The interview you’ve been waiting for! Well, at least I was. Ken Levine talked shop with IGN about the news of a 1999 mode that will challenge players. One of the earlier games made by Irrational Games is System Shock 2. Why does this matter? This older title was known for its intrinsic difficulty and huge degree of choice longevity. Basically this game was fucking hard. With that in mind, Irrational hoped to give us what we haven’t had quite as much; a real challenge.
The 1999 mode hopes to bring back the difficulty that long time gamers have said is almost gone in modern games. This mode will give you a tougher version of BioShock: Infinite where your choices as a player have “permanent consequences.” This is in stark contrast to the numerous respawn points and readily available ammo that we have seen in gaming. The 1999 mode aims to rid us of that inherent ease and force us to agonize over our choices as players. Old school, yes. Awesome? Most definitely.
This mode was born from the outcry that the BioShock community made over what they saw as a lack of permanence and difficulty in earlier games. Irrational’s blog explained exactly why this mode will be for those players that want to tout around that they are hardcore enough to handle the 1999 mode.
“It’s not simply a matter of adjusting the difficulty sliders in the game – the team went much further than that.” Indeed, every element of the game has been tweaked to increase the challenge, with players forced to make every shot count, plan out a strategy for every scenario and effectively use weapon customization to increase their chances of survival. The health system will be overhauled too, “set to an entirely different baseline” says Irrational. Even in 1999 mode there will be game saves, but as Ken Levine (Creative Director) puts it, “you’re gonna f***ing need them.”
And with that, I leave you guys and gals with Ken Levine’s recent interview discussing this new mode and more about how BioShock: Infinite will play.
- The one thing to expect from 1999 mode.
Is 1999 basically for the release year of System Shock 2?
Ken Levine: Yeah, that was when our first game came out, System Shock 2, and I want to make sure that you don’t lose things that are in our culture. One of the things that’s interesting about our first game is that it was pretty hard, you know? But games were much harder then in general. They weren’t just more difficult, they asked different things of you. They really asked you to manage resources in a way that has sort of fallen out of vogue.
There is a notion of permanent choice in BioShock Infinite in general with your nostrums, but [with 1999 mode] you’re choosing a path that is going to be mutually exclusive from other paths. If I want to be a pistol guy, that means I can’t be a machine gun guy as well. When I find a machine gun, I’m going to suck at it. You’re going to have these periods where you’re limping along with the weapons that aren’t right for you. I could have chosen to be a vigor guy but I haven’t got a vigor, so I really have to struggle. That kind of bootstrapping is something that is sort of gone from games where you have to start from a really weak place to get back to a strong place. That’s definitely something that I always enjoyed in games and still enjoy in games.
And so it sounds like it’s a little bit like a class system where you have to make a decision up front about what you want to be powerful with. Is that accurate?
Ken Levine: Yeah, because you make certain commitments. I think that was something that a lot of our old school fans were disappointed [with] in BioShock 1. You never had to commit to any character path. While we do ask you to do that in regular BioShock Infinite — your nostrums are permanent choices — it’s not the mutually exclusive angle that we’re pursuing here. You don’t think of builds in BioShock, you know? We really want to have this mode really demand that you make a build.
I remember when BioShock came out and there was concern over the Vita-Chambers and what that did for respawning. Is this be an attempt to address [the complaints of] the people who were a little bit upset about Vita-Chambers?
Ken Levine: Yeah absolutely. There was a degenerative strategy in Bio 1 of dying a lot and wearing down the Big Daddies and things like that. We really wanted to have something that we haven’t in our previous games where there’s a resource cost to respawning and you know you could end up in a bit of a spiral and a bad place. You have to bootstrap your way out of that spiral or if you can’t, guess what: game over.
So if you’re playing in 1999 mode and you run up against something that you maybe can’t defeat, then you just can’t defeat it and that’s how it’s going to go?
Ken Levine: Yeah, or you’ve got to go off in a different direction and try to find more resources or fight some of the easier enemies. Look, we want to balance the game. That is a very difficult mode not just in terms of how many hit points the enemies have but in terms of the kind of choices you have to make. I think we put a lot of responsibility in the gamers’ hands and they can make choices that aren’t well thought out and they will. Their character will suffer because of those choices.
Going back to System Shock 2 to frame the conversation a little more in terms of the evolving genre of the Shock series, what type of genre would you say System Shock 2 was? Would you say it was more of a role-playing game? More of an adventure game? How exactly would you define it?
