During his Paris GDC session, Bioshock lead programmer Chris Kline casually explained that his main point would be that "BioShock should've failed."
According to Kline, Bioshock "did fail a lot, over the course of time. A series of big mistakes and corrections and slipped ship dates, but all of these helped make it a good game."
The whole thing started early in 2002 when Irrational Games realized they need tomake a big budget game. "Here was our idea: Let's just make System Shock 2. This was easy because we'd already made System Shock 2. We knew it was a critical success, and we thought we knew all the things that kept it from being financially successful."
"I said this was going to be about failure," said Kline, "and the very first failure was that we wanted to base this whole thing on System Shock 2."
The team then decided that they needed improve both System Shock 2's narrative and AI. They also faced the challenge of selling a sequel of an unsuccessful game to a publisher. Kline openly admitted that they "Faked" interest in their game by giving an exclusive glimpse of it to a major gaming website alongside a planned System Shock 2 retrospective for its five year anniversary.
"The design team's core assumption was that Shock 2 was a near-perfect game design. And we could just fix a few flaws. So what did we keep? Resource scarcity, the customization of the character through different systems, and we wanted the player to be cautious about moving through the world," Kline explained.
Kline then went on to tell how they weren't focused in their designs and how " nobody was focusing on what the end user experience was, and everyone was moving in different directions." Until E3 2006 when they had to release the game's first demo. "In order to show we could create a compelling user experience, we had to change how we were thinking about the game. We had to start thinking about what the player was really going to feel in this game," Kline said.
That E3 was critically successful but gained little to no interest from players; and the game seemed doomed for market failure.
But then their marketing department decided to market the game as a shooter. "What's interesting is that even though it was the same game," Kline said, "when we presented it as a shooter people started getting more excited about it. Even the team."
The team then started focusing on the game's shooting aspects and tweaked it to be more exciting. "Some people think that constantly messing up, and pushing dates isn't a good way to make a game, but as far as I'm concerned it's the only way to make a good game."
Moral of the story? According to Kline: "Always remember that you might be totally screwing everything up."
