BioShock Used To Have Atmospheric Pressure Controls
Plus four other canned game features.
Irrational Games has revealed some features from its past games that didn't make the final cut, including an atmospheric pressure system for BioShock that still resides in some form on the published disc. The details were posted on the studio's blog yesterday.
The BioShock atmospheric pressure system would have given players the ability to change the pressure in any given room, with three levels that would change the responses of the enemy AI and the nearby environment. Technical Director Chris Kline says that the intention was to give players “an additional way to manipulate the world to his advantage.”
It was eventually cut due to the feature tripling the amount of design and coding work for each level of pressure, and how the changes could be best conveyed to the player in an understandable way. “What does pressure look like? How does a Big Daddy behave under high pressure? Can players correctly interpret that behaviour?” Kline explains.
“Interestingly, some remnant of this system shipped with BioShock – the portion that controlled lighting and fog changes was left in the code. At one point, I discovered that artists were hijacking the pressure system to script lighting and fog changes.”
Other features that were scrapped in BioShock included a heavier emphasis on biotechnology, with audio logs assuming the form of “squishy, organic things, with lips and ears”; an insect-based hierarchy for Rapture's creatures and a navigation robot, designed to avoid making the team work extra in creating a map. There were also plans to include an audio log in System Shock 2 to explain the degrading of weapons over time – which would have “prevented about 80 per cent of the complaints” about the feature.
The BioShock atmospheric pressure system would have given players the ability to change the pressure in any given room, with three levels that would change the responses of the enemy AI and the nearby environment. Technical Director Chris Kline says that the intention was to give players “an additional way to manipulate the world to his advantage.”
It was eventually cut due to the feature tripling the amount of design and coding work for each level of pressure, and how the changes could be best conveyed to the player in an understandable way. “What does pressure look like? How does a Big Daddy behave under high pressure? Can players correctly interpret that behaviour?” Kline explains.
“Interestingly, some remnant of this system shipped with BioShock – the portion that controlled lighting and fog changes was left in the code. At one point, I discovered that artists were hijacking the pressure system to script lighting and fog changes.”
Other features that were scrapped in BioShock included a heavier emphasis on biotechnology, with audio logs assuming the form of “squishy, organic things, with lips and ears”; an insect-based hierarchy for Rapture's creatures and a navigation robot, designed to avoid making the team work extra in creating a map. There were also plans to include an audio log in System Shock 2 to explain the degrading of weapons over time – which would have “prevented about 80 per cent of the complaints” about the feature.
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