BioShock 2: Developer Interview

We sit down and get some amazing insight from 2K Games.

At an event in Sydney recently, NZGamer.com was lucky enough to catch up with some of the minds behind the forthcoming BioShock 2; arguably one of the most anticipated games of 2010. What follows is an interview with three of the guys from 2K Australia, and one from 2K Marin (California), where NZGamer.com was able to ask a few questions and get some insights into how they work and why they do it.
Enjoy!

Interviewees:
Martin Slater - Studio Director, 2K Australia
Alex Vancomerbeck - Level Designer, 2K Australia
Anthony (Tony) Lawrence - Studio General Manager, 2K Australia
Kent Hudson - Senior Systems Designer, 2K Marin

From left; Martin Slater, Alex Vancomerbeck, Tony Lawrence and Kent Hudson.

Sam: What I'll do is I'll just run through the questions and since there's four of you guys you can kinda break it up and answer it just however comes naturally. So my first questions is, forgetting about the process of creating the game and all the bits and pieces that go into making a game like BioShock 2, what's your visceral response when you think about what got you out of bed every morning to keep working.

Kent: Sure, to me, and it sounds like a cliche 'cause you hear this a lot, but it's the people. I think working with great people is the biggest charge for me. People who are kinda always challenging you. When they're challenging you to always raise your game. So, you know, if we're working on a Barbie game, we'll make the best Barbie game, it doesn't matter. If you've got a great team then you're gonna do great work. To me it's just always wanting to live up to what my co-workers are doing and just feel like we're always doing our best.

Alex: I didn't work on the first BioShock, and as a fan of BioShock, I wanted to make sure fans are going to get the best experience, first of all.

Martin: I want to add on to that, the people are, just the most important thing. The quality of the people you're working with. You're really sharing something that's somehow of you, something that's got your name on it. It's a representation of what you can achieve, going out there and it's got your name all over it so the drive to make it the best thing possible, all of your friends, all of your family are going to be looking at it, and you just wanna do the best job you can. Settling for anything less just isn't an option.

Tony: Working with the studio, during the week you're discussing something, and these things are gonna happen, and you think well, okay, that'd be really cool if that could happen. By the end of the week, working with these guys in the studio, not only has happened, it's happened better than you thought it would and in ways you never thought it could. Every day is something new and different and better. And it's really just cool working in that kind of environment.

Kent: And to kind of build on your point a little bit, our lead designer, Zak McClendon, towards the end of the project when we were really closing it out and finishing the game, he started using the rule of two million. Where, if a bug only happens one percent of the time, 20,000 people are still gonna see that. He's like, we can not let anything slide. Everything has to be perfect. If this happens three out of ten times, think about how many people are gonna see those weird bugs. We can't settle, it has to be good, it has to be crazy, we have to hold ourselves to that quality of art.

Sam: By and large, gamers get a lot of talking at them by the media, and always with that layer of the studio's PR buffer. If you had your chance, what would you say to a gamer who was standing in a shop holding a copy of BioShock 2 upon release, saying “Why should I care?” Imagine you had their attention for 20 seconds.

Martin: BioShock 2, it's innovative and new, and the level of story that we've built into the game, that Marin have been working on, on the creative side, is something that's still original in the market. The drive to improve what we can do is the be all and end all of everything we do and we seriously and honestly believe that it's as good a version as we could have got it. There's always bits that when you get off the end of development that you'd like to go back and look at it again or you kick yourself a bit if there's something that you thought you could do better, but it's a really good game and that's the only thing we were interested in doing. Creating games that players enjoy. They bring to the game what they want, and I think that's one of the cool features of BioShock, that there are so many different styles of play, there are so many ways of attracting different people into different parts of the game.

Kent: Yeah and for the five second version, honestly it's just fun as hell. It's fun as hell. It is a fun game. I still enjoy playing it.

Martin: Absolutely

Kent: You will have fun if you buy this game, period.

Sam: Imagine that they'd never played BioShock, or never even heard of the franchise, would you say the same thing?

Kent: I mean you're gonna get a great story, but honestly, you won't be disappointed. I'll give you your money back if you don't like it. It's serious but it's just fun, I mean honestly just play it.



Sam: There was a bit of a delay.

Kent: Sure.

