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Регистрация: 10.03.2007
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Цитата:
Elizabeth Tobey: We begin the BioShock 2 podcast series by talking with two key figures shaping the future of the game: Jordan Thomas, Creative Director at 2K Marin, and Hogarth De LaPlante, Lead Environment Artist. Both veterans to the BioShock franchise, they worked on the first in Boston and moved to California in 2008 to found the new studio and begin work on the much anticipated sequel. To start, I asked them to give me a run down of their job descriptions, and their answers gave me much more than simple insight into what they do.
Jordan Thomas: I’m the project’s creative director. That means executive hand-waver. I ask for stuff and whine when it isn’t quite right.
Hogarth De LaPlante: I’m the lead environment artist on BioShock 2. Basically, that means that I’m in charge of architecture and lighting, and making sure that the levels of the game get built out and look awesome.
Elizabeth: Jordan also told me a bit more about the team building BioShock – one that spans, literally, the entire globe. The group also consists of both people who have been with the franchise since BioShock 1 was still being built to those who probably waited in line on opening day to buy the game, and now are getting a chance to work on the much-anticipated sequel.
Jordan: There was an original group of us that came over from 2K Boston and all of those folks worked on the original game. And BioShock 2 is also being worked on by 2K Australia and many of those guys were critical to BioShock 1 and they have returned for the second game. Since then we have been hiring a bunch of talented folks out of the bay area. Some of whom are ex-film folks, especially in the concept arena, and some of them are veterans of the many talented studios that are out here. The team, frankly, we’re very proud of them. We’ve had to build 2K Marin more or less from scratch. Hoagie and I were part of that original group. The team is led by Alyssa Finley, who was the project lead of BioShock 1 and who essentially seeded this new studio.
Elizabeth: BioShock came on to the scene in August of 2007 and won a slew of awards and praise from the press and gamers worldwide. The story, setting, and mystery of BioShock were profound and fresh, and when a sequel was announced, many agreed that 2K Marin would have some big shoes to fill when creating the next game of the series. As the mind creating the next chapter of Rapture’s history, I asked Jordan to tell me what BioShock 2 was all about.
Jordan: First and foremost, BioShock 2 is an attempt to bring new mystery to Rapture. So, the story begins in the late 60s, and the player takes on the role of the very first Big Daddy. Big Daddies are these lumbering powerful guardian characters that were present in the world of Rapture. This time, you take on the role of the first one, the prototype, who has been cut loose and given free will and is able to make use of plasmids. Plasmids are genetic superpowers that allow the player character to evolve and grow over the course of the game. So, the game begins with a mystery: who am I, and how did I get here? From there, you start to build relationships with the characters surrounding, that are still alive in Rapture, and by working with them, you can discover not only what happened to you, but work towards an escape. But if you have played it, then you get to experience new locations and a new narrative that’s embedded in the sprawling failed utopia at the bottom of the sea. Elizabeth: Hogarth, (called Hoagy by everyone in the studio) also had his own take on what BioShock 2 is about, and how he is trying to reach both the gamer who has traversed Rapture many a time, and the player who has never heard the word BioShock before.
Hoagy: It’s for players familiar with BioShock, a reintroduction to the environment of Rapture, which is the city that Andrew Ryan created under the Atlantic Ocean. So, it’s a reintroduction for them, and we’re trying to figure out how to bring new narrative elements to the location of Rapture to make it an interesting place to play through another BioShock title. For people who haven’t played the game yet, they will get to learn about Rapture and who built it and why it’s there, and the events that have transpired in its 30-someodd year history. The first game, we saw part of Rapture, and now we’re seeing parts that we haven’t seen before yet.
Elizabeth: One of the questions I heard most frequently among gamers after the announcement of BioShock 2 was “why a sequel? Wasn’t BioShock enough?” And in part, that question made sense to me – BioShock was a game with a beginning, middle, and end – no cliff-hanger needed for something else. It seemed that Jordan, Hoagy, and all of 2K Marin had asked the same questions (or quite likely, read the same gamer comments) when approaching the story of BioShock 2.
Jordan: Sequels are all about expectation, and BioShock is a series that we believe everyone thinks of as a very different animal from the next guy, so the process began with, “Where do you go with this? How do you bring people back to an experience and terrify them and shock them in a way that they’re not expecting, but also fulfill the many expectations they’re projecting onto it?”
Elizabeth: Writing and building a video game can be likened to a novel, a comic, or a film. Like those other mediums, when creating a game, the developers have to think about more than just the gameplay, but about the story, the world, the ideas they want to convey and the style in which they will express them. For many, video games go further than any book or film can in allowing a person to step into another world and imagine themselves in a place entirely other than the one they live in. For Jordan and Hoagy, they had some important stuff they wanted to continue from BioShock 1, as well as new areas that hadn’t been explored before.
