BioShock Interview, Part One
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Q: You're giving the players a lot of freedom. How do you create a game where there are multiple paths? It seems like that would be difficult for you.
A: It is really hard in some ways, and it makes your life easy in other ways. A lot of gameplay comes emergently, and people are constantly surprised with the things they can do. For instance, you saw very briefly in the demo it's kind of hard to see that you fired proximity mines on objects, and then you can toss those objects at people. [The] testers came up with that, because we have a basic simulation. Those tripwire mines.you can actually grab them with telekinesis and reposition them they're these long cables with electricity running through them. You can grab them even the preset ones and drag them around the world, and then they'll cling to a surface.
Those are things that just came out of the simulation. That makes your life easier, because you get a lot of gameplay out of that but it also.there's lots of crap that isn't desirable that comes out of the simulation that you have to fix. You have to watch out for exploits.you're constantly worried about exploits. It's not as bad as in a multiplayer game, obviously, but that's something we needed to be careful about. It makes your testing life.very difficult.
That's one of the reasons we got an additional two months on the game was primarily not for features it was for polishing up. You can play the game and it's not exactly crying out [that] it doesn't have enough features. [smiles] It's just making sure they all work.
