Rebuilding Rapture: Choices and BioShock 2
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You've probably been asked this a million times, so I apologize, but I'll ask again. To a lot of players, I think BioShock encapsulated an extremely strong self-contained metaphor about various things -- the danger of unchecked hubris, science, capitalism, regulation, and all those things. It was about a city that had failed. It seemed like a very final statement. How do you address that?
ZM: I'm making a BioShock 2. That's how we're addressing it. [laughs]
But no, it is obviously really hard. The worst thing about following up something that is truly great like that is the amount of second-guessing you can do and how paralyzed you can get. You think, "Oh God, is this going to have the same impact?"
But at a certain point, you do have to strike out on your own and do something that is different and not worry too much about whether it's going to have the same effect on people. If you just focus on that, you'll never move at all.
AF: You could get caught up in going, "Can we hit exactly the same philosophical notes once again?" Or you can say, "Look, at the end of the day, everybody wants an interesting character. Frank Fontaine was an interesting character.
If our notion is that we want to make sure that we continue to tell stories about interesting stories that the player can get engaged with or not, that they can participate in as much or as little of their narrative arc as the player chooses, then it's a lot easier of a question to solve.
From my point of view, we've met the challenge of whether we provide interesting characters that give the player a similar experience, that give the player something that they can dig their teeth into. And maybe at the end of the game, we've talked a little about the world we live in based on what we saw and the game we've put together.
ZM: It's up to us to try. It's up to the audience to judge whether we succeed. It's really hard for us to say, "Yes, we're absolutely doing it." Of course we're trying to do it. But ultimately, saying it one way or the other right now doesn't mean a whole lot until people get a chance to play the game for themselves.
