BioShock Preview

Gamers With Jobs has put together a preview of BioShock, based on what they saw during a recent demonstration from Irrational Games’ Ken Levine.

Sitting next to the artists and designers, there’s little question that every corner of BioShock has been lovingly crafted. Irrational licensed the Unreal 3 engine from Epic, the visual supercharger behind the hit Xbox 360 title Gears of War. Like most developers, Irrational has taken this engine and tortured it until it bleeds a gritty reality full of fire, water, and dust. From the few hours I spent touring the game’s architecture (alas, over the shoulder, as my day at Irrational was before the game went “hands on” to the press) they’ve succeeded on at least a few levels. Everything in the game feels both organic and polished at the same time. And the environment is extremely interactive. “Everything is searchable,” explains Levine. His goal was to make the world of BioShock work correctly, like a simulation. “If the user expects to be able to do something, they can do it in this world. So you can freeze something and then shatter it, fire spreads correctly, and so on.”