BioShock 2

Format PC

Developer 2K Games

Publisher 2K Games

Genre First Person Shooter

4 Comments

"The player of a first-person shooter is a plexiglass-faced powerhouse that thunders its way through corridors and occasionally is asked to care about things that it's never met." This is Jordan Thomas, Creative Director of BioShock 2. He's about to tell us who we play as this time.

"The Big Daddy prototype seemed like a logical choice." Big Daddies, the moaning diving suits that trudged the city of Rapture's dank halls, were BioShock's most fascinating creatures. And it was a fascinating place. An underwater haven for society's elitest elitists, gone horribly wrong with the discovery of the flesh-altering miracle goo Adam. We crept through its ruins with a wrench and a grudge, only to find (spoiler) that we'd been an unwitting slave, psychologically hard-coded to murder Rapture's founder Andrew Ryan and obey his slimy rival Frank Fontaine.

Ten years on, both men are long dead. That clears the way for a darker, stranger story in a more broken, twisted Rapture. A story entirely about Big Daddies, Little Sisters, and the lives they once had. You're the first Big Daddy ever made, and the most powerful. You were built to use any of their weapons, not just one. You have all of their resilience but little of their sloth. And your suit, unlike theirs, allows the use of Plasmids.

You're the reason every other Big Daddy was crippled and brainwashed: you were too good. The team won't talk about what you did to make your creator - presumably Dr Suchong - abort his plans to make any more creatures like you. "Suffice it to say they decided to simplify," Jordan says.

Jordan designed BioShock's Fort Frolic level, a macabre interlude in which a pulp crooner forces you to murder his former friends and construct a work of art from photos of their corpses. He also designed the only game level to warrant an entire feature in PC Gamer: Thief 3's unwisely combined asylum and orphanage, Shalebridge Cradle. BioShock 2 is the first game he's been put in charge of, so we should all take a moment to set our expectations unreasonably high.

"Both of those levels were a structured attack on expectations," Jordan recalls, "so that the player wouldn't get numbed to a template. For BioShock 2, obviously, those lessons remain with me. I would hate for the player to ever feel like they're starting to predict us."

Happily, I don't have to do much predicting. Jordan and his team at 2K Marin are stingy on plot details for spoiler reasons, but forthcoming about everything else they're working on. Most of what defines BioShock 2 stems from the fact that you're in the heavy steel boots of a rogue Big Daddy. It determines who you fight, what you fight with, where you can roam and - most potently - your relationship with the Little Sisters.

The tiny children Big Daddies exist to protect were one of the few disappointments of BioShock. They were beautifully animated, fascinating and evocative to watch, yet your interaction with them felt abstract. You could remove the parasite possessing them to gain some of Rapture's main resource, Adam. Or you could remove it in a slightly different way that ultimately gave you roughly the same Adam, but made her vanish rather than leaving her defenceless.

I'm explaining this, and not very kindly, because the way it's changed is probably the most significant thing we know about BioShock 2. "The way you participate in the ecology this time," explains lead environment artist Hogarth de la Plante, "is something that we call Little Sister adoption." You still have the option to kill a vulnerable Little Sister on the spot for an immediate fix of Adam, but your other choice is a longer‑term investment.

"You put her up on your shoulder, and the two of you work together as a team." While a Little Sister is riding on your back, she'll point out Adam-rich corpses from which she can 'Gather'. It's your choice where to set her down, and it's one you'll need to prepare for. Once she sets about her foul work - syringing blood from the recently dead and drinking it to process its goodness - it draws the attention of Rapture's inhabitants.

That means Splicers: GM humans gone headwonky. Ten years have taken an even dearer toll on them. "They've had to become apex predators," says Jordan. "They've had to sit there at the top of the Adam foodchain murdering all their old flames and drinking-buddies and slowly splicing themselves into something that can survive." That means, as you'll see on these pages, they've deformed further; perverted a little more of their flesh for a little more plasmid power. "They've also evolved sock garters," Jordan notes.

"There's a pretty broad spectrum of human degeneracy," Jordan says of the grim research these new designs represent. "If you look at birth defects and other genetic disorders, you end up with the truly tragic and the truly monstrous in a perfect balance that is designed to take your dismorphia fear and turn it against you."

