BioShock Interview
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Q: How did you approach the subject of getting players to become emotionally attached to the game through the visuals?
Christopher Kline: Well that was an important aspect of BioShock - there's an aspect of graphics from the point of wanting to have something that just blows people away when they look at a room - it's got to light correctly, it's got to have all the greatest graphics features.
But more important than that is the emotion, and that's something we struggled with for a long time on BioShock. Our original plan was to take the kind of games that we loved to make in the past, some kind of Shock-style game, and bring it to a bigger audience.
At first we wasted a lot of time because we interpreted that too literally, and started making a sci-fi game that was technically quite correct - the systems were working the way they were designed, but people didn't really have the emotional attachment.
One of the key things we realised maybe half way through about the game was that the exciting thing wasn't the AI, or how great the face looks, or the sheer number of systems - the key is that when somebody walks into this world they have to be filled with wonder and mystery and a sense of majesty. That's really what draws people in and keeps them moving forward in the game.
This is something that we've owned up to a little bit is that when that feeling of mystery goes away - which it does at a certain point in the game when you've sort of resolved the big mystery - people felt like maybe they had a little less reason to keep going.
I think some of the levels after that point in the game were some of the best - if not the best - in the game. The gameplay was awesome, but you really need to have that mystery and wonder driving you forward.
It was also something we struggled with the Big Daddys and Little Sisters in the game - originally the Little Sisters were giant slugs, basically, squirling around on the floor. We did a whole prototype demo of getting the Splicers (they were called something different back then) and the Big Daddys working.
And we got them working, but it was kinda hard for people to get any emotional attachment to a slug.
