BioShock 2 director: making sequel "has definitely changed me as a person"

• by GamePro Staff
• January 12, 2010 10:41 AM PST

BioShock 2's creative director Jordan Thomas speaks to GamePro about creating his monster of a sequel, and the unique challenges he faced when returning to the undersea dystopia of Rapture.

Jordan Thomas, the creative director behind one of 2010's most anticipated sequels, BioShock 2, walks us through his creative process. In this exclusive interview with GamePro, Thomas explains how he and his team went about approaching the daunting task of ensuring that BioShock 2 lives up to everyone's expectations, increasing the player's sense of authorship this time around, and why he believes that reading an essay by John Stuart Mill is not that different from playing Resident Evil 5.

Jordan Thomas, the creative director of BioShock 2, also worked on the first BioShock as a level designer.

GamePro: Where do you start when tackling a sequel to what many consider to be such a complete experience?

Jordan Thomas: I was a level designer on the original BioShock and none of us had any idea what the reaction would be to that game. So we had to just decide what we thought was cool, throw our hearts into it, and hope that it resonated well with people. We were surprised and pleased with the reaction to BioShock.

For BioShock 2, everyone expects something different out of a BioShock sequel. All the folks at 2K Marin, 2K Australia, and Digital Extremes who are developing BioShock 2's multiplayer independently, have to determine "here's what we think BioShock means -- here's a powerful little microcosm of what the BioShock space could be" and deliver something on a level that excites us and from there leave it up to you guys to decide.

The blue sky meetings at the beginning of BioShock 2's creation were characteristically schizophrenic. Every possible thing was brought to light, considered, loved for a day, and sometimes shot in the head at the end of that day. The big thing we wanted to do was imbue Rapture with a new sense of mystery without sacrificing the integrity of the very dense and carefully considered storyline of the first game. Telling new stories about Rapture is something that we were excited about, but at the same time we wanted to ensure that nothing was contradictory and that the player felt that this story and these characters really live in that world. The BioShock tone is something very specific and it took a while for 2K Marin to come online and make sure we were nailing what I think to be a very controlled group of shots if you know what I mean.

We built an internal wiki for BioShock 2 that derived heavily from everything we know about the first game, everything I brought to the table, and everything from people who helped build the 2K Marin studio. We were made up of members of 2K Boston and Australia and acted like shepherds by ensuring that the things that were brought up and considered for BioShock 2 felt right for the BioShock experience at large. From there, when 2K Australia formally rolled onto the project they lent us even more weight because they've all shipped a BioShock with us. The Siren Alley mission for instance was constructed largely at 2K Australia. It was perfectly BioShock because those guys are seasoned.

GP: The first BioShock's story and the character Andrew Ryan borrowed from Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy. Are any of the characters in BioShock 2 based on real life figures?

JT: Starting with Dr. Sophia Lamb, the primary antagonist in BioShock 2, she is a utilitarian altruist who's taken to a very extreme position. She believes that your moral duty is not to your own interest, but to the world at large. Her motto is "make the world your family." What that does is spread her loyalty very thin and she starts to see people as numbers. Now, this is something that arch nerds in philosophy courses will debate at length but the idea is that she and her followers are derived from a cross-section of utilitarians starting with John Stuart Mill, who is the founder of that school and was raised by his father specifically to promote that philosophy. Mill was isolated from other kids and surrounded by really creepy stuff designed to promote this genius-level intellect. I felt that was a cool origin for a villain and so Dr. Sophia Lamb had a similar background. This is how it plays out into a legacy.

As far as other characters in BioShock 2, Grace Holloway is based on several singers such as 30s blues singer Bessie Smith who's a favorite of mine. Grace seemed like a cool channel from Bessie Smith. There are definitely others but I don't want to spoil those today.

GP: The moral choices players faced in the first BioShock (whether or not to harvest a Little Sister for ADAM) had a limited impact on the experience. In BioShock 2, do the choices you make have a more profound impact on the story?

