BioShock 2 – exclusive Jordan Thomas Q&A

Not so long ago, I had the pleasure of heading to San Francisco for the first-ever hands-on with BioShock 2. What’s it like? Find out in issue 53 of X360, on-sale now. While at the BioShock 2 event, I had an epic 22-minute interview with the game’s creative director, Jordan Thomas, who, it turns out, is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Here, he discusses Rapture’s new leader, Sophia Lamb, as well as the philosophies that inspired her creation. It’s a long interview, covering just about everything unveiled on the game so far, but I assure you, it’s worth sticking out to the end:

How are you today?

Good. I’m very proud of Siren Alley and The Big Sister is Watching, and I think people are excited, which is really good for us. We were up all weekend working on it, so that is gratifying.

So much of the appeal of the Big Sister encounters lied in the intense build-up, rather than the fights themselves. Was this intentional?

Yes. I enjoy waging psychological warfare against the players, to the extent that I can within any game. The Big Sister was conceived as very much a boogie man with an emotional payload, and she needed to be able to scare a Big Daddy. So, the way in which she affects the environment, the fact that she uses it, when she decides to fight you – she leaps off of things and picks up whatever she can find – was always part of the design. I don’t know that we specifically said the build-up must be scarier than the fight. We wanted her to deliver on that front. It boo-hoos us to put the player in the right emotional space before they face something like this.

Plus, I suppose it’s a challenge to find different ways of doing it each time…

Well, sort of. Here’s the thing – the Big Sister is drawn in by player behaviour. Now, smart players of Ryan Amusements will note that the first time you deal with a Little Sister before the Big Sister faces you, is part of the narrative for that level, but from then on, the Big Sister hunts you down anywhere in the level based on wherever you decide to deal with the Little Sister that brings her to that threshold. So, the way in which she appears is kind of authored in part by you, after that point in the game. They’re strongly involved in the fiction, and they’re still a character – we were talking previously about only one Big Sister, and basically it was a game design choice to refracture her into different aspects. Well, you get better at facing her in combat, but you also learn more about the central Sister character that we had referred to previously, who still exists in a certain form.

Is there any way you can discuss the background of the Big Sister character?

She is pretty central to the story of the BioShock storyline, so I won’t say too much about her. What I will say is, the player, as the very first Big Daddy successfully bonded to a sister, and back then, they were doing them as pairs. One Big Daddy, one Little Sister. And so, the player’s motive, ten years after Rapture has fallen and Sophia Lamb, the new villain, has taken it, is to cross the city to find her.

The player’s role within the BioShock universe has changed completely. How will the moral choices now affect the player? Player behaviour usually dictates playing it through once the good way, then again the bad way – will BioShock make these decisions so easy for the player?

I hope it isn’t easy. All of the moral choices that exist in BioShock 2 both pertain to the Little Sisters and to the unspliced adult characters you meet along the way. We have tried to make them as grey as possible. The fact is, the player’s relationship with the Little Sister has indeed changed. They have a father trust employed now, and the decision whether to exploit that trust and betray it or make good on it even if it sacrifices some gain for yourself, is compelling to us, but BioShock doesn’t really judge. We’re trying to reflect the player as much as possible, rather than say, ‘this is the good playthrough and this is the bad playthrough.’ But, we are aware that people play through multiple times in different ways. Our optimal case, for some jerk like myself who invests the kind of effort in multiple paths, is that someone will come back and be interested to know what happens if you take another path.

We’d expect the dynamic between the character and Tenenbaum to be different than that of Jack and Tenenbaum, considering that, as a Big Daddy, you have a predefined role within Rapture. Can you talk about the dynamic between the two characters?

Sure, although it’s a little different than what you’d think. Tenenbaum is aware of what makes the player special. Most of the Big Daddies are slaves to Rapture, automatons lumbering around and protecting the little sisters, essentially tirelessly. The player has been cut off his leash, and Tennebaum knows that. That means that while she is fully aware you were originally designed for a purpose, she also knows that you might have some resentment built up over the way you were oppressed into this service. So, Tennebaum is somebody who has a lot of wisdom about Rapture and gives you some knowledge of your previous role and still is very much about saving the Little Sisters, but her relationship to you is still informed by your free will. She doesn’t assume that you should be doing this because you’re a Big Daddy.

Sure, but has her personality altered over these ten years? Say, grown cynical as a result of the changing politics within Rapture?

