NEWS | ALPHA
Does it ever worry you in that you have in mind the emotions a player will feel, and if a player messes about and does contrary things, they won’t experience the game the way you want them to? Yes, but look, I think you have to put trust in the player and I think the player generally rewards the trust you give them. Somebody once asked me about the scene in the first BioShock where you see the Big Daddy come down and drill that guy against the wall. They said ‘What if I didn’t look at it?’. Well, I think that people generally do look closely, and it’s our job to draw the eye as much as we can. We understand that people may not be
paying attention and we have a lot of systems in Infinite for dealing with that – content that, if it doesn’t play in one sequence, it’s always waiting for another opportunity to play again. We can see that multiple times in a level and the player might not be paying attention the first time or be in a position to see it, perhaps because of a gunfight. There’s all this opportunistic stuff that happens in our AI, but at the end of the day I think that players appreciate being trusted and they feel like ‘I caught that’. It’s almost better if they catch it out of the corner of their eye and turn to see it rather than the game locks up and a movie starts running. But it’s hard to tell a story that way. We spend a lot of our time saying ‘Oh my god, how the hell are we going to get this across? How are we going make this so the player can’t break this but we still give them freedom?’ I think that at the end of the day, the player feels trusted and that’s important.
certainly a way to do that, and people can do that well, it’s just not how it works for us. I think that’s the culture at the company, it’s a little more figuring out and making sure we deliver something that’s really, really good at the end of the day.
So why doesn’t Irrational go with the annualised method? Obviously you look at Call of Duty go from one developer to another and they’re honing their craft and they’re really good at that, but with each BioShockwe want to pop the stack completely and really start again. I think even when we announced Infinite
we still had that challenge, in that people were saying ‘Wait, what are you guys doing? I don’t understand.’ Even we didn’t understand for a while. We had to figure out exactly what it was, and it was so interesting when we announced the game a year-and-a-half ago in New York. The first event we did had people really
scratching their heads over it. But by the time we got to Gamescom people had had enough time with it where they began just looking at it and getting really excited, so their reaction was so different. The money guys at the company are wise enough to understand that’s the better way to make a product for us because that’s our skill set.
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If you get a chance to play these annualised franchises – the Assassin’s Creeds and the Call of Dutys – what’s your take on them? I hate those people that say ‘I think everyone should make games the way I make them because I know the secret.’ Seriously, fuck those guys. There’s room for everything out there. There’s room for annualised franchises that continue to polish the gem. There’s room for people who pop the stack and really try and change things every time; the Rockstars and the Irrationals. I’m not comparing the quality of those two groups.
I hate people that say ‘I think everyone
should make games the way I make them because I know the secret.’
Fuck those guys. Ken Levine, Irrational
I say if they can do it and deliver quality, which I think they do, that’s great. I think the thing that made BioShockwork to a large degree was the game’s environment and the experience of seeing something new. But If you were to keep going back to that place, you lose so much of that. I don’t think we had much choice, creatively.
Moving on, what about the media attention and the status of being ‘Ken Levine’. You’ve become one of the more iconic developers. Are you conscious of that stuff, or do you try to ignore it? We interviewed Cliff Bleszinski and he’s really conscious of it and knows he can use his superstar status to inspire other people to do the same thing. I’m a friend of Cliff’s, I like Cliff. He’s a much more social guy than I am and he really loves being in that space. I’m much more of a home body. I go to work and I go home and spend time with my wife. That’s what I do, whilst Cliff is always jetting around all over the world. So we’re different guys in that regard.
What’s helpful to me is that I can get out there and talk about my work and the team’s work in a way where people are interested in hearing about it, so you have some credibility coming in. I’m very fortunate to be able to do that because that allows me to talk about what we’re doing more easily. I guess I don’t think about a lot of stuff. It’s
very gratifying to meet fans and it’s charming when somebody recognises you on the street because it’s not like a situation where you’re like Beyoncé and you can’t even go out to dinner. It’s very charming when it happens and it’s
very flattering. The fact that people like what I do and what the team does is just very nice, but when you go back to the office the thing you have to do is remember that you have to
FEBRUARY 2012 | 07
Ken Levine (left) believes it is important for the player to feel trusted, and to allow them to stumble across moments in a game, rather than force them through cutscenes
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