Everyone knows Irrational Games’ lead designer Ken Levine, who’s been heading the Xbox 360 version of Bioshock. Few people know Joe McDonagh yet, who is senior designer on the PC version. With Irrational Games Australia, he has applied many changes to the PC version. Jörg Langer talked to Joe in Munich after playing the nearly finished game.



GG: Joe, I’ve just reached the second level of Bioshock. I’d like to congratulate you on how good the water looks and feels, and on the atmosphere in general. But so far, the game looks extremely linear to me.

Joe McDonagh: That’s true. We want the game to be linear in the beginning, because we don’t want to set too high of a threshold for beginners, and we want to have the time to introduce key gameplay elements, to show the player what’s Rapture all about. But now you are on level 2, in the medical facilities, from level 3 onwards, we leave linear gameplay behind, you need to find your way yourself, and you also need to return to earlier levels sometimes, or go there to collect resources, just like in System Shock. And the game is open ended.

GG: 70 percent of the Bioshock team have been part of the System Shock 2 team. Of course, they plan to make Bioshock even better, but doesn’t this also limit them in some way?

Joe McDonagh: I guess that many in the team just wanted to make System Shock 2 again. And we really have to challenge that, that’s not enough. System Shock 2 is nine years old, we needed to do something new. What we really concentrated on was what scared the team the most: To create an environment that was essentially living and breathing, which you can interact with in any number of interesting ways. From a sort of basic interaction like setting fire to an oil slick or melting a lump of ice, to the more sophisticated interactions. Say, you hide behind a Big Daddy, and a sentry gun shoots at you and hits the Big Daddy, and Big Daddy attacks it. That sort of interactions is where we really set a distance to System Shock 2. And that’s the single hardest thing for the team. And, personally, having played it through just last week, I think it’s by far the most interesting thing about the game, what sets Bioshock apart from all the other games.

GG: Still, the underwater scenario reminds me of the old Space scenario. It’s got a similar feeling of confinement. So, where’s Shodan in Bioshock?

Joe McDonagh: All I can tell you is that story has always been a huge part of our games. Take the second level as an example: You meet a guy called Steinman. He’s a plastic surgeon whose mind has been corrupted by plasmid. I think he’s one of the best characters in the game, We have put as much love in this character as we did with Shodan in the first two games.