Levine: Everything. We're making a shooter that is unlike any other shooter that anyone has ever played before. So in terms of what to expect out of it as a gamer, it's being developed to defy expectations. We've never made a game like this before. Because you can approach every problem so many different ways, because you have such a huge arsenal, and because enemies are so varied -- you never know which enemies you are going to be facing, and where -- it just makes it a nightmare for us to balance.GameSpy: What kinds of weapons will we have access to during the game?
For better or for worse, that is where games are going, and that's where games need to be going, because now it's all about the experience you had and sharing that with your buddies; not reading a step-by-step strategy guide where you walk through and have the same exact experience as everyone else. But in turn, that makes it hard to balance.
Levine: The player's got access to several different categories of weapons. There are the traditional weapons (like you'd find in any traditional first-person shooter) but of course, they are all modifiable. Also these weapons will have different ammo types. You can have regular rounds, armor-piecing rounds, incendiary rounds, etc. and then some more exotic stuff too. And then there are all the active plasmids which can potentially serve as different types of weapons. These provide X-Men-like powers, so anything you could imagine an X-Men-type character doing, you'll be able to do something similar.
GameSpy: Does the game's storyline follow a linear path, or are there multiple ways to complete the game?
Levine: The story is a very particular story. The reason we have done this with all our games is that any writer who thinks they can write seven great stories for one game is kidding themselves. It's hard enough to write one great story alone. For us, the story is the skeleton around which the game lies on, and then the meat of it is what the player does. Our focus is on expanding the "meat" space and keeping a really tight, really formed, really smart skeleton of a story intact.GameSpy: What mechanic will be used to tell the story?
Levine: There are numerous mechanics in this game. One is talking ear-to-ear with a radio device; then there are characters in the world that you see and can directly interact with, too. There are apparitions that you come across in the game which you begin to pick up on because you've been so genetically modified that you can now sense these spiritual energies. There are people's audio diaries, and everything in the world of BioShock has analog properties.
Because they split off from the world in the '40s, they split off with the most brilliant minds of the time, and so they developed all their technologies. So instead of writing letters, they developed an early form of email but that were in an entirely analog format which they would send through these pneumatic tubes. So you'll find lots of communications on these audio logs, and I think one of the best forms of communications in the world is actually the world itself as a character. It communicates its personality because the world still thinks it's this wonderful utopia and doesn't realize that it's been destroyed.