She has definitely grown somewhat more bitter, because in BioShock 2, someone is making new Little Sisters, continuing her work. The redemptive arc that we left her in, during BioShock, ended seemingly with Jack becoming a harvester or a saviour of her primary charges. Now, that nightmare has begun to echo, and she has darkened somewhat in her pursuit of that cycle being broken.

Let’s discuss Sophia Lamb – obviously, she’s fulfilling the Ryan role on a basic level, but her ideologies are completely different. So, how did you go about creating the character?

Well, it started by asking, ‘what would be compellingly different? What school of thought would inform Rapture in a way that would add new dimensionality and really change the original intent of the city?’ Andrew Ryan would be sick upon his shoes, right? Beyond that, I have been interested in utilitarian philosophers since I was a kid, and she is sort of an arch-utilitarian, an altruist who believes in the greater good above all. Now, people who study that philosophy have reached what’s called the repugnant conclusion: that if you spread this thin enough, all of a sudden you’ve got everybody equally miserable, but at least it tallies – that’s what she’s falling into, her being a psychiatrist who could exploit the weakness of people that were trapped without the sun, and who would have insight into the player’s dilemma. What interested me as well, obviously, is that Rapture is a place where psychology plays pretty heavily into the themes.

Were there any philosophers in particular that influenced the new state of Rapture – Ayn Rand informed many of the ideologies and references on display in the first game. Is there anyone comparable used in the sequel?

I mean…y’know…some of these guys are still alive, so I’ve got to be careful about that! (laughs) But John Stuart Mill has a grim background. He’s the founder of utilitarianism. He was isolated from other children by his father in order to turn him into a genius-level intellect. He was learning Latin when he wasn’t even in his tens, you know, to promote his philosophy. I found that chilling, so I thought Sophia Lamb should have a similar background and be echoing it through the ages. That’s sort of the material from which she was born. But you know, Rand fled Russia to evade what she saw to be the tyranny of Marxism and religion as well as a number of other things, so Lamb incorporates a lot of different philosophies.

Let’s discuss Sinclair. Going back to player expectations and factoring in Atlas’s true identity in the first game, people are aware of the fact that your benefactor in the game could betray you – do you play on that at all?

[Long, awkwardly evasive OHHHHH] All I can say is that learning who to trust, in a game that follows BioShock, is part of the fun. I can’t spoil a thing about the motives of any of the speaking characters.

Structurally, how similar is the game design to the original? We saw at the end of the demo that we were getting in a train, to presumably head to a different hub area. Is it all still divided as such?

It’s still divided into discreet regions, if you know what I mean. We feel like the potential for pocket worlds that comes from that, absolutely fits BioShock. Obviously, you start in Ryan’s Rapture, learning about that, before transitioning rapidly and heavily into that of Sophia Lamb, some of the locations of which, for example, she managed to rally the downtrodden and turn them against Ryan back in Rapture’s history. She’s an important part of that history, but for reasons I again won’t spoil, was not present for BioShock.

Do you spend much of the first part of the game connecting the dots to the original?

I would say that we give it a fair amount of billing, although our big target was to, in Ryan Amusements and introductory levels, allow people who know the story of the first game to smile at secrets and double entendres that a fresh player wouldn’t necessarily catch, so that there’s still some surprise and things that are genuinely unfamiliar to them. And then, both types of player, as they lunge out of Ryan Amusements, are getting to know an entirely new side of Rapture.

When you were working on the first game, did you have any of these ideas or locations in mind? Was there a sentiment among the team that there was more to Rapture that what we saw in the first game?

Oh, definitely. The city is immense – you look out the window and there are skyscrapers aplenty, you know, the idea that there could be other places, both in DLC and sequels, who knows what, always has an appeal. This is a place where the best and brightest were allowed to work in their own interests, unencumbered by law and God, and that puts them in a position to really create their own private domain, their own theme park. So, I always thought that we could go a number of different ways with that. The sequel, specifically, [it all] coming from an altruist, occurred later, upon the formation of 2K Marin.

The pace of the game in BioShock is naturally faster, since the character you play is more powerful and you have a different effect on the surroundings. Still, the greatest indication of the changing pace of the game is the omission of the pipe puzzles, in favour of something real-time. Did you perhaps feel that players had tired of them in the first game?

