BioShock is one of the most surprising games of this generation. First of all, it isn’t inspired by a real-life conflict, a film or another game series, but a moderately successful novel called Atlus Shrugged by Ayn Rand, which put forward a philosophy called Objectivism, or ‘rational selfishness’.

BioShock’s writer and Creative Director, Ken Levine, and his team are now working on BioShock Infinite, a departure from the dark, dystopian corridors of Rapture into the bright skies of Columbia, a floating city named after the female personification of the United States of America. I recently had the chance to sit down with Ken to talk about the philosophies that underpinned the original BioShock and how, if at all, these are being applied to BioShock Infinite.

PlayStation.Blog: What’s more important to you: surprising the player or making existing fans feel familiar?

Ken: When you look at BioShock Infinite, you can’t deny that it’s a BioShock game. However, and this might seem counter-intuitive, Rapture was a surprise to the player; you wanted to see what was around each corner because it was so strange. If we were to take you back to Rapture then that surprise element would no longer be there. Weirdly, we had to change BioShock in order to make it BioShock, or at least to retain that core principle of the unexpected.

I think the important point for us is that BioShock Infinite has the same roots as the original, and in part those roots are me, Nate, Shaun, Steve and all of the guys in my team who worked on it. In terms of the game itself, we’re talking about the depth and detail of the game world, the kinds of weapons you’re going to have, the freedom of the combat and the character growth system that we’re going to be showing later.

I’m not saying we can never go back to Rapture, but it would need to be in a way that was fresh and new.

PlayStation.Blog: What is your favourite moment in the original BioShock?

Ken:The two moments of BioShock that will always be special to me as writer and creative director are the opening descent to Rapture and the encounter with Andrew Ryan. We really put ourselves out there on the latter because it was a boss battle where you don’t actually fight the boss, but that was fundamental to the story, the fact that you had no choice in how it played out. We are thrilled that it worked so well because it was such a risky moment.

I don’t think people give gamers enough credit and assume that they only want explosive, visceral experiences. We also want to be mentally stimulated. The fact that the scene resonated so much proves that we are more diverse in their tastes than some think.

When faced with a choice between protecting and destroying in games, point in case being the dilemma of whether to rescue or harvest the Little Sisters in BioShock, do you think we are innately drawn to one or the other?

Well we don’t have any kind of metric to track that particular example but we do have anecdotal evidence. I do a podcast called Irrational Interviews and I was talking with Guillermo Del Toro on there. He said that he harvested in front of his two daughters and they got really mad at him. My sense is that people generally rescue and I think that decision is an emotional one rather than a logical one.

I believe players have an inclination to what we might call ‘disruptive’ actions, such as jumping around when another character is talking, but I don’t get worried about people doing weird things; games are about the player doing what they want and they are generally there to try and experience every interaction available. It’s their game.

PlayStation.Blog: And yet protection seems to be a running theme in BioShock games. Is this a conscious design decision?

Ken: I see what you mean in that you have Big Daddies and Little Sisters and there’s some kind of protective relationship going on there. With BioShock Infinite it’s important to point out that you’re not escorting Elizabeth all the time – she is capable of taking care of herself and she is more like a partner in your mission. But she is looking to your experience in combat. She has never fought but Booker has a rough past and a lot of combat experience.

The basic notion of protecting is one of the noblest things we can do for each other and those relationships can be beautiful in game form. Just look at that moment when you first take Yorda’s hand in Ico. In BioShock games we like to explore how those relationships can have both a dark and a light side. When a Big Daddy protects a Little Sister, he is also exploiting her by making her gather ADAM. In BioShock Infinite, when Booker finds Elizabeth she is locked in this tower with Songbird, who is her only companion but also her jailor.

Those are the challenging relationships that we are drawn to.

PlayStation.Blog: If you’re faced with a potential fork in your design choices, where either narrative or gameplay benefits depending on your decision, which one usually wins out?

Ken: You have to reach a decision that benefits both. We had a dilemma early in the development of BioShock Infinite with the character of Elizabeth. We needed to ensure that her powers made sense to both narrative and gameplay. We knew we had this character that was going to be extremely powerful, but we didn’t know exactly what those powers were going to be. It was a tough job making sure that what she does from moment to moment in the context of the gameplay suited her role in the overall story. We generally don’t choose; we tweak from both sides to get unity, and if you don’t get that unity, then we tend to jettison things.

