Gardner recalls that the design and impact of Resident Evil 4inspired the team to not fret about what the “average gamer” could handle. In the beginning of BioShock’s development, the team wondered whether players would be willing to accept a more complicated breed of action game. It utilized a first-person perspective that was once most commonly associated with action-heavy shooters as the basis for a deep RPG experience.

System Shockwas a game very much ahead of its time. The challenges of bringing a System Shock experience to consoles is immediately apparent to those who played the cult classic PC series.

“Given that we were bringing it to consoles, there were a lot of challenges there.” “For the longest time, one of our core goals was to find that balance between System Shock and finding a way to balance our audience,” said Gardner.

While the BioShock team may have suffered from a comparative lack of resources, they did benefit from the looming presence of a clear and common goal. That’s compared to a game like Assassin’s Creed, which had maybe 300 people working on it.” “I don’t remember the exact number, but we had about 50 people in-house working on that game plus some outside help from Australia. “Relatively speaking the team on BioShock was way outside of our weight class,” said Gardner. In my recent interview with Bill, he recalled BioShock’s surprisingly humble early development at Irrational Games.

Before he helped form indie studio The Deep End Games and released the 2017 indie horror hit, Perception, Bill Gardner worked as the lead level designer on 2007’s BioShock.

Is bioshock related to system shock