BioShock Preview

Coming back from this year's E3, I felt like I definitely let you guys down. No, it's not the fact that I didn't slap Paris Hilton and run for my life (although that is a personal letdown). Coverage-wise, I let you down by not doing a piece on BioShock. As you know (Or may not thanks to YOU Mr. Slacker! -Mo), Ken Levine and the rest of the team at Irrational Games are hard at work on what the PR machine is dubbing as the 'spiritual successor' to System Shock 2. PR coin up or not, there is some truth to these words (NOW you have my attention -Mo).

Mmm... dead bodies... yum!

The roof is on fire!

Powered by a heavily modified version of the Unreal 3 Engine, BioShock is a horror game with first-person elements that takes place in the utopian city of Rapture, a city lying at the bottom of the ocean. As the game kicks off, you find yourself floating amidst debris, a survivor of a plane crash accident. The surface of the water is on fire, so frantically, you make your way to something resembling a lighthouse in the middle of the ocean. It just so happens that this 'lighthouse' is a gateway to a grand underwater city. Built by an ex-soviet named Andrew Ryan in 1946, the city was designed as a safe haven for the best and the brightest minds of planet Earth, a utopian community that would see through the impending cataclysms and secure a better future for mankind.

As you make your way down an underwater elevator and into the city of Rapture, you slowly begin the grasp the scale and the magnificence of this place. Undoubtedly, the Unreal 3 tech provides the building blocks for a spectacular underwater world, which Irrational is molding into a fully consistent and immersive environment. The idea of the development team here was to do away with the ideas of recreating actual cities with their known landmarks, and then placing them in an alternate reality. Instead, they opted to build a unique and all-encompassing world, a fusion of art deco and retro sci-fi visual styles that will give players the sense of true interaction with their surroundings. Ken explains that he doesn't simply mean this in a graphical sense (or in terms of ad hoc physics changes, courtesy of the Havok 3.0 engine), but changes on a much larger scale - in terms of being able to change the air that the inhabitants breathe, and consequently, their very behavior.

BioShock is a horror game first and foremost. Now it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the utopian society of Rapture stayed nothing more than a utopia in the end. Utopian societies in general have this bad habit of turning into repressive totalitarian ones. One of the reasons may be that in order to reach the state of utopia, a truly unattainable goal, one must justify the end as one sees it, by reaching for some terrible means. The world of BioShock is very much like that.

The fall of the city of Rapture starts when a stem cell-generating sea creature dubbed 'Adam' is discovered by a man named Fontaine. A struggle for power ensues and soon, the real motives behind the altruistic ideas of the men in power begin to surface. The world of Rapture is thrown into a state of chaos, and what the player is entering into is the aftermath of that chaos. A skewed reality of deranged human beings, half turned into mutants by bio modifications, and humans who are no longer that. Much like in System Shock 2, the fear of the unknown is amplified by the ghosts of the past - recordings and insane screams of those who perished and those who survived and changed into something frightening to an ordinary human being (Gimme a dark room, my PC and a set of headphones! -Mo). Pieces of the puzzle that needs to be deciphered. The visual style of a now decrepit, flooding city, the total chaos of a decaying society and the mutants set the tone for the game. Of course, one of the key tasks of the development team is not to employ cheap tactics when scaring the player, but rather to create a world that is so immersive, it functions almost independently of the player.

To the best of my knowledge, the idea is to create an open-ended game in the sense that there will be no levels, but more importantly, Irrational is attempting to create the illusion of a living and breathing world. To try and emphasize the emotional bond between the NPCs and the empathy created between the player and other actors in the world. One of the main vessels for this illusion is the architecture of the Artificial Intelligence.

Ken Levine explains: "We built what we call an AI ecology. AIs have goals of their own. First, we have several classes of AI. There are the Aggressors who were the foot soldiers of Rapture during the conflict. They behave pretty much like monsters that you're accustomed to seeing in games. They're very aggressive toward you. But there are also two other classes of AIs in the world called Protectors and Gatherers -- this big guy and this little girl. And the Gatherer's role in the world is to go around collecting this resource, 'Adam,' which is what drives all these genetic changes from bodies left over from the war. They sort of recycle that material and are able to recycle that biologically, in their own body, and they're guarded by these big protectors, these big lugs you see in these diving suit get-ups. And they won't bother you if you don't bother them. They are carrying around a lot of resources around that you might need. So the aggressors are interested in them, and there is often conflict between the Aggressors and them, and you're potentially interested in them. But if you don't bother them, you just observe them going through their behaviors; they have a relationship with each other. They're a team.