Ken Levine Q&A
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Were there ways that you wanted players to express themselves in BioShock that didn't quite come out?
There were people, particularly the hardcore System Shock 2 fans, who felt the game was dumbed down. And I'll be first out in front, taking it on the chin if you're not happy with that, then that's me I'm the guy who did that. But I think if you break it down system by system, it's really not that different. I haven't gone back to the System Shock 2 strategy guide to refresh my memory. But the research system, the plasmid system, upgrade system and all that stuff there was a fair amount of allowance for player expression. Whether everyone loved the implementation of it I can't say. One thing that's really encouraging with what we're doing with multiplayer games now is being able to track where people are dying on the maps. Getting feedback from users. Looking at the raw data on an Excel spreadsheet and saying, is this an underpowered thing? Look at World Of WarCraft. Three or four years later they're still patching it, balancing it. And their data is colossal. You make a game that you've just launched to market, you're data pool is fucking tiny. Blizzard's datapool is the size of this hall. And even with that, you tell me there's not someone in the world right now bitching about how Warlocks are nerfed in the last patch. There's still going to be people who are unhappy.