So when the scent of freshly extracted Adam is in the air, these sad Elephant Men can't afford to be shy. They come in swarms. This is a problem. They'll mostly attack you, since getting the Adam out of a Little Sister is tricky with her Big Daddy around. But if you leave her unattended during the fight, Splicers will 'menace' her and interrupt her profitable blood-suckery. That only prolongs the onslaught. Luckily, of course, you have a giant freaking drill on your hand.

When she's finished, and all the Splicers are dealt with, your tiny friend will return to you and grant you all the Adam she's gathered. At which point, of course, there's nothing to stop you killing her and taking the Adam-rich seaslug that was keeping her alive - Jordan calls it the "superdick" option. If you want to ensure her safety, though, find one of those grand-looking art deco air vents they crawl out of and help her back into it. Huge decals of these are plastered around the San Francisco Bay Area office where the game is being made, appropriately enough for an office founded last year on the success of Rapture.

In case you were wondering, "The adoption mechanic is a direct rebuttal to the horrible escort quest that you may have played in other games starting with 'BioShock'," Jordan laughs. If you want to draw a comparison with the first game, they have more in common when it comes to the Big Daddy fights - which will also return.

"I felt it was time to allow BioShock to start guitar-soloing in one of the places that we do well," is how Jordan colourfully puts it. "Allow the player to take the territory, and then bring the world to them. That's what the dynamic sieges are about... Knowing something is coming and allowing you to use every tool, every bit of planning that you might have developed and mastery over the systems, to turn that situation to your advantage. To make sure that whole first wave falls on its face and bleeds out."

Your hardware for dealing with the incoming hordes includes the iconic Big Daddy drill, the Splicer-skewering Rivet Gun, some unannounced weapons, and an upgraded suite of Plasmids. It's the latter that lend themselves to the let-them-come philosophy of combat. The team aren't talking about any we're not familiar with yet, but the ones you invest in will change function, and even combine with others, in new ways.

"Let's say you invest in fire," says Jordan. "Each time you invest Adam in Incinerate, you get another version which means you can hold it down and release a burst, and ultimately use your hand like a flamethrower."

My personal favourite, the springboard mine-layer Cyclone Trap, takes on a new purpose when you upgrade it to level two. "You can charge it with any of the elemental stimuli in the game," says Jordan, with obvious glee. "Including the Element of Bees." That means ice traps, fire traps, rage traps, even security traps that cannon victims into the air while simultaneously setting every turret and bot in the area on them. Bees are also good.

Weapons and Plasmids can be used simultaneously, rather than requiring you to switch between two discrete modes, because a Big Daddy can hold pretty much anything in one hand. The weapons are a big risk: it always looks gruesome when a Big Daddy impales someone on his drill in a scripted sequence, but it's not going to feel as convincing in first-person when you're not truly making holes in anyone. What we've seen of the combat compensates for that with sheer volume of blood, spurting it liberally in your face to mask the drill/flesh interface beneath. I'll be honest: it seems to work.

Part of BioShock 2's mission statement is to give the player a new perspective on Rapture, and there's a very specific way that being a Big Daddy can feed into that. You can go outside. That is a deep-sea diving suit you're wearing, after all, however antiquated. You'll sometimes need to stomp across the sea bed to progress, but often these excursions into the sandy kelp forests surrounding the city will be entirely optional.

The team have wisely decided not to shoehorn any combat into these outdoor wanderings. The whale that drifted past as you first descended into Rapture? Not a boss. These are tranquil breaks to punctuate the action, allow the art team to go nuts, and give the player a chance to focus on what's being said to him on the ever-present radio.

"The intent for the gameplay there is that it is, sort of ironically, where you get to breathe," says scarf-fancying art lead Hogarth. "You get to go outside, harvest live Adam slugs, and listen to pieces of the story - and also act as a voyeur because you can look through windows at the next area."

"I'm one of those players who, I'll listen to story if I can, but when there are like 20 Splicers trying to set me on fire, I don't pay a lot of attention to it." Hogarth is confident the seabed sections will be different. "I think that the really moody parts of BioShock 2, and probably some of the really emotional parts, are going to take place in the water."

The only voice we know will be nattering to you while you're out in the depths is Tenenbaum's. The German geneticist who created the Little Sisters is ten years older, but she's still as tiresomely guilt-stricken as ever. This time it's down to one of her creations in particular.

You could be forgiven for still wondering, this far in, what the hell any of this has to do with a girl on a beach. Most of us guessed that in the first teaser trailer for BioShock 2, the young woman looking wistfully out to sea was a Little Sister, a little grown up. She's grown up a little more in BioShock 2 itself, and it hasn't gone at all well.

