Big Daddy speaks

I was a professional screenwriter for a while, and I've done a ton of plays before I became a game developer. I've sort of done that, and to me, the reason I like working in games is it's much more challenging. Telling a story, you have to think much harder - you can't have two guys sit down and say, 'I'm Ryan and here's my viewpoint' and somebody having an argument, because nobody wants to watch that.

Our big argument... we had to frame all of this in a game, and that's so challenging. That's what makes me scratch my head every day and turn to the talented people I'm working with, because I can't have a monologue, I can't have a scene where the camera's pointing this way.

We don't really have cutscenes in this game, that's not my thing - I'm not a Final Fantasy guy where I'll write a 20-minute scene to tell the philosophy of the game. I have to do it really quick and really compress it, and have the world tell us a story, the Big Daddies and Little Sisters visually tell us a story. I like that challenge, because I'm not a gamer that likes watching story. I like themes and ideas - I don't want to sit there and watch a 20-minute cutscene.

I haven't thought about it that much because I'm so focused on telling the story in the game, because it's taken a lot of work to get right. It's really easy to tell evil overlord stories, but this story is very challenging.

If you want to get into this story, there's a novelistic level of depth. If you don't care about it, you just zip over the plot, but if you listen to every audio diary, you can really map out all of these relationships. There's 60 different characters in the game, and you learn all about them, about the backstories, relationships, who was sleeping with who, who backstabbed who. And it's all there. You could write a novel out of it.

I love the notion of BioShock, that you come into this world and you have to figure out what happened. I'd love to have the opportunity, I just don't know whether I would or when.

The how? It changes gameplay more actually, whether you go the saving-the-Little Sisters path, which is what Tenenbaum wants you to do, or harvesting the Adam from the Little Sisters, which is what Atlas wants you to do. Because he's saying, those aren't even children anymore, they're monsters, they're already gone, they're dead already. But if you're gonna survive, and I'm gonna survive, and my wife and children who are trapped are gonna survive, you'll need the Adam to give you the powers to survive. So that whole choice is really ambiguous.

Depending on who you follow, the Atlas path or the Tenenbaum path, your character grows differently, you play the game differently. To me that's more important than branching story points, though there is some variation on that side as well.

I'll never get tired of leading a target and shooting it with a cool weapon. That's always gonna be cool. But I am getting tired of a game that's like a one-ball string with a corridor that goes like this, and you go at the beginning and you go to the end, and there's no choice and you know that wall happened to get smashed through, so you continue on in the game; you know that monster's waiting for you at that very point.

You know that you have these weapons here and these weapons here; you know that you're always going to have these powers; you know that the environment's always going to be pretty static, even if it's got a few physics objects; you know that weapons won't speak to each other.

I want BioShock to be one of those games where people say, after I played BioShock I wanted more, I wanted this, and I wanted that, and when the other game didn't have it, I got mad. As a gamer, in the same way that when Gran Turismo came out people now expected to be able to tune their cars, not just race on tracks - that makes better games.

Our producer at 2K, Greg, always says, 'you say yes to the player'. It's a game that says yes to the player, that their expectations are fulfilled, that their improvisation is rewarded, that their choice is validated, that their experience is different from their friends', and that a walkthrough is no good to you.

That they go by the watercooler or in the schoolyard the next day and say, 'oh you did it that way? I did it this way! I set a proximity mine on my bot and I shot the guy and my proximity mine went on a kamikaze run and blew up on him.' It's a game that says: 'I care more about what you want to do that what I want to do as a designer. I care about the players' experience'. As a gamer, that's what I want.

Different things got nailed at various points. A few months before E3, I wasn't happy with the way the game looked, for instance. The restaurant at the beginning - we built that one room, and we worked on that room. After we did the prototype and threw it out, we said, let's get one room. And we worked on the restaurant and the statue and the water and everything until we got that room right. Everything came out of that.

The Big Daddy was the first creature we had in the game. We always had the notion of a protector class, a protected class and the other splicers. After E3, everybody loved the water effects and people said to me, does the water have a gameplay impact? And I said no. But why doesn't it?

So we went back, and Greg said, 'say yes to the player!' So you light a guy on fire, he runs to water to put it out; a guy's in water, you electrocute him. In the past year, we've been pushing up those elements: say yes to the player, say yes to the player, say yes to the player.

I think of it as people-powered gaming. It's a gamer-powered game more than it is a designer-powered game.