BioShock 2 Interviews

To go along with the previews, a number of interviews BioShock 2’s creators have hit the web. Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Tom: So obviously much of the first game is fondly remembered. Will we get to go back anywhere?

HD: You’ll see locations from the first game. You’ll see Arcadia, but you’re not going to go back there. You can see the Kashmir Restaurant through the window. We want to acknowledge some of those areas existed, as Easter eggs if nothing else.

Melissa Miller: Regarding the history of Rapture, a lot was established in the first game. But that’s not it. In BioShock 2 we’re really excited to be showing more of that history.

MTV Multiplayer.

Miller stressed that the game is being designed to retain and celebrate the things players most enjoyed about the first game. (BioShock 2″ is engineered, for example, to allow players tactical flexibility, this time as they try to protect an adopted Little Sister as she gathers Adam while a dynamically-generated assault from Splicer enemies commences. Mixing Plasmids, triggering traps and other strategies are back and continue to be left to the player to fully explore. (We don’t force players to use one toolset,) she said. (We like to think that’s what works about ‘˜BioShock.’)

Gameplayer.

Gameplayer: That’s a fair enough call in regards to the city of Rapture, but is there something in regards to gameplay you wanted to do differently?

Melissa: You were offered all these choices in Bioshock 1. In Bioshock 2 we see an opportunity to really deepen those choices in a lot of different ways. The first example of that is with the Little Sisters, but that deepening of choice is going to extend to a much greater degree in Bioshock 2 than it did in the first game.

Hogarth: I think also that the idea of ‘˜meaningful choice’ to gamers is something the industry has been working towards for the last few years. Bioshock made a lot of claims about giving you moral choice. And we sort of did. We sort of started that conversation and scratched the surface a little bit.

In some respects when we look back critically over the first Bioshock we didn’t pay off on a lot of those things as well as we could have. There were so many things we were trying to do new. Now we’re really starting to think about how can we give you more meaningful choice. In Bioshock 1 you got to choose to harvest or save the little sisters, but in Bioshock 2 how can we really make that more meaningful than a yes or no and an animation?