Official Little Sister Podcast Thread

[Raveness]

Originally Posted by Mike

Oh, so you've played the game before then? How is this ludicrous? The choice is about saving or harvesting, not murdering her. She's a gameplay element. None of this stuff is relevant because it's not the point of a little sister. This is akin to complaining about not being able to kill enemies by beating them over the head with medkits. Immersion is great and all, but it's still a game and there have always been limits on every single game ever made.

That aside this is all still blind conjecture on your part because you don't know how the game will take care of this in the first place. You're just making up scenarios about an unreleased game based more or less on a single sentence, and for what? So you have something to complain about?

Very well said I haven't offered my two cents yet as from what I've read I currently have a low opinion of this place, want the idea to calm down a bit first, but essentially what you've said is on par with the reality of it.

[ZippyDSMlee]

Originally Posted by Raveness

Very well said I haven't offered my two cents yet as from what I've read I currently have a low opinion of this place, want the idea to calm down a bit first, but essentially what you've said is on par with the reality of it.

I am a bit tiffed that you cant make battle strategies to protect them from death when you fight a big daddy or if you want to play the uber evil role and just kill them because they are there.

Altho its a minor annoyance to such a apparently awesome game.

-----------------------------------------------
(ggaaa 2 line sigs are a must)
Now a days a demo is a must no demo no preorder, end of story.

[Ectoplasm]

Originally Posted by Mike

This is akin to complaining about not being able to kill enemies by beating them over the head with medkits.

On a completely unrelated note, there is a game where you could do just that: original X-COM UFO Defense. Any item thrown at someone had a chance of doing some damage. You could take down an alien by hurling a bunch of medkits at it.

[ZippyDSMlee]

Originally Posted by Ectoplasm

On a completely unrelated note, there is a game where you could do just that: original X-COM UFO Defense. Any item thrown at someone had a chance of doing some damage. You could take down an alien by hurling a bunch of medkits at it.

*L* reminds me of dungeon master 2 on the sega CD you could pick up anythign and toss it...oh the fun to be had..plus it had worm rounds....hey you do need food to keep stanmia up :X

[2K Elizabeth]

The podcast is now on the Cult of Rapture with a non-spoiler version of the podcast transcribed by yours truly.

[the noob 22]

thanks elizabeth I have been waiting to get my hands on this transcription

[irrationallevine]

Hey guys-



So some thoughts on the situation. First of all, this approach was entirely directed by me, not by any corporate marketing department or the ESRB. I’m going to use the word “I” in this post a lot, instead of “We” not because I did the wonderful Little Sister animation (that was Shawn Roberston and team) or I implemented their AI (that was John Abercrombie and team). I just want to be clear that I called the shots on this, and if people have issues with this, they should direct their issues at me and not marketing or members of the team. 2k has stood by us on this morally challenging and very, very intense game.


My goal has always been to make the game impactful and disturbing but not exploitative. BioShock is the thematically darkest game I’ve ever made. It might be the thematically darkest game I’ve ever played. (SOME SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS IN THE REST OF THE PARAGRAPH) Insurgents hang from street lamps. Entire families are found in obscene, undying portraits, a bottle of poison sitting on their coffee table. The streets of Rapture are filled with a thousand individual scenes, of lives and dreams obliterated in a brutal civil war at the bottom of the ocean. Even the woman advising you not to harm the Little Sister in the game is a scientist, a survivor of the the concentration camps who once experimented on her own people.



At the end of the day, you are indeed choosing to either rescue or take the life of one of these little sisters. However, given the nature of the subject matter and the gameplay impacts of this choice, we took a very particular course of action regarding the Little Sisters for the following reasons:



1) Intention.

As another member posted, Little Sisters and the Adam they carry are indeed a limited commodity in the game. In our original testing, we found people were unintentionally having violent interactions with the little sisters all the time. This really pissed off players who were intent on rescuing them.

Well, you might say, how could this happen? BioShock is a game with a huge amount of player expression and, well, controlled and uncontrolled chaos. Setting a trip wire trap for a Big Daddy and having a Little Sister stumble frankly sucked from a gameplay perspective. A gunshot goes wild, fire spreads throughout the world and ignites passersby, a grenade takes a bad bounce…

For the player really pushing down the character growth path of Little Sister rescuing, the insults of potentially dozens of unintentional attacks on Little Sisters

2) Impact. Remember the original E3 demo video? There was a bug there and a Little Sister got caught in the crossfire. From where I’m sitting. It wasn’t impactful. It wasn’t shocking. It wasn’t anything. The action was unintentional, at a distance, and made an emotional impression of zero. (on me at least, I can’t speak for others out there). In contrast, the sequences now where you save or harvest the little sister is pretty intense. When you’re fighting the Big Daddy, she’s pretty vocal:

“UNZIP HIM MR B!”

She shouts, referring to Mr. Bubbles, the nickname she has for the Big Daddy.

"TEAR HIM INTO LITTLE BITS!"

-she cries, until the Big Daddy goes down. After you kill a big daddy, the little sister is found literally mourning over the corpse of her former protector. She’s crying, and you can hear her lamentations over the loss of her friend. It’s kind of awful.



“…what am I going to do now…” she cries, or pathetically intones “Muh-muh-muh Mr. Bub-bub-bles…”

And there she is, defenseless. And you’re left with a choice. And this isn’t a choice you make at a distance. It isn’t a choice you make when her protector is breathing down your throat, that you can later make excuses for. This is a choice you have to make when she’s standing right in front of you, weeping because the closest thing she knows as a parent is lying dead in front of her.

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not making a game that has anything to do with the joy of hunting down a childlike creature with a gun. My goal was to distill the choice down to what it’s really about. There’s something that may or may not be a child in front of you. If you want to survive, if you want to save the wife and family of the man who’s been helping you survive Rapture, you must harvest the Adam from these Little Sisters.

The Little Sister is defenseless in front of you. Gone are the tools of the first person shooter, the tools that you use so often and after years of gaming, without thinking. What you now have in your hand are the almost surgical tools of Adam extraction.

Rescue or Harvest. Rescue or Harvest.

It’s up to you.





(note: for those worried about the fictional justification for the Little Sisters resistance to damage from sources other than the Adam extraction tools, they are indeed in the game. If people want to know more about this, I can post on the topic.)

[Bioshock_FTW!]

well then!
If that doesn't end the civil war going on in the forums of the Cult of Rapture...I don't know what will.

P.S. - thanks, Ken. I think you made the correct choices in doing what you did. This game is going to melt my face off.

[darthkiwi]

Thanks for posting, Ken. Very informative, and more than a little emotional. I was worried that invulnerability would lessen the impact. I was very wrong.

(note: for those worried about the fictional justification for the Little Sisters resistance to damage from sources other than the Adam extraction tools, they are indeed in the game. If people want to know more about this, I can post on the topic.)

I'm glad there's a fictional justification, I'm sure it's going to be good. Gotta love the fiction! Using tools for the harvesting also sounds like it'll ground the whole thing in a sense of the here and now, making the decision more visceral, more of a commitment. I was worried there was going to be some sort of annoying pop up: "Harvest Y/N?" Glad it's more human, and more emotional.

[ZippyDSMlee]

irrationallevine

I had the same thoughts after I shut up and thought (abliet chaotic and messy) about it,all in all its what called balancing somewhere in the middle lies the best path I suppose I can only hash out thoughts well on highly caffeinated clear days :P (Dysgraphia and ADD can screw with your trains of thought...)

Thanks for taking the time to come to the forums not enough devs bother with doing it anymore.