PlayStation.Blog: How exactly are the PlayStation Move controls going to work?

Ken: We’ve got the Move controls working now back at the studio, certainly more so than we had when we announced it at E3, and really we’re just waiting for the opportunity to show that with a new piece of content. It’s working well but we still have a lot of polishing to do. Of all the motion controllers in the world, the Move is the one best suited to a first-person shooter, and a lot of PlayStation games have done a great job incorporating it. I will say that we’re discovering some great opportunities with the Skyline gameplay, but rather than show it to people with an old demo, I’d prefer to show it with a new piece of content.

PlayStation.Blog: BioShock famously took inspiration from Ayn Rand’s Atlus Shrugged. Does BioShock Infinite have a particular philosophical or literary influence?

Ken: I read a lot about history and I got interested in the late 19th century by the book Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, which is set around the 1893 World Fair. For me, that time is the most transformative in history because you had all these technologies coming into play, like radio, movies, electricity, cars – mass production in general. Alongside that, you had social transformations with suffrage, labour movements, the beginning of the civil rights movement – all these amazing uprisings bringing a sense that the colony is starting to buckle and break free.

Just look at what was happening in science, with Heisenberg, Einstein and Max Planck; they were discovering that the Universe is so much more complex than anyone thought, and we’re still figuring out the implications of their findings to this day.

In the original BioShock we tapped in to Crick & Watson and their discovery of genetics. In BioShock Infinite we’re looking more at the world of physics and we bring that in through Elizabeth, who is able to manipulate her universe. We’re always looking at the technological, scientific, social and cultural changes that are happening in any historical period we touch, and we try to integrate those into our stories.

Originally, we conceived the game as a struggle between a technological movement and a Luddite movement, and it didn’t work out because, in reality, those Luddite movements never took hold in a powerful way, so we didn’t have such a rich well of inspiration.

What we have arrived at is a conflict between the Founders, an ultra-nationalist group that is the dominant power in Columbia, and the Vox-Populi, an international workers’ movement that is fighting against the Founders, kicking all of the rich people out of their part of town.

The real conflict of that time – and, you could argue, what is happening today – is this left and right schism of extreme nationalism on one side, and an anti-capitalist, internationalist movement on the other. With our games we’re never looking to advocate a political position and we try to ask questions more than we try to answer them. We show the extreme ends of the spectrum.

The Splicers in BioShock were insane, almost feral, but the enemies we have seen in BioShock Infinite seem more lucid. How does this affect the game?

You’re going to see a range of enemies in terms of where they’re at mentally. It’s not like BioShock where you’re showing up after an event and picking up the pieces; Elizabeth and Booker are in the middle of it all. The Vox-Populi is a small group when you show up at the beginning of the game, and your actions change that and accelerate their growth. You’re going to see changing AI based on your actions. Then you’ve also got SongBird and Handyman – examples of bigger, stronger enemies.

PlayStation.Blog: How does it make you feel when you hear that some players completed BioShock almost exclusively using the Electro Bolt and the shotgun?

Ken: One of the first things we did when we started on BioShock Infinite was to draw a graph with y and z axes, and to say that one of those axes was the number of enemies in an encounter and the other was the range of those enemies. In the original BioShock, the entire game lived in one corner of that graph – few enemies, all at close range — so the Electro Bolt and shotgun were perfect. BioShock Infinite is going to have much greater ranges and, potentially, far more enemies, so we’re greatly increasing the spectrum of encounters that are possible, and that requires the player use a broader set of tools.

That being said, it may be a given player will try to find a way to close down those distances and stick with Electro Bolt and shotgun, but I don’t think that’s going to be anywhere near as effective a strategy this time around. They were too devastating in BioShock, we admit that, but we’re not going to solve it by simply nerfing those weapons; we’re doing it by changing the types of encounter you’re going to face.

We haven’t heard a great deal about DUST 514 since it was shown at E3 2011, other than that it’s a first-person shooter connected to the vast sci-fi universe of PC MMO EVE Online, and that it’s coming exclusively to PlayStation 3. When developers CCP made the trip from Iceland to London to outline their vision for this new addition to their immensely popular EVE universe, I came out of the meeting amazed at the scale of the project. Suffice to say, DUST 514 is not just another shooter.