Sam: Well noted, and laying aside the whys and wherefores, how would you explain why it was a positive thing the delay happened? Assuming you agree a delay was necessary and was good for the game.

Alex: We had a very good game already, but just before the initial release date in October, we just didn't have all the little things that are going to bring the game from being very good to being great. So we spent all that extra time just polishing a little bit more, and making sure the story's very clear for the player, and the AI behaves as it should.

Tony: Yeah, and it's BioShock 2. We had to build off BioShock one, so putting a great game isn't really going to be cutting it as far as building games is concerned. It has to be the best! So that extra time was making it the best it could be.

Martin: That's something 2K as an organization are passionate about. There really is no point in bringing to market something that's not there yet. When you get to a point where you're looking at it, and you go, "I've got a good game, what'll we do to make it great?"
We're thankful that we get the opportunity to take a few more months, and put that extra time in to perfect the game that we have the backing of 2K too, with resources and the will to do that, and not settle for seventy-five percent, eighty-five percent games. Put the work in, put the effort in, to drive the game to be as good as what we can possibly get it.

Kent: That's always a difficult decision for the company because, nuts and bolts, it's a decision to spend millions of more dollars literally, on the game. I mean it's a real commitment, it's not just words, when they do that, they're saying "Look, we're gonna stand behind this to the tune of a couple of million dollars to fund this game for longer because we believe it can be great!"
So, it is a lot of what Alex said. It's all the little bits. One of my favorite sayings is, "Once you finish the first ninety percent, all that's left is the last ninety percent". If you look at a Modern Warfare type game, the polish and everything is just a million little decisions, so you just need the time to do that stuff.

Sam: What would you say to gamers who want to get the most out of BioShock 2?

Tony: It's a really hard question, it's so deep with all the things you can do, it really depends on the gamer. They've gotta establish their own style and they can either play that style throughout the game...

Alex: Yeah that's right we give them lots of options, lots of new Plasmids and weapons, so it's up to them to be creative.

Tony: I guess what you'd really say is, don't play it once. Play it twice, and next time do something different. Play it three times, do something different then.

Kent: Take your time. There's a time for exploration in the game, and there's a time for the little bits that you're only gonna find if you go check behind that one toilet stall and look in the bathroom of the giftshop, or the amusement park. It's like, "drink it in man!"
I mean, don't try to rush through. If you see somewhere you think you can go, go there because you'll find a little something, you'll find a bit of story, you'll find a bit of extra ammo, you're gonna find a bit of extra encounter that some people aren't gonna see. So take your time, drink it in. We built the whole thing, there's no ugly corners here.

Sam: I've seen the demo right, so I mean I can see there's lots of little improvements made, and big improvements obviously, but how do you think that Rapture feels different after ten years and how have you ensured those differences are conveyed?

Kent: With the art side you can see that it's just got a lot more decay. You can tell that ten years have gone by, everything's even more ruined, there's really a highlight on the environmental storytelling which is something that BioShock one did very well, but we made sure to bring over. We don't tell you it's ten years. We show you. Like, this area of the whole city has collapsed, this area of the city is literally flooded. You actually, in another level of the game, enter an area that you have just un-flooded, it's been underwater for the last ten years and so you're seeing there's barnacles and there's algae. You're exploring something that's ruined. Utterly ruined. Everywhere in the game you look you're gonna see that time has passed, this is not a re-hash of the first game. This is a destroyed city.

Martin: That's one of the core approaches we have to story telling. That you don't need to throw everything in the face with words when you can show it through the environment. Let the game tell the story itself, and you look around, you understand what's going on because you can see it, you can feel it in all aspects of the game. The environmental storytelling is a real core idea behind the the game in letting the player advance and understand just on that personal level, he's going around exactly what is happening and why it's happened.



Sam: Following the release of BioShock, what popular opinion did you take into account, or what did you take notice of following the game, that has influenced the development of BioShock 2.

Alex: We spent quite a bit of time listening to the community, the reviews from the magazines and websites, checking what the player wanted to see in the sequel and what they didn't like so much about BioShock one. What they couldn't live without in the sequel and so on. That's one of the reasons why we removed the pipedream mini game.

Sam: San you give an example of something that's been added in? Something that someone on a forum or in a review said, "I'd really love it if we had this"? Is there an example that leaps to mind?

