Levine explains Little Sister behaviour
On new blog by EG chums.
Irrational Games' Ken Levine has been explaining why you can't just bump off Little Sisters - the vulnerable children who collect Plasmid-enabling Adam in BioShock - in regular combat. Happily, he does this in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, which gives us just the excuse we want to link new blog Rock Paper Shotgun, put together by Eurogamer contributes John Walker, Kieron Gillen, Alec Meer and Jim Rossignol. Rock Paper Shotgun. Sneaky, eh? Rock Paper Shotgun.
Speaking to RPS (Rock Paper Shotgun), Levine said that not being able to kill Little Sisters randomly actually upset some of the team's audience. "They viewed it as impacting the amount of choice they had in the game," Levine explained, "but for me - and I speak for myself personally as a game developer - I'm a strong believer that artists should be able to make art. And the big difference between art and reality is... guess what? Art is not reality."
"I'm a huge believer in other artists making what they want to make and what they're comfortable in making...for me [killing them randomly] was personally distasteful and irrelevant to the story we were trying tell." What's more, he said, no matter how good your AI is, they're never going to avoid the odd random death. As Kieron Gillen (prosecuting) noted, "An acrobatic Little Sister wouldn't need a Big Daddy."
For more from Levine, including lots on how Rapture came to be, the challenges of balancing the experience so it wasn't too much too soon or too little too far away, and even the odd bit about System Shock, check out the rest of the interview on whatever blog it was we were talking about.