After the meeting, I interrogated Brandon Laurino, Executive Producer at CCP, to find out exactly why PlayStation 3 owners should be getting excited.

PS.Blog: With EVE Online, CCP already has a huge, engaged community. Why are you now trying to break into the console FPS market?

Brandon: EVE Online is an incredibly deep MMO and, for better or worse, that comes with a typical perception that it is complicated. The common joke is that you have to overcome a ‘learning cliff’ to get involved. Part of the thinking behind DUST 514 is to address those preconceptions; we accept that there is a barrier to entry with something as deep as EVE Online and we wanted to make it more accessible, providing another portal and dimension into the EVE universe. What’s more accessible to a gamer in this day and age than a shooter?

Why did you specifically choose PlayStation as your partner in making that happen?

Brandon: Obviously, we were attracted to the power and the feature set of PlayStation 3, but it really came down to Sony’s willingness to work with us in bringing an MMO to the platform. There have been attempts to bring MMO games to consoles in the past but we believe we’re now in a position to do it properly, using existing features on PS3 and the PlayStation Network, and collaboratively developing new features to support our vision.

Can you elaborate on your vision for a ‘proper’ MMO?

Brandon: We’re breaking so much ground with DUST 514: we’re not only building a full console MMO; we’re building one that feeds into another MMO on a completely different platform [PC]. We’re breaking more ground by bringing the microtransaction business model to a console shooter for the first time. All of this was inconceivable not too long ago, and it’s the partnership between CCP and Sony that’s finally making it happen.

Talking about the connectivity between DUST 514 and EVE Online, is this something that’s going to most benefit EVE players or is there equal benefit to those players first experiencing the universe through DUST 514?

Brandon: It runs both ways – you can be sure that we’re very conscious of that in our design, we run through all the different use cases constantly to ensure its well rounded. EVE Online players can continue playing just the way they are and new players can jump into DUST 514 and get a traditional shooter experience, if that’s what they like. There are aspects that are consistent between the two platforms, such as in-game currency, and there are ways that EVE Online players can impact events in DUST 514 and vice versa, all without harming the overall ecosystem.

Because we have this living universe we call EVE – a single shard server, where all EVE Online players and all DUST 514 players are literally in the same universe, not a bunch of split instances, with a huge variety of dynamics and interdependencies within the ecosystem of the sandbox we’ve created – people playing DUST 514 and people playing EVE Online are essentially providing user generated content for each other, just by their sheer presence and their actions in the game world. To give an example, for a player fighting on a planet surfaces in DUST 514, the actions of the EVE Online players can trigger epic moments and provide support that is completely user-driven. Similarly, a DUST 514 player could trigger an event from the ground and do something spectacular in EVE Online. This emergent behaviour and gameplay is only possible with our level of connectivity. These are the broad strokes, the gameplay and interactions run a lot deeper than that.

In that case, what’s to stop an EVE Online veteran blowing my corporation out of space?

Brandon: We have some rules of engagement that ensure nothing drastic happens without some kind of fair warning and time to prepare, this is basically carried over and expanded upon from large scale player-driven warfare in EVE Online, where sometimes users are coordinating battles involving tens of thousands of players at once. Additionally, there are things that you can earn or build, independently in DUST 514 and / or EVE Online, or collaboratively between the two, that will mitigate those scenarios.

Putting the philosophy to one side for a moment, what is DUST 514 going to be like to play when you’re on the ground, in battle?

Brandon: Essentially it’s a vehicular combat game on an extremely large scale, and then when you move into installations and outposts, it’s more infantry based. We’re using Unreal Engine 3 and we’ve incorporated a Mega Terrain engine into it that lets us create huge levels with varied terrain, with a vast array of vehicles ranging from buggies to tanks to aircraft. Typically, you would use vehicles to traverse the landscape and engage in closer combat when you deploy into outposts, but there is a huge amount of tactical freedom, way outside of those broad examples.

There’s some familiarity for players of shooters in that we have general classes or playstyles that we’ve worked out, such as light infantry and heavy weapons, but we’re hesitant to label them that way because we have something called the Fitting system – something that has been entirely ported over from EVE Online – where you can attach all manner of weapons and equipment to your character and your vehicles. It’s better to think of it like the character systems found in the deepest role-playing games; you can have the broad classes that are familiar to shooter fans, but there is massive freedom to expand on or go totally outside of them.

