BioShock's Mistakes Contributed to its Success

[GameBanshee News]

Develop Magazine has posted a short overview of some interesting comments made by 2K Boston technical director Chris Kline during the Paris Game Developers Conference. Essentially, he states that the mistakes made during the game's development contributed to its success:

"Bioshock was basically a sequence of failures and errors," he said. "But every one of them was a good thing - it forced us to look at the game and reassess what we had, which worked in our favour."

Charting the development of the product back to 2002, Kline pinpointed almost a dozen points at which wrong decisions or wrong paths were taken, ranging from bad middleware decisions right at the start of the project to the team's original misguided decision to simply remake System Shock 2, a game that had failed commercially despite universal critical acclaim.

One of the original differential points for Bioshock was to be its self-sustained AI ecology, which Kline called "life around you, but also without you". While impressive results came from months of intensive focus on these interactions, it soon became apparent to the team that it was incredibly boring without any player involvement in this ecology. This forced the team to rethink not only the entire system but also the designs of the AI agents themselves to make them more interesting and empathic.

[Tricky]

I recently got a fair go at Bioshock. I haven't been able to try it out up until now because my Radeon lacks sm3.0 balls. Fortunately for me a friend of mine was kind enough to let me borrow her pc for a bit. I only had about four hours, so I didn't have time to play the whole game. To my impression this game is too much like System Shock, so it inevitably includes all its flaws. And it's slightly more on the console-ish simplistic side.

I remember the early previews, AI ecology and all that. What I remember most was a single preview that mentioned you could change the air pressure in a room, so your footsteps would be muffled and you had an easier time sneaking up on your foes. I didn't chance upon that particular room, but I was generally disappointed with the environment nonetheless. 2K promised a vastly interactive world and didn't deliver. So, together with AI ecology we have at least two gameplay elements that could have vastly set this game apart from its predecessor.

Boring my shiny metal ass. Creating the same game twice, thát is boring.

[Brother None]

I don't think that room exists.

The "living ecology" consists of Big Daddies walking around banging pipes. The rest pops up on the same spots, always