Jordan Thomas, the Creative Director on BioShock 2 (February 9th release) has given up information regarding the game's not-tacked-on multiplayer. Specifically about how it holds clues to the history of Rapture.
Speaking to Ars, Thomas explains, "To be perfectly honest, my feeling on the true prequel, if it were to be honest at all in trying to portray a living city, would be a very different game than Bioshock.
"With the multiplayer", he continues, "we have gone in an honest prequel direction: in the year between 1959 to 1960, it precedes the events of BioShock, and is the real year where the civil war of Rapture began in earnest."
"You take the role of a splicer whose life has been torn apart by that war, and see what it was like to be there when dozens and dozens of clever, self-interested mutants are competing over this miraculous resource—ADAM—and I feel like multiplayer is the best way to experience that part of Rapture's history. If you go back further than that, you're dealing with a very different interactive model that we didn't feel like played to the strengths of BioShock, something that makes you feel alone, paranoid, and hunted."
But surely, the multiplayer is just tacked-on and ripe for microtransactions? "Fan concerns stemmed from the fear that the single-player game would get hurt from working on multiplayer at the same time. We were able to focus on the single-player, and Digital Extremes was able to focus on multiplayer.
"We had an internal representative who is a multiplayer specialist. She took broad creative direction from me, and became a liaison to the Digital Extremes team, and those guys took the high-level direction and made the game their baby. They layered as much love on that as we did the single player. Because of that person walking between worlds, there wasn't much lost creatively."
Here's hoping... our review copy is now agonisingly close to hereness, so stay tuned.
Lots more over at Ars.
Speaking to Ars, Thomas explains, "To be perfectly honest, my feeling on the true prequel, if it were to be honest at all in trying to portray a living city, would be a very different game than Bioshock.
"With the multiplayer", he continues, "we have gone in an honest prequel direction: in the year between 1959 to 1960, it precedes the events of BioShock, and is the real year where the civil war of Rapture began in earnest."
"You take the role of a splicer whose life has been torn apart by that war, and see what it was like to be there when dozens and dozens of clever, self-interested mutants are competing over this miraculous resource—ADAM—and I feel like multiplayer is the best way to experience that part of Rapture's history. If you go back further than that, you're dealing with a very different interactive model that we didn't feel like played to the strengths of BioShock, something that makes you feel alone, paranoid, and hunted."
But surely, the multiplayer is just tacked-on and ripe for microtransactions? "Fan concerns stemmed from the fear that the single-player game would get hurt from working on multiplayer at the same time. We were able to focus on the single-player, and Digital Extremes was able to focus on multiplayer.
"We had an internal representative who is a multiplayer specialist. She took broad creative direction from me, and became a liaison to the Digital Extremes team, and those guys took the high-level direction and made the game their baby. They layered as much love on that as we did the single player. Because of that person walking between worlds, there wasn't much lost creatively."
Here's hoping... our review copy is now agonisingly close to hereness, so stay tuned.
Lots more over at Ars.
Read More Like This