Stomping around Rapture in the shell of a Big Daddy, adopting Little Sisters and unleashing them on fresh corpses to gather blood and harvest Adam. You know the score, but Bioshock 2's single player premise poses one question that no one's yet dared ask: isn't the game now simply one elongated escort mission?
"A lot of people may be quietly concerned the Little Sister adoption works like an escort quest where you need to keep her alive; that she'll take a stray bullet and bite the dust and the player will try to eat the controller in rage. It's not. Escort missions suck." Contrary to reports about 2K Marin's secrecy pact, Creative Director Jordan Thomas isn't afraid to talk in detail about Bioshock 2's main game.
"It's much more like a dynamic siege that players can direct," he continues. "If you adopt the Little Sister she rides around on your shoulders, and if you let her out in the world she attracts Splicers because she's an Adam jackpot. However, just like when the player was a Splicer in Bioshock the Big Daddy needs to be taken out to grab the Little Sister, which is why Splicers will try to kill you. Splicers grabbing the Little Sister only perpetuate the encounter." Phew.
As the man behind the original's Fort Frolic level, Jordan is the perfect replacement for Ken Levine. Eloquence should never be mistaken for creative skills but Thomas speaks with an understanding of Bioshock's mechanisms unlike anybody else. Chatting to other 2K Marin and Digital Extremes team members we're bombarded with their attempts to quantify what makes Bioshock what it is: Plasmids are a firm favourite; Big Daddies another.
Thomas isn't so keen to reduce the original to its parts, and under his watchful eye it's doubtful that Bioshock's sequel will lose the mix which made the first game so memorable. "Bioshock is very much what you project onto it; it's a roll-your-own shooter," he admits. "You choose your verbs in a way other shooters don't allow you to.
"I'm interested in psychological horror; in the moral and emotional horror that results from a setting like Rapture. Games that rely on protagonist vulnerability and jump scares just don't interest me. That's not Bioshock. We've got an entirely different animal that should mess with your brain. Forget jumps, it's the back of your mind we need to tap into so that you're the one creeping yourself out."
The way to do that, Jordan claims, is by changing the formula. "Fort Frolic was a success because of its contrast to everything else. Contrast remains a primary goal for Bioshock 2. Our overall experience has to have the unity that the original did but I will absolutely not claim that there are zero curveballs because that would be stupid. As a guy who's made a career out of curveball levels there may be one or two..."
But this contrast needn't solely take the form of unique level concepts. "In Bioshock we received feedback saying people felt the world never calmed down and that they never had the chance to take stock and breathe. Somewhat ironically Bioshock 2's underwater sections are those chances to take a breather.Obviously the Splicers can't follow you, and neither did we want to throw additional threats at you while you're out there. I'm an underwater nut anyway and the bottom of the ocean is already quite an alien world. It just seemed natural that Rapture should expand out onto the ocean floor, and especially so once it became clear I wanted to tell the story of the man inside the monster. We should have done it in the first game, really. Just an outside walk would've been cool."
Playing as a Big Daddy from the off seems like a radical departure, but for Thomas - somebody who believed the original's execution didn't do the lumbering hulk justice - it was a natural progression. "When I looked at the Big Daddy I immediately saw a mystery. I'm interested in the story of Frankenstein's monster in the sense that there's a human being trapped inside of what appears to everybody else to be this 'other'. The idea of bringing people into the boots of character who already has a history with Rapture and allowing you to then discover the human side of this creature is really powerful."
The Big Daddy in question - the first Big Daddy - wasn't around during Jack's time in Rapture but Jordan isn't abandoning any of the original's fiction. "We need to absolutely preserve Jack's tale because we trusted you with that choice and we must ensure that whatever ending you received is still ratified in this fiction. Canon is extremely important - we're not attempting to be Lucas-y revisionists. There are certain overlapping points between Jack's endings, and Bioshock 2's Splicers now constantly argue about which choice he made." The endings are both sacred, but Jordan still looks back with disappointment.
"I absolutely saw the binary catch-all ending and was saddened that some players felt cheated. They harvested just one Little Sister because Atlas was such a charming, convincing Irish bastard and all of a sudden at the end they were Hitlerzilla. One of the pieces of the spiel when I play the Bioshock 2 demo is about the sense of morality and trusting the player with greater control over their role in the narrative. The first game gave you one moral choice and there was one binary ending.
In Bioshock 2 you make a number of new choices which are much greyer, that have nothing to do with the Little Sisters. Those decisions inform the ending, as does the fact that when you're closing in on the end you will be given the opportunity to see ahead to the person you are becoming and how you're changing the world. Then you make another decision based on that. We're giving the player greater intentionality as they're deciding their own identity."
If there's one central theme to all of Jordan's creations it's of choice, such as the Rescue/Harvest mechanic, or the acceptance that choice is just an illusion as highlighted by Atlas' "Would you kindly?" instructions. Bioshock 2 further builds on that idea.
"The harvesting mechanic is there again because all Bioshock's systems are consensual and when you decide to kill a Big Daddy that's a decision you make. Kill it and you have a Little Sister. You can just walk away but if you want Adam you can just harvest - the nasty and immediate option - or ply into her trust and take her through a level to gather Adam from the sources that she identifies to you. At which point, the choice comes to you again: am I a good father or a bad father? Do I harvest her then and there for maximum Adam - the option we call the 'superdick' option - or am I going to redeem her and send her back to Tenenbaum to restore humanity again?"
Lessons from the first game's choices have been well observed. "People identified that our primary moral choice was strangely a zero sum game in the sense that over time we were largely reinforcing the same choice. Even in the Adam space, which was the very substance you were supposed to be sacrificing. In Bioshock 2 we're striving to make you actually give something up, so the reward for being altruistic is decidedly different in the long term. The 'superdick' harvest is the route to greatest reward: you'll become more powerful in the Adam axis this time."
Our time runs short, and with one last question we ask Jordan to speak about the game's logo which, with barnacles and butterflies, hints at Rapture's rise to the surface. "People always read too much into everything," he chuckles. "That said... it does not mean the butterfly was meaningless by any stretch." Make of that what you will.
"We've got an entirely different animal that should mess with your brain. Forget jumps, it's the back of your mind we need to tap into so that you're the one creeping yourself out."
Yeah, sure mate, maybe you should stick to making the game as great as possible to live up to the first, instead of Molyneuxing the whole thing. Remember the acorn comment?
"We've got an entirely different animal that should mess with your brain. Forget jumps, it's the back of your mind we need to tap into so that you're the one creeping yourself out."
Yeah, sure mate, maybe you should stick to making the game as great as possible to live up to the first, instead of Molyneuxing the whole thing. Remember the acorn comment?
"We've got an entirely different animal that should mess with your brain. Forget jumps, it's the back of your mind we need to tap into so that you're the one creeping yourself out."
Yeah, sure mate, maybe you should stick to making the game as great as possible to live up to the first, instead of Molyneuxing the whole thing. Remember the acorn comment?
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