Kent: There's a couple. I think people wanted to explore the ocean floor, I think people wanted to get outside Rapture, even just for a little bit, so we gave them that opportunity to go out and actually see the ocean and there are some really cool moments where you're actually out there, and you see some wonderous stuff. Even in the first level of the game, I won't spoil it, but there's some really really cool stuff.

Alex: Playing as a Big Daddy, which was a bit underwhelming in BioShock one, so we really pushed as far as we could in the sequel.

Kent: Yeah now it's like, you really got the friggin' drill! You can really drill the hell out of people.

Sam: This one might come a little bit out of left field, but I've always been really interested to know this and wanted to sit down with a group of developers like yourselves to get this question answered, so being a little bit self indulgent: Stephen King has written a great book about the creative process, and he says that he always writes for his "constant reader"-

Kent: Are you talking about On Writing?

Sam: Yeah.

Kent: Yeah, it's a great book.

Sam: It is. In your mind's eye, when you think about your "constant gamer", who is that person, what kind of person are they, and how do they influence what you do?

Martin: Hmm. It's an interesting question.

Kent: I think about it a little bit. I dunno, I guess I'm maybe a little cynical, but I sort of think that some of the big publishers and some of the people who decide what games get made, kind of have a picture of what the gamer is. The same way that Hollywood has, like, "Here's our Blockbuster audience!"
And I sort of try to remember that, no, there's people who really love games, as art, and there are people out there like us who are geeks about games. And we love the little things. We really appreciate it and try not to talk down to the audience and try not to dumb things down for the game too much. One of the big things is that we hired a team for the sequel here that was quite new and had a lot of people who came on because they were fans of the first game. So in a lot of ways we were our own audience. It was like “What would we wanna see as gamers?” not what's gonna be a bullet point on the back of the box, or what's gonna make for a sweet thirty second TV commercial. No, our audience: they're smart, they're savvy, they know what's good. We don't have to talk down to them as much, so it's just people like us man. We're game fans too.

Martin: Yep.

Tony: They wanna have fun, we're just putting a game together for someone to really have a good time.

Alex: Yeah absolutely, and as level designer my job is to try and get inside the player's head and to cater for different play styles as well, so that's something that was important.

Sam: And do you have a process for that, that you go through when you think about the way to design the levels?

Alex: I like lots of user testing because I can try to think what the player's going to think, but then there is always that player that plays in a weird way I did not expect. I feel that a lot of user testing was very good.

Martin: That's pretty much the most fundamental thing we have to answer is: is it fun? We make games to give people entertainment and enjoyment, we're not there to lecture them or force them to like what we think you should, how you should play a game. Can we give you something that you enjoy, and you've got some good old fashioned entertainment out of? That's just the bottom line of everything I think we do.



Sam: Do you all have favorite aspects of gameplay in BioShock 2?

Alex: I think the combat for me. I think that it improved a lot compared to BioShock one. The AI has evolved quite a bit, Kent will be able to talk to you about that. We have the Big Sister, that's pretty good. There's lots of cool stuff with the environment, I think the action with environment has evolved a lot as well. And I think that with level design, we have a vertical component that wasn't there very often in BioShock.

Kent: I think that the actual, it sounds broad, but the play experience. I was saying it's not, "Oh we've got cool levels!" or "Oh, we've got cool AI's!" or "We've got cool weapons!". It all comes together. That's one of the things we were allowed to do with that extension, was make sure that all of the environment supported all of that gameplay. So you're fighting the Big Sister, she can fight you, and she will find you anywhere, and anywhere you go she's gonna be jumping off walls and kicking at you, picking up telekinesis objects. Because with that extension we made sure that all the levels had enough physics objects that the players could pick up and throw, we made sure that they all had the mark ups so the guys could use cover, we made sure they all had the proper ambushes for all the ADAM bodies. We sorted it all out to where the quality level across the game is so high and everything's integrated. It's not like, "Oh, we've really good AI, but the levels kinda suck". Everything works together and it has a unity of effect to borrow an old-timey term, but everything sort of blurs into that one experience where it feels like everybody showed up to make the best game we could.

Sam: Pretty sure I know the answer already, judging by how this has gone, but Metacritic sports over thirty reviews of a hundred percent for BioShock. Have you topped it?

