Inside the Genesis of Bioshock
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"The first external BioShock focus test was meant to be a sanity check: to get a better sense of what was working well but needed polish and what wasn't working at all.
At this point we had already done one small round of internal focus testing with friends of friends, which had turned out mostly positive feedback. So, just after the first beta, the entire design team plus a contingent of 2K producers headed off to see how a group that knew nothing about our company or BioShock would react to the first level.
It was brutal.
The first level, they said, was overly dense, confusing, and not particularly engaging. Players would acquire new powers but not know how to use them, so they stuck to using more traditional weapons and became frustrated. They didn't interact with the Big Daddies, and they didn't understand (or care) how to modify their characters. They were so overwhelmed by dialogue and backstory that they missed key information. A few of the players did start to see the possible depth of the game, but even they were frustrated by the difficulty of actually using the systems we had created.
Based on this humbling feedback, we came to the realization that our own instincts were not serving us well. We were making a game that wasn't taking the initial user experience into account, and we weren't thinking enough about how to make it accessible to a wide variety of players.