JT: Yes, definitely. One of my goals for BioShock 2 was to increase the player's sense of authorship, turning them over to the player over time. The choices in BioShock 2 on a moral level are at once more gray and more granular. You can set up some strange conflicts that play out by the end of the game by interacting with the adult characters who are often unspliced, sane, and just have a strange moral position for you to reconcile yourself with. Beyond that, the choices you make with the Little Sisters also feed into the endings. I can't talk too much about that because it would be a spoiler, but in BioShock 2 your internal decision making process shapes not just the play style on the mechanics side -- by the end you've rolled your own shooter -- but also the outcome of the story and my hope is that they feel intertwined to the player as he or she becomes the author.

The Fishbowl Diner is one of the landmarks you can visit in Rapture's seedy Pauper's Drop district.

GP: Can you talk a bit about the music in BioShock 2? From what we've played, it really helps set the mood of the new areas of Rapture we see this time around.

JT: I have a number of people who helped me compile a giant song list and for the licensed tracks I filtered these down by the levels. In Pauper's Drop, we chose from a cross section of blues from the 30s all the way through the very early 50s. The score is done by Garry Schyman, who did the music for the original BioShock and is returning with all new material. Some of the licensed tunes on the multiplayer side come from the first BioShock because we wanted to correspond as much as possible with that feel. You get a bit more of a religious vibe in BioShock 2 because even though religion was outlawed, the story takes you to all the places Andrew Ryan wasn't aware of. So you'll hear certain songs that would have been banned in Rapture proper.

GP: Can you talk about how working on a project like BioShock 2 has an effect on your personal life? You seem to know every square inch of Rapture and it must live in your head. Do you know it almost as a real place?

JT: Rapture does stay with you. I've probably babbled a few times about how big a fan I was of the games of 2K Boston and 2K Australia before I got a chance to work with them. As a level designer, my job was to take a small piece of Rapture and make it live as much as possible. So, I threw myself into Fort Frolic. In the end, there was a moment where I stood up and was done fixing bugs for the day and was almost done with Fort Frolic, but I realized that everyone was gone. The room was empty. Meanwhile, on screen Sandra Cohen was standing there before his masterpiece in a dead world. I just realized that art had become life and I needed to go home and sleep for a week.

With BioShock 2, continuing that legacy and making sure that all the people from 2K Boston and Australia are going to enjoy this chapter of the BioShock saga was my continual study. I wanted to ensure that Rapture felt as alive and interesting as it did to me when I first came on to work on the franchise. Now, I'll admit to you that BioShock has definitely changed me as a person. I'm not really sure who I was before I started the project, but it's been an amazing ride.

GP: Do you see things from BioShock in the real world because you're so immersed in the material?

JT: Music in particular. Something about the music of the 30s through 40s. I've now started to pick them from out of the world wherever I hear them playing. There's a taxi service in Marin County where I live, which drives you around in very old yellow cabs and they're always playing sounds of the 40s. Of course, I'm always wondering "do we need that one? Stop for a second! I need to listen to this song!" And of course the cabbies think I'm insane. And then he turns around and he's got the Toasty Splicer lip.

GP: There's definitely more of an intellectual approach to design with the BioShock games. The first game drew on a number of things culturally such as philosophy. What has influenced BioShock 2?

JT: We take a huge amount of inspiration from other games, but we're just as interested in literature or some old silent film as we are in World of Warcraft, which heavily inspired Ken Levine for the original BioShock. In BioShock 2, there's all that influence plus there's a strong sense of the legacy of what's called by arch nerds as "an immersive simulation." Pauper's Drop was created by Steve Gaynor who runs a blog called Full Bright as well as Monte Martinez who was a designer on Deus Ex. And they bring that strong simulation vibe to BioShock 2's Pauper's Drop.

To me, reading an essay by John Stuart Mill is not that different from playing Resident Evil 5. It's all relevant to games because games are a subset of reality. We're carving off a little fishbowl where we make the rules. It's important that if you poke a character, that character seems to have read something. If you have a shotgun and decide to saw off its barrel, that has an effect on its spread in a believable way. We inherit from whatever media that helps us bring this thing together.

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