We definitely got feedback to that effect. That said, it was not done just because some people became bored with it. BioShock 2 is an attempt to weave all possible choices into a FPS/immersive simulation, where you are taking control of these systems and making them work for you. By the end of the game, you are holding the reins. That’s important to us. It kind of took you out of the action and isolated itself. The results, however, subverting security and so forth – all we wanted to do was focus on that in the game world. Doing it from a distance was more of a countermeasure against feeling too bulky as a Big Daddy and not being able to do some clever things before the Splicers come running. So, you know, that’s how we ended up with something that isn’t a simulation nor forces you to go up to it.

Fair enough. And we suppose so much time is invested in examining the details of the world around you, which levels out the pace…

Right. We would rather you spent time feeling immersed, that the place is alive. It doesn’t just stop when you hit a menu. There are certain things [that shouldn’t], like it would be pretty annoying to be hit in the back of the head while you’re shopping [with a vending machine]. But with hacking in particular, this is one thing that could live in the sim and we felt like [the player] might want to steal someone’s friendly bot and murder them on the fly and to do so on the fly.

How does the 2K Marin team feel about the multiplayer in BioShock 2? You begun the presentation on-stage – this is a series identified by players as first-person, narrative-driven game that is notoriously multi-layered. How do you feel it’s translated into a multiplayer experience?

The goal that we set out with on the multiplayer side was to take the systemic potential – taking your own body and adjusting it to your own play style and the expressivity that came from the intersections between those systems – and lets you show off against another live entity. One of the chief attributes of [the single-player] is that as a player, you can decide to pull off the crazy cool-style kill, and maybe it’s a little more efficient, but whatever. We don’t force it on you. With multiplayer, you’ve got bragging rights. In multiplayer, it’s actually much harder to pull off these combinations against live players, and we felt that the Civil War period of BioShock, the whole of 1959, was also great for open combat. The kind of thing that was less contained and based around a single person’s story more than a single-player experience would be. So, internally, the idea of multiplayer was kicked around on the original BioShock and with BioShock 2, we felt we actually had the bandwidth to start asking those design questions.

Was there no temptation to keep the project in-house at 2K Marin? How did Digital Extremes come into it?

Really, our feeling was that anything that ships with BioShock 2 on the cover has to come from a team for who it’s their raison d’etre. And so, we wanted to make absolutely sure that the narrative experience of BioShock 2 was super-compelling and loved, from the get-go, by its team. We didn’t want to dilute our focus by stretching resources between the two. Digital Extremes was super well-known and frankly, their demonstration and technology impressed us a lot. They had a lot of pedigree and they clearly loved BioShock. We felt they were the right people to ensure that that component would be loved on its own.

Voice actors are so important to the BioShock story – they’re essentially the primary channel for the game’s narrative. How meticulously do you cast the characters in the game?

It is a lengthy process and we are extremely meticulous. The type of actors who are able both to make player directions sound natural and who are able to imagine themselves in the presence of others in this black womb of a recording booth are quite rare, so BioShock 2 has to stand-up to the bar that was raised by the first game, so it was very important to us to make sure they were the right people.

I noticed the NPCs had overlapping voices with those of the first game. Is that a stylistic choice?

It’s definitely a deliberate choice to use some of the same Splicer voices. The content is entirely new, but we really like those voices and while there are new ones in the form of the Brute Splicer and the Crawler and other characters you meet, further in the game. For the core humans, we felt those people were incredibly talented. We wanted to them so show how that personality would take ten years of additional misery and spin it into new psychosis.

Can you talk about this Eleanor Lamb, at all, who we noticed was mentioned in the demo?

I can only say her story is very much part of the mystery, of BioShock 2. The player was bonded to a single Little Sister in his past. Eleanor Lamb, as you may have figured out, is that sister. I can say no more than that.

My 20 minutes are up, but I suppose I should ask another question…

Hey, I’m not going to chase you away!

Okay then, I guess I should ask this: do you feel overshadowed by the first BioShock, in any way, or do you embrace the fact that it had such an impact?

Oh…I feel extremely lucky to be involved with BioShock. In my work on the first game, I was really given a space to really go to my…special crazy place! (laughs sheepishly) I owe those guys a lot for that trust. On top of that, I learned from them, both from the Boston and Australia studio. But Bioshock is a brand-new IP, which was the Magnum Opus of that combined set of teams, and my hope is in BioShock 2, I’m able to surprise the player and that moral choices have consequences they can perceive. I feel like it’s worthy of the name, and that the guys who worked on the first game enjoy it. That’s my aim.