BioShock’s Mistakes Contributed to its Success

Develop Magazine has posted a short overview of some interesting comments made by 2K Boston technical director Chris Kline during the Paris Game Developers Conference. Essentially, he states that the mistakes made during the game’s development contributed to its success:

“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.