BioShock Interview

IGN PC is the latest website to kick up an interview with Irrational Games' Ken Levine about their upcoming FPS/RPG hybrid, BioShock.
Q: Is there anything else you wanted to talk about that's relevant about BioShock right now?

A: What was cool is that at E3 people were excited and were exposed to the world of BioShock. And now we're really excited about taking all these theories we had of BioShock and the gameplay, and putting them into practice. The most exciting thing about working on something new and innovative is that it's a real learning experience. When we made SWAT 4, we kinda knew what we were gong to end up with in a lot of ways. It was really us just trying to make a better version of SWAT 3. That's what the publisher asked for. So for us, it was fun to work on it as craftsmen. But it wasn't really exciting because we really weren't leaning that much. But BioShock is constantly telling us what it wants to be as we develop it. So it's like we're having this dialog with the game, and we know what we want it to be, and it exposes part of itself and goes, how about this? Have you thought about this? And because it's so emergent, we keep learning things about it. It keeps changing the feel of the game all the time and defining itself. We just got down to a deeper level with the big daddies and the little sisters and we've expanded the level of interaction you can have with them. We talked about this at E3, you can either help them or hurt them. And we really just expanded the role you can have with them and it came out of the AI; observing the AI and how they acted. As it evolves, design emerges from it.