Martin: Yes. We. Have. I know you expect us to be pushing the corporate line a bit, but there is a true belief that this game is better than BioShock one. Having the opportunity to go back and take all the things that never quite worked and just, retune things, readjust, I love duel wielding, I love the pacing. Getting the hacking game out was a vital thing, getting that continuous play just leads to a much more immersive experience and it is genuinely more fun and engaging, I believe, than number one.

Tony: And to add to that, it just had to be better than number one.

Sam: And that kinda goes back to the first question about what got you out of bed to go work on the game...

Martin: Second place just isn't worthwhile.

Kent: There would be nothing worse than releasing BioShock 2, having your name in the credits and having it get a seventy-five Metacritic rating, and going "Well, we've ruined something great". That would just... ugh!

Martin: You'd never show your face in a game shop again.

Alex: Like if we didn't think we could top BioShock one, we wouldn't have done BioShock 2.

Sam: Actually you just said something interesting about seeing a seventy-five on Metacritic and not wanting to have your name on that credit. This is something that we've been doing a bit of talking about at NZGamer.com recently: when did seven and a half, or seventy-five, become such a bad score?

Martin: It always has. Virtually everybody in the industry and certainly everybody who wants to buy it, is not going to be happy. Seventy-five means that you could have done better, and if you could have done better, we should have done better. If we didn't do that, we failed.

Sam: So you think that's what's driving it? It's just that need to be the best, that need to put the best product on the market?

Tony: We want better than a good game. You don't want a game where you kind of enjoyed it, you want a game that you're gonna talk to your mates about. "Have you played this yet, 'cause it's awesome". That's not a seventy-five.

Kent: The way I think about it, for my personal goal, is, I wanna make games that matter. And when you have the number of games that comes out every year, only a couple of them are gonna be remembered a couple of years later. You look at something like Fallout 3. That was a staggering achievement. I've been to replay it, I have replayed it, I've played all the DLC. People will talk about it, five years from now, when they ask you, "What's your favorite game?" someone's gonna say, Fallout 3. And you look at a game like System Shock 2 or Half-Life 2, you know, as time goes on a lot of those games fall off. We don't wanna be one of those games like, "Oh it's pretty fun, I played it for a month and kinda forgot about it." You wanna put your name on something and be proud of it, and and say five years from now, someone's gonna have a copy of this, they're gonna break it out, they're gonna start a website devoted to it, they're gonna... it's so goofy, but people are gonna write fan-fiction about it which, is like the geeky thing, but that means someone loved it man. Someone loved it. So that's what you're going for.

Tony: And it's a real 2K philosophy. You walk into a studio and you feel it walking around.

Sam: That's that's fantastic insight. That question is something that's been in our minds recently, and I'd imagine that it's the kind of topic that goes around, certainly on the media side of things because when you're scoring a game, you've got to try and really think hard about it. But that's fantastic, so it's really just less than a hundred percent is just not good enough.

Martin: I'd really like to emphasize how lucky we are when we get to work on these titles. Everybody I think in the games industry has worked on games that they're less than proud of, they know they could've done better, maybe got sixty, sixty-five and not even hit that seventy-five percent. And getting these opportunities to work with seriously talented people, across the world, is not something that jumps up everyday and it's not every game developer that gets that opportunity and when you do, you wanna make the absolute most of it. And the feeling when you get the game done and it goes out the door is pure pride. It just gives you a good feeling and you're never gonna beat that rush of just pushing quality games.

Kent: We got emails about some of our early review scores last night, I couldn't even sleep. I was emailing people, I almost called my girlfriend back in the States at four o'clock in the morning to just like, "Holy shit, did you see that review?"
The early stuff was rolling in and it was better than I expected, and I just I couldn't believe it. It makes it all worth it man, especially when you've been through the lows, you can appreciate the highs and it's like, "Wow, we actually did something." It's crazy.

Tony: And it wasn't just us it thinking it was cool, it's everyone.

This transcript has been edited for length and for ease of reading (many ums, ahs and likes have been removed). Quirks of syntax or grammar will sometimes be the author's own, as all attempts have been made to keep this transcript as close as possible to the source recording.

Look out in coming days for further NZGamer.com coverage of 2K's BioShock 2 event in Sydney.