Hoagy: Just the idea that we knew it was going to be awesome to come back to R, but how do we make sure that that is going to be really awesome for an audience who’s already been there. So, that was, for me, working on the environment, that’s been my primary challenge. I think we’re doing a great job of making it fresh and mysterious and awesome again. I think there are some thematic hallmarks of the BS title. You know, it’s interesting, working with a different creative director this time around, it’s interesting to see what Jordan pulls out of the world of BS, that he fixates on as the interesting things as opposed to Ken who we worked on it with the last time around, so there is still the background and backdrop of the Objectivist utopia that was what Ken thought was so fascinating about that world. But now we’ve got that in the background, and Jordan’s adding on top of that the things that he thinks are interesting about the characters and the world, and what ADAM does to them, and the power struggles that happen. I think it’s just really interesting for me working on it to build on it that way.
Jordan: For me, on the one hand, the new mystery comment that we’ve now managed to plug a few times around is something that I feel extends into the philosophy of Rapture, that coming back to BS means that you need to be introduced to new ideas. Hoagie was talking about some of the thing I’m interested in, the nerdy stuff that I dig about R, but I also feel that while we can’t go in too deep because it would spoil the plot, I also feel that it’s important that if you come to BioShock 2, that you get exposed to schools of thought that we didn’t touch in BioShock 1, and that are interesting contrasts to Objectivism. So, some of our characters will be ideologues like Andrew Ryan was for BioShock 1, but have a very different point of view. And then, on the gameplay front, I did feel like in BioShock 1 we managed to bring some interesting choices to the FPS. My feeling is, this time around we need to increase that expressivity, that when you decide to be the fire guy or the electricity guy, that over the course of the game rather than just zapping a little harder or lasting a little longer – or really just keeping up with the Joneses of the splicers that you’re meeting along the way – your tactics are changing. You’re gaining new usages and learning to pull out the bank shot, and the Rube Goldbergian trick shots that people tend to really dig. Furthermore, your Big Daddy weapons, you’re evolving those throughout the game. So by the end, you’ve really rolled your own shooter. By the end, you’re playing an entity that did not exist at first and is wholly yours.
Elizabeth: One thing seemed clear to me from talking with the guys: Rapture made BioShock. That statement seems simple enough, but for a game in the shooter genre, having a city so rich and alive it can tell its own story past the plot of a single game is something unique. Many BioShock fans have taken the world of Rapture and created their own fan fiction. In fact, ever since the game was announced and BioShock 2 was only a title, the internet was alive with speculation about what the plot would be. And a lot of it was very in depth. Having a history with the first BioShock, both Jordan and Hoagy knew how valuable an asset they had with Rapture.
Jordan: We believe that it’s incredibly fertile. Hoagie and I were both on BioShock 1. In fact, Hoagie was my level architect or level artist on the Fort Frolic level and when we were working on that game, there were a lot of ideas that occurred to us that we could do, but that we didn’t fit into the first game, and towards the end, when BioShock 1 was about to ship, these conversations would emerge about what we could next, and we think that a city built out of such strong ideas is a place that has long-term interest. So, from there it seemed like the shift in perspective, that Hoagie mentioned, moving into the role of the noble but rather persecuted Big Daddy figures was an interesting way to change your role in the ecology, and thus change the type of story that we’re telling around you. And of course, there are a lot of cool things the player might like to see, new locations in Rapture that suggested themselves, but that didn’t fit with the story of BioShock 1. Here in BioShock 2, we have an opportunity to bring those to life.
Hoagy: Yeah, I think also the space station utopia was really boring. Honestly, Jordan and I talked about this a while ago, what do we do for the sequel? And any idea was out on the table at that point, and I think nobody has played BioShock more than the developers that made it, so I feel like in one respect we are a pretty good litmus test for whether it’s still an interesting place or not. At the beginning, I was so psyched to think about new parts of the city of Rapture and continue working in the artistic style that we developed for the first game, and invent locations and stories and characters that still existed in Rapture. And if that doesn’t bore us and we’re the people that played it for thousands upon thousands of hours, then I think we have a pretty good perspective on how interesting that location really is.
Elizabeth: While Rapture may be a fascinating place, this is a video game we’re talking about after all, and the character you play is crucial to the success of the experience. In BioShock 1, the player took on the role of a seemingly regular man, stranded in Rapture, but in BioShock 2, you step into the shoes of the first Big Daddy. Big Daddies, in BioShock 1, were probably the most feared opponent you could come up again, many wielding a huge drill on one hand and others carrying a rivet gun that could take you down in moments.
Jordan: One of the cool things about playing a Big Daddy is that in BioShock 1 you would defeat the Big Daddy and then clunking to the ground would be this huge guy in an antique diving suit and he’d have this big bad-ass drill on his hand. So you’d be like, “man, that thing is better than this wrench I’ve got, I wish I could use that.” And you couldn’t. Well, in BioShock 2 you actually begin with the drill. Furthermore there was another type of Big Daddy called a Rosie that when you would take her out, she would drop this massive industrial rivet gun on the ground, and there it was, this super-ornate thing that…it looks like a playable weapon, but oh, sorry, you’re just a regular dude, you can’t wield that thing. Well, in BioShock 2, of course, all of the Big Daddy weapons are accessible to you. And so, the rivet gun is one of the early ranged weapons you get.
