all these great ideas, fire naturally spread, and the oil incinerators... sort of go after a room full of enemies and multiple targets approach, and we said ok, this is great, how we can make the hornet different. It is actually a tool used against multiple targets at once and so we found a way to keep that.