BioShock Postmortem

BioShock 'was a sequence of failures and errors' on Develop has 2K Boston's
Chris Kline's interesting comments on missteps made during the development of
the submerged shooter: "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.


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