Bioshock: What was right what the player couldn't get.

Gamasutra has an insightful write up on Bioshock this week and I urge anyone who has not read it to do so no now. The Story can be found at their site Gamasutra.com
I'll just talk today about some of the highlights I found while reading the article.

One of the more interesting things they brought up early on was; how can you merge two very different play types and still end up with something fun. As you read on you notice that at first they where going down the path of a very nerdy and slow moving game. So they addressed the issue that in the beginning they had the classic leveling of skills. Though cool it was one of the things that took away from the pacing and overall use in the world. As it is they had to re-write the enemy AI because it was to far along on a rpg style.

Another major problem they had which is the biggest problem any game company has is, how do you make the game fun? They talk about in the interview that for the most part it was well received by the internal testers and family. Yet once it went to open testing the group hated it with a passion it seems. So much so they had to remove levels and "dumb" the game down quite a bit. Their words not mine, I'm not that good at FPS so I would have crashed with training wheels. Anyway once they got the news the game was to hard but people did kinda see how cool the game ultimately became. It became very clear that a lot more had to be done than they thought. As it is they had to change the entire pavilion to less sandbox to more of a teaching aid on the importance of plasmids; and on top of that make it so you had to deal with the little sisters and big daddies more directly than in previous builds.

One thing I think worth mentioning when it comes to how they determined how hard to make the game was how well their own developers where playing the game. So it seems that everything was going fine in their minds until they learned one little secret, the secret is that the developers where using cheat codes. Granted this is not a problem when doing testing on how the Ai reacts to you. It's also not bad on trying to find glitches I would think. Without the fear of death you could run around all day and look for weird poly rips or poor movement animation on that third guy on the left. Though it seems using cheat codes was a poor way to guess how hard to make your game. Of course we are all gods with IDDQD, (for those of you to young to get the reference it's the god cheat in Doom one and two) sorry had to do it.

I think now knowing more about all the issues the game had and learned what had to be done I am amazed that the game was one as good as it was and two received as well as it was. My hope is now that we all know the name Bioshock the very dedicated staff can bring us a much closer vision of how and what Rapture should be.