Elizabeth: Becoming a Big Daddy sounds like an awesome experience, but as I said, they were the thing many feared most. Ask a veteran BioShock player how he felt the first time he faced a Big Daddy and I promise, the tale will be harrowing. All this talk of bad ass weapons and becoming one of the most powerful elements in Rapture makes me ask: Who do you fear now? The Big Sister, Jordan says back.
Jordan: : The player is a prototype, which puts in the position of being smarter and faster than the average Big Daddy. The idea is that the later models were simplified and brute-like, and the player was designed to take a different role, essentially. That puts you in the place where other Big Daddies are a legitimate threat. If in a single player game, you were this unstoppable singular force, but if you were to face yourself, that would be a huge challenge, so the Big Daddies are still a very legitimate threat. Splicers in large groups. Splicers are the degenerate drug addicts who have become addicted to this drug called ADAM, and have been altering their DNA over and over again and causing them to fall apart but get more powerful at the same time. In large groups, those guys are still very much a threat to you. And then there are new splicers to come in BioShock 2 that have managed to survive all of the time between the events of the first game and the second, and those guys, because they have managed to basically, in a completely closed system, be the ones, the top predators, they are a real threat to you. And finally, on top of all of that, there is a brand new character who is borne of Rapture’s tragic history and who takes a place at the very top of the food chain. So in BioShock 1, you would have these sort of dynamic and very consensual boss fights against the Big Daddy characters. Well, there’s a character called the Big Sister, who is watching all of your interactions with Big Daddies and Little Sisters, the sort of gatherer characters that follow Big Daddies around and siphon ADAM out of bodies, and every time that you take a Little Sister out of the ecosystem, she [the Big Sister] becomes angry because you’re disrupting the status quo. For her, Rapture coming back to life and functioning as it did in her memories is very important, and so she watches you for a while and then she comes and hunts you down. She is kind of a literal hybrid between a Big Daddy and a Little Sister. The idea is that she’s an ex-Little Sister, an important Little Sister who returned to Rapture, unable to leave it behind, and put herself through the process of becoming a Big Daddy. But it only half-worked, and somehow her armor is custom-fitted around her and she is this lithe, ultra-dysfunctional figure that is powerful but unstable.
Elizabeth: Even after all this talk, I still felt that I had really only scratched the surface of what BioShock 2 really was, but having experience BioShock 1, that didn’t surprise me much. The “twist” of the game is still hailed as one of the best moments in video game history, and much of the thrill of playing through that story was the experience of uncovering the mystery. But for the player who has already been to Rapture once before, and learned the sordid tale of Atlas and Andrew Ryan, would BioShock 2 still remain mysterious?
Jordan: I would say definitely. The setting in BioShock 1 was the mystery. This time around, we’re bringing you in to locations that are informed by new ideas, and, in fact, your entire identity is again a strong mystery, with a touchstone that comes from the first game. I know what a Big Daddy is, but you definitely don’t know what the PC is, he is a unique entity. So our feeling is not only need the story be mysterious, it also has to be very unified with the kind of gameplay that you’re dealing with. So we mentioned earlier that you’ve got the plasmids, and I think you asked about some of the tools involved. In BioShock 2, the plasmid system has deepened quite a bit, and this reflects the fact that ADAM, this genetic force, this stem cell-like material that has run wild in Rapture, is changing the city, and it’s also affording new opportunities on the plasmid front. So the plasmids are deepening, and each time that you upgrade one of your genetic superpowers, it gets a new crazy usage rather than just “MORE DAMAGE” or “LASTS LONGER” and meanwhile, you’re learning how ADAM has affected Rapture since, and how the Big Sister is involved with all of that.
Hoagy: Yeah, I think also, the most compelling mysteries this time around are - as Jordan said, it was really environmental mystery and who am I? the first time, but I think this time around, it’s really the characters you meet as you go through the game and how they’re related, to each other and how they’re related to the city of Rapture that is going to be the really compelling mystery. There are actually a handful of characters from the first game that are in this one. Like, Tenenbaum makes an appearance, and she’s related to what’s happening in the story very closely and you start to learn about her and other characters that we can’t talk about today. The cool mystery comes from the characters and their relationship with each other.
Jordan: Yeah, we heard a lot from fans of the first game that they wanted closer environment with live, non-spliced characters who were sane and you could have a moment of respite where you’re dealing with somebody who seems coherent. So in BioShock 2, we’ve got a new cast of characters that you get to participate in those moments with, and actually make choices about their fate, which allows you to affect the greater story in a way that we weren’t able to do with the first game. You know, we had the one central choice with Little Sisters, and we’ve got that again, and we’ve actually evolved that quite a bit, but the choices related to the adult characters, the ones who are more grey, are entirely new.
Elizabeth: With that, Jordan and Hoagy left me to continue doing what they do best – building BioShock. I had many more questions to ask them covering just about every topic we had touched on today, but I knew there would be plenty of time for that. They do work down the hall from me, after all, in a studio painted in brilliant green and blue – with life sized Big Daddy and Little Sister statues watching over the entire team, waiting for them to complete the next epic journey through Rapture.
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19.12.2008, 14:12
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