This is Big Sister, a woman who outgrew her role as a blood-drinking Adam gatherer, but not the psychological conditioning that made her a slave to Rapture's sick ecosystem in the first place. She's too old to be a Little Sister, so she's tried to turn herself into a Big Daddy, strapping herself into a homemade, spiky, feminine version of their diving suits. And since there's a shortage of Little Sisters in the city - thanks to a certain Jack Ryan - she's been out into the real world to abduct human children and take them back to Rapture.

It's a surprise to learn that you're not sent on a righteous quest to stop her. On the contrary, she's on a quest to stop you. You're just trying to survive long enough to escape Rapture entirely, and that means adopting, harvesting or saving Little Sisters for the Adam you need to get by. All three infuriate Big Sister: her life's work is restoring Rapture to the way she remembers it: Big Daddies and Little Sisters 4eva.

"After you've taken away a certain number of Little Sisters from their Big Daddies, the Big Sister comes and finds you wherever you are," Jordan says. "She'll hunt you down anywhere on a level."

"It's our goal to make sure the player feels like he's being stalked," adds lead designer Zak McClendon, noting down my home address. It's "an inverted form of your own relationship to hunting Big Daddies, where you follow one along for a while until he gets into the exact right area, then jump him at that point." He beams. "We want to have her doing that to you."

In the scripted demonstration I saw, Big Sister leapt around an atrium like a treefrog, hurled furniture at the player with telekinesis, smashed him to the ground, and broke down the glass keeping the ocean out. It was a bad day for Prototype Big Daddy. The team make it clear that you'll fight the Big Sister many times over the course of the game, but they wouldn't give me a straight answer on how you win these fights without killing her. "There are some special things about her that I don't think we're talking about yet," JP teased. "You'll fight her more than once. We can definitely say that." Hmm.

In BioShock, the Vita-Chambers that resurrected you each time you died worked because they were made for Andrew Ryan, and you shared his DNA. In BioShock 2 the Vita-Chambers work for you, the first Big Daddy, and we don't know why. But you have to wonder which Little Sister the first Big Daddy was charged with protecting, how old she would be now, and why she might be able to keep coming back however many times you fight her.

If you were unhappy with the section in BioShock after you break free of your conditioning, you're in good company. Meet the BioShock 2 team - three of those I interviewed said something disparaging about it. You'd just had your brain mildly blown by the revelation that you were a slave all this time, and then... everything stayed the same.

Hogarth puts it best: "We were all like, 'Now you have free will again! But do these three things for me and I'll unlock the door for you.' We're trying to open things up a little bit more than that." Jordan expands on that: "Without spoiling the moment in question, we are very aware of the kind of narrative construct that BioShock 1 relied on, and the satirical element that speaks to the medium. We absolutely have a plan to allow the player to breathe out and to in fact celebrate his or her free will."

Yeah, it's still Cylon-vague. But we wouldn't want the plot spoiled just for the sake of knowing where to set our excitement-o-meters. That comes down to an issue of trust. Usually when the creative lead for a game steps down for the sequel, it's cause for concern. But Jordan Thomas is an interesting choice to take over from Ken Levine. Both are the kind of guys who talk in sentences worth writing down, and some of us have wanted to see the kind of game Jordan would make for a while. It's unlikely to be the one Ken would make, but it's likely to be that good.

Ken isn't part of the team working on this game, but it might be too soon to say he's not working on BioShock 2. He and most of the Boston team who made BioShock stayed where they were, while seven key staff members left to form the 2K Marin studio, making the game you see here. But Jordan said something odd at the start of their presentation: "There's obviously been a lot of prequel/sequel argument/rumours - what I like to say is that if we did a pure one of either of those, we wouldn't be surprising you enough."

The game he's making is a straight sequel, so I asked if that was all of BioShock 2. "In terms of the game you buy in the shop," Producer Melissa Miller said, "no." Hogarth clarified: "The thing she's not mentioning is multiplayer. We can't talk about multiplayer, except that it's in the game."

Interesting. The fact that this part of BioShock 2 is not a 'pure' sequel is too vague to speculate about, but there are plenty of interesting forms a multiplayer game in Rapture could take. Particularly now that players can don the diving suit of a Big Daddy. We'll have more on the multiplayer next issue.

Tom Francis