bioshock spiritual successor to system shock

It changed a lot along the way, obviously.'Īs we know, the final thematic change came along, in part thanks to 2K Games buying out Irrational Games and giving the studio free rein to create any game story it wanted so long as the core Little Sister/ Big Daddy game mechanic was kept intact. It obviously had some things in common, you can see how he got from there to the underwater Ayn Randian fantasy paradise gone bad. It had been abandoned and now it's full of crazy Nazis and the results of their crazy experiments. 'It was a secret Nazi base that had been set up during the war.

'It was set on an island after the Second World War,' recalls Jon of what would be the foundation for BioShock's story. The team ultimately turned its back on the concept, and so Ken Levine – the reputed writer of BioShock – came up with something else. Aboard a space station, the player would battle against genetically modified mutants while rescuing other characters from cults all bundled into a dark story covering political topics. This was true of the final setting of the game, as well, which was originally built around something fairly akin to System Shock. It was a long time before they were the little girls we ended up with.' Finding Rapture 'At one stage they were like slugs that crawled around sucking things out of corpses, there was a whole range. 'Originally the Little Sisters were called Gatherers, and they went through a number of iterations,' Jon says. It was quite some time before they took on the iconic look of a possessed girl and her accompanying boring drill with legs, however, which organically evolved as development of the story progressed. 'We had some monsters that weren’t just about how they fight you, what’s interesting about them is that they interact with each other and there are different ways that you can interact with them that isn’t just about what the best angle to shoot them from is.' 'So that’s where the Little Sisters, the Big Daddies and the Splicers come from,' explains Jon.

The idea was to create systems that worked together to create something that seemed real and believable, as though the world of the game would trundle along with or without the player.

Bioshock spiritual successor to system shock