Ken Levine: That game was really a hybrid between a first-person shooter and an RPG but from a balance standpoint it was very much a survival horror game. In terms of the starting from A) starving people for resources, B) that the kind of choices you had to make and that feeling of, that parsimonious feeling because the game doled out resources very begrudgingly to you. If you made the wrong choices you can really get screwed. I think there are places like weapon degradation which is sort of a bridge too far for a lot of gamers and that was really a source of a lot of contention then, it was too hard even for 1999. I think that it was a hybrid but balanced like an old-school survival horror game.
Then moving forward to BioShock, there was a definite shift in how that kind of formula was set up. I remember we were even debating internally about how to classify the game on IGN in terms of what label to put on it. So can you just talk through what some of the discussions were like internally when first coming up with the game and touch on where a decision on genre really fits into the overall timeline of the games development?
Ken Levine: Genre to me is primarily a tool to let non-hardcore gamers know what they’re getting into. Like when you go to a movie, it’s identified romantic comedy, drama, you know horror, whatever, and that’s primarily for people who aren’t reading sites so they know what they’re getting into. A hardcore movie buff is not going to need those descriptors. He’s going to know this is a Tobe Hooper film, and he’s going to know, you know, this is Stephen Frears’ movie, and he’s going to be like really interested in the space between traditional genres. I think that the reason we do genre names is really for the people who aren’t reading IGN every day, who aren’t going to Kotaku every day, who don’t know Ken Levine and Irrational Games. Who just sort of see a game and are sort of like “oh that looks cool, what is it? Oh it’s a first person shooter, I get it.” We don’t really use it as a design tool because basically we want to make the game we want to make. If the game says it wants to do this, it wants to do that, then who cares about the genre classification?
Subject Delta & Jack contemplate how to get back at Booker Dewitt for ending up in shiny Columbia while they are suffering in the hell that is Rapture.
And how did that conversation go internally in terms of how you wanted to evolve the mechanics of BioShock moving from the original BioShock to Infinite?
Ken Levine: Fortunately we sort of knew, luckily, what we were going to be building: a first-person shooter with heavy narrative stuff, giving the player a lot of different choices about how he approaches problems. As much as you can go on the internet and have people critiquing your work, Irrational is the biggest critic of their own work. We spend so much time after projects doing post-morteming, what went right and more importantly what went wrong. After we came up for air after BioShock 1 we felt that there was a small missing piece: permanent choices. In vanilla BioShock Infinite, you’re still making permanent choices in a way you weren’t making choices in BioShock 1. I think with this [1999] mode we just wanted to take that notion and make something that is going to make a non-hardcore gamer cry like a little girl, that’s why we’re separating it off. Probably we’re even going to hide it behind one of those old-school left, right, up, down, left, right kind of things — you don’t want somebody stumbling into this thing because it’s going to hurt.
You’d mentioned System Shock 2 was a hard game, it was also an incredibly scary game which I think had to do with the setting as well as the difficulty level just knowing that something could completely screw you up at a moment’s notice. How would you say the horror element transfers into Infinite. What’s so important about that element of ever-present danger?
Ken Levine: There’s two ways to create horror. Well, there’s probably more than two but here’s the two I can think of right now. One is this certain thematic narrative mood, which I think BioShock has a lot of and System Shock 2 has a lot of. Then in addition there’s this tension you get from starving people from resources, from making every bullet count because the stakes get raised very high. One of the reasons people were so scared in System Shock 2 was because they knew that if they made a mistake they were going to be really, really, really screwed. When you go back to play the original Resident Evil, that’s insane. That’s going to really starve you of resources. Even when I go play old-school X-COM.
I remember being out on the field and fighting Sectoids and Mutons and you have one round left, you’d better use that ************ correctly. Sorry about my French. And that feeling that this shot counts so much even in this like goofy looking 320 by 200 turn-based game, I remember that tension and waiting for the alien turn and hearing them walking in the background as they take their turn. Because my resources were so limited and I could not afford to screw up, that added a huge layer of tension. I think 1999 mode harkens back to that layer of tension not strictly because we’re so much better at creating narrative horror now, but because we have the advantage of that natural sense of “oh my god I can’t make a wrong move here”.
The shooting elements in Infinite, would you say it’s more about precision, do headshots really count compared to hitting someone in other parts of their body? Is it like really punishing like something like Counter-Strike or is it a little more forgiving where you don’t have to worry about weapon spray patterns and degenerating accuracy and things like that?
- Nice to see that 1999 mode challenges even Elizabeth.
Ken Levine: About the vanilla game or in 1999 mode?
Oh if there’s a difference then please do explain.
