Jörg: 70 percent of the Bioshock team have been part of the System Shock 2 team. Of course, they plan to make Bioshock even better, but doesn’t this also limit them in some way?
Joe McDonagh: I guess that many in the team just wanted to make System Shock 2 again. And we really have to challenge that, that’s not enough. System Shock 2 is nine years old, we needed to do something new. What we really concentrated on was what scared the team the most: To create an environment that was essentially living and breathing, which you can interact with in any number of interesting ways. From a sort of basic interaction like setting fire to an oil slick or melting a lump of ice, to the more sophisticated interactions. Say, you hide behind a Big Daddy, and a sentry gun shoots at you and hits the Big Daddy, and Big Daddy attacks it. That sort of interactions is where we really set a distance to System Shock 2. And that’s the single hardest thing for the team. And, personally, having played it through just last week, I think it’s by far the most interesting thing about the game, what sets Bioshock apart from all the other games.
