BioShock Community Q&A

The guys at 1Up grabbed a handful of the community’s questions about BioShock and sent them over to Irrational Games’ Ken Levine for answering. A bit of what to expect:

Q: The A.I. in BioShock seems very complex. What was the biggest hurdle in balancing the A.I.?

A: Well, there’s balancing it in terms of how much damage [enemies] do, and then there’s sort of making them work properly and making them work to our intentions. Like for instance, you saw those teleporter guys who were in the X06 demo. They turned out to be really tough and really hard to hit, which we wanted them to be because they’re teleporting around, but they ended up having too many hit points, so it got to be very frustrating. We knocked them back a bit… “Last cannons” is the term we use for them because they deal a huge amount of damage and they’re really hard to hit, but if you get ’em just right you can knock ’em down.

But in terms of the A.I. itself, getting it all to work, we’re still working on things and we just included a feature where if a melee guy comes up to you and you have a pistol or range weapon out, he’ll attack you or he might even run off — but if you’ve got a melee weapon out he’ll come up to you and he’ll even taunt you because he knows you can’t hit him at range. So he’s kind of aware of what weapon you have out. Then we have Big Daddy and Little Sister — you’ve seen a lot about them and their relationship is very complicated to get right, but I think we’re really there with them.