For anyone keeping score, that’s exactly what I – and I suspect, most BioShock fans – wanted to hear.

He continued: “From a gameplay perspective, the biggest thing we were trying to improve is a lot of that core gameplay – and make it more accessible to people, in that you can combine your weapons and plasmids at the same time. We went down the dual-wielding route that you can use much more fluidly. Also, we wanted to deepen the growth mechanics of the game – you now can upgrade all of your plasmids by three levels, they all have more functionality as you go through the game, the tonics are a lot more open ended.”

Again, this is heartening. The combat in BioShock 1 works so well because it was so customizable – the plasmid powers are interchangeable and upgradable, the weapons are upgradable, etc. The ability to dual-wield is genuinely exciting, as are the implications for newly upgradable plasmid powers.

Things will also be a bit tougher this time around – if you like it that way. Enemies will regenerate health if you die, making the “hit a big daddy with a wrench, die, repeat” strategy moot. You will also be able to disable the vita chambers (the regeneration points where players show up when they die) if you choose to. McClendon also mentioned AI advances and enemy behavior diversity.

The team has a very keen sense of what their biggest challenges are in pleasing fans and newcomers alike. The folks at 2K Marin know exactly how shocking and amazing the first trip through Rapture was – and they have a real respect for player expectations.

Thomas: “On one hand, the setting of Rapture will never be as new as it was in the first game, and trying to recreate that would be sort of falling on many levels. With that said, there are a significant number of new surprises.”

Even more simply, McClendon offered his take on the biggest and most difficult challenges in making the game.

“That would be the fact that BioShock was so well received.” He laughed. He mentioned building a team with ex-Bioshock 1 team members from Irrational and instilling a sense of what it meant to “be BioShock”, and “going up against the weight of all of our expectations, because everyone that joined this team was an immense fan of the first game. We were all awed and humbled to be working on the sequel. There’s a lot of reverence to it, which can lead to a lot of second-guessing and a lot of trying to please everyone, and sort of getting through that to a point where we were really striking off in a direction that 2K Marin as a studio could own – and not just following in the footsteps of what came before or rebelling against it irresponsibly – was just a long and difficult process.”

That process is thankfully over – and with the game’s release so close to bear, we’ll be able to find out very soon whether all the improvements, tweaks and genuinely new directions that 2K Marin have implemented will be successful.

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