Ken Levine On The Background of Bioshock

GameSpy has up an interview with Ken Levine of Irrational Games. While Levine has spoken previously about Bioshock's ideology, this piece discusses a number of the elements that went into creating the game. He touches again on objectivism, but expands on the title's connection to its spiritual predecessor System Shock 2 and the process of actual developing the game. "Sterling: Segueing away from storyline a little, what sorts of hardware limits did the team encounter from pre-production leading up to this point of near-completion? Ken Levine: As a credit to my programming team, honestly, I didn't hear much about them. There was some hesitation on the part of some of programming team in pushing a level of physical simulation in the world, in part because they knew how much work that was. To their credit, I'll say, not only did they do it, they knocked it out of the park, because I've never seen this level of simulation ever in a shooter."

Re:What I hope for from Bioshock

[LarsWestergren]

What was great about System Shock 2 was the off-balancing level design and the set-piece hallucination. There were some real classic moments there, like the apparition in the Bon Chance lounge (should've been "Bonne Chance", but that's Tri-Optimum for you...) and the tunnels in the Garden.

I LOVED the storytelling aspect of System Shock 2, that intead of lazily cutting to a cinematic whenever something needed explaining as in other games, you had to figure stuff out for yourself from clues in the environment, log entries and so on.

However, the ghost sequences, while very scare, broke some of the immersion for me. It was a bit too obvious that they just came up with an excuse - "Partially erased security holograms" to include some sort of cut scene again. It seems there is a similar explanation that doesn't hold up very well in Bioshock - memories that come over with the genes of previous users from the booster stuff, as if memories were recorded in genes. But perhaps they use the same cop out as in Aliens 4. You see, it is special alien contaminated dna, so it records memories.

Anyway. Minor complaint about one of my favourite games ever (SSH2).

Re:What I hope for from Bioshock

[Anonymous Coward]

"You might witness some strange phenomena. Your R-grade cyber rig has an experimental perception enhancement that can theoretically detect residual psychic emanations. These emanations traditionally come from the recently dead. Literature might call them ghosts. I call them self-hypnotic defects in the R-grade unit. Don't let it distract you from the job at hand."

The genetic stuff might be based on old school concept of memory RNA [wikipedia.org] which made its way into science fiction of the 1960s era.