Ken Levine: I don’t think they’re radically technically different from a code standpoint but the balance itself like headshots, things like hitting your target with three rounds of ammo and killing that target because who knows when your next round of ammo is going to come around? There is no moment in System Shock 2 where you’re going to pray and spray, you just can’t do that because you don’t have enough ammo. We’re not technically doing anything different like toenail hits do 1.7 more damage. Because of the resource starvation and because of the kind of choices you’re going to have to make when you’re really specializing in weapons and all you’ve got is some vigor that you use in combat, you’re just going to feel like ‘oh my god I’m going into this thing a day late and a dollar short, but I have to figure out a way to make it work’. I think that just adds that natural tension without really changing the principles of how combat works.
In terms of Big Daddies which were useful encounters in that if you defeated them you were given rewards but they were also optional in a lot of cases. I was curious how the element of optional encounters and player choice in terms of exploration enters into the experience of Infinite.
Ken Levine: We’re really experimenting with that sort of non-immediate aggro enemy to a much broader range of AI in this game. That you’re going to see a lot of characters where you’re not sure what their disposition is going to be. Watching them for clues is going to be an important aspect of the game. If you just go in guns blazing all the time, especially where every single bullet counts in the 1999 mode, you’re really going to have to think carefully about which combats you take. If you take on a lot of combat that you shouldn’t you’re going to use up resources pretty fast. We really are experimenting with that whole notion of what we did with the Big Daddy and it’s fascinating to see like how that changes the dynamic of the experience. It is a profound change from most FPSes. But the Big Daddy was a change too you know. The thinking about what they do moment to moment is a lot more important because you can just look at them. You can just stare at them whereas with most AI you don’t really get to stare at them, they’re trying to blow your head off.
How does interface factor into Infinite? I know there’s probably quite a bit of information that could be displayed at any time but what do you feel is important to let the player know?
Ken Levine: When I want to think about interface I like to pick up a remote control for my cable TV and look at it and say oh my god, if I don’t do my job right I could be making this, you know? Those things are like the most disastrous interfaces of all time. There are like a hundred and six buttons on them, all of which are the same size, all of which could have the same color, you really have to search, literally put your glasses on and search for what you’re looking for. We could make a game that has an interface as terrible as this, so you always have to step back from your interface and when you’re working on it. Sometimes you’re like ‘oh this is great, I love this.’ It’s because you’ve been playing it for six months, you know? You forgot the first time you picked it up how much it sucks.
The word for interface is transparency. When you have the control in your hand you should feel like there’s no controller at all. Even with a motion game you have to think about it. The goal is to remove the thinking about the interface and just sort of make a neuro connection. It’s caused so much humility because you just have to assume that your interface is going to be absolutely terrible until it’s half way decent. Then when it ships it will hopefully be half way decent but your interface is always going to be wrong.
Will there be more non-combat exploration? Maybe puzzle solving and character interaction in Infinite compared to say BioShock or System Shock 2?
Ken Levine: You definitely have a lot more character direction. There’s a bunch of things I haven’t talked about yet that we’re looking into. There’s not a lot of stuff to do off the beaten path in BioShock 1 and I think there’s a missed opportunity there. I don’t want to sort of talk about much of what we’re thinking about here but I think it is an important element that we underexplore in BioShock 1 and certainly we underexplored character interaction, obviously. I think that any time you try to innovate or do something a little different you’re always setting yourself up to fall on your face but listen, I’d rather fall on my face trying to do something that we feel is different than what we did before
Is multiplayer entering into the equation at all for Infinite?
Ken Levine: I’ve given the same answer on this one for two years now and I’m going to have to give you the same one, it’s my boring stock answer on this. There will be no multiplayer in BioShock Infinite unless we feel we have something that is uniquely BioShock, uniquely tuned to the tastes of what BioShock fans want, and on top of that is awesome and fun to play and until, if and when that happens, then we have something to talk about.
But as of yet that has not happened?
Ken Levine: Yes. As of yet we have not had a chance to talk about that having happened. How’s that?
Ok.
Ken Levine: How’s that for a weird grammatical something of an answer?
How would you classify BioShock Infinite for somebody who hasn’t been following it, in terms of genre?
Ken Levine: I think we stick with first-person shooter, because again it’s sort of puts them in the ballpark of what they will expect. If you play first-person shooters you’ll get a lot of what you expect when you play BioShock. You’ll get a lot more things that you definitely don’t see in a lot of other games, but you’ll get that first person experience. You get the gun, you get the reloading, you get the enemies and the headshots. I think it’s a pretty safe way to classify the game to the non-hardcore gamer, but to the hardcore gamer, we just talk about what the game is to them. To me, they don’t care about genre. They’re going to dig deeper than just the genre. What genre is Minecraft, right?
Yeah who knows. It’s still on track for a 2012 release?
Ken Levine: That is correct.