What’s the plan for expanding content in DUST 514?

Brandon: Right off the bat, we have literally thousands of in-game items built into the system; likewise, in terms of scale, you’re looking at a conflict taking place across thousands of planets, so we’re not just talking a dozen maps – we’re talking an entire universe of planets and areas of engagement within them. That’s the difference in scale we’re looking at here, and taking our experience with EVE Online and also, some inspiration found in the best microtransaction based MMOs, social and mobile games, and we’ve set up our workflow so that we can iterate and add new content very quickly. In terms of scale, depth and volume of content, DUST 514 will easily be the biggest multiplayer FPS on the market – also by virtue of being an MMOFPS, not just an FPS.

Talk us though how your beta is going to work.

Brandon: Just as we have done with EVE Online, we’re going to be telling a story with each of the events that happen in our game. To give a bit of context, in EVE Online you play as the pilot of a spaceship – a capsuleer – and in DUST 514 you play as a mercenary on the ground. It’s going to be a bit weird if, all of a sudden, we release the DUST 514 beta and all these mercenaries suddenly show up in the EVE universe, so the setting is that the first small group of players that get access to the Private Trials will be the first trial of this new mercenary technology in the context of EVE Online. Just as you’re helping to test the game in the real world, in the EVE world you’re taking part in war games organised to test this new mercenary technology.

With our Private Trials – we’re not calling it a Beta, but Private Trials in both the real world and the EVE fiction – we’re not taking the usual “on / off” method of rolling out a build and then taking it back and tweaking it, then rolling it out again; when we roll out with those first few users we are introducing mercenary technology to EVE, our “game as a service begins”, and the story will continue from there as that technology develops, further empowering the DUST 514 mercenaries from test subjects in war games to ultimately allowing them to take hold of their own future. It’s what we call a thematic rollout.

There will be people out there who will look at DUST 514 and assume it’s an EVE Online spin-off. How would you counter that?

Brandon: We’re not thinking of it in that way at all, I suppose is the easiest way to respond to that. The EVE universe is comprised of three experiences: one is the classic EVE Online play, “flying in space” or what we call FIS; there’s WIS or “walking in stations”, where you can now get out of your ship and explore the interiors of space stations; and the final piece is DUST 514 and we’ve nicknamed that SIF, or “shooting in face”. None of those three are spin-offs, they’re experiences of equal value that can be played independently or fully connected. If you’re connected then you’re going to get the rich emergent gameplay that runs through all three.

We have so much to talk about, much of which is new territory for me. Is there anything we haven’t mentioned that you really want to get across to our PlayStation.Blog readers?

Brandon: I hope it comes through that what we’re developing is a truly new experience on PS3 – on consoles in general. It is the deepest shooter with the richest universe ever conceived and, on top of that, by bringing to market an MMO with microtransactions, we could be changing the face of console gaming forever. This is groundbreaking stuff, but user choice is at the core – it’s playing the game however you want to play it. If you want a quick experience, you have it; if you’re looking for something deeper, it’s there. If you want to pay a very small amount of money to play, you can; if you want to be heavily invested, you can do that too. We’re providing a more extensive array of options than has ever been seen in a console game.

We haven’t heard a great deal about DUST 514 since it was shown at E3 2011, other than that it’s a first-person shooter connected to the vast sci-fi universe of PC MMO EVE Online, and that it’s coming exclusively to PlayStation 3. When developers CCP made the trip from Iceland to London to outline their vision for this new addition to their immensely popular EVE universe, I came out of the meeting amazed at the scale of the project. Suffice to say, DUST 514 is not just another shooter.

After the meeting, I interrogated Brandon Laurino, Executive Producer at CCP, to find out exactly why PlayStation 3 owners should be getting excited.

PS.Blog: With EVE Online, CCP already has a huge, engaged community. Why are you now trying to break into the console FPS market?

Brandon: EVE Online is an incredibly deep MMO and, for better or worse, that comes with a typical perception that it is complicated. The common joke is that you have to overcome a ‘learning cliff’ to get involved. Part of the thinking behind DUST 514 is to address those preconceptions; we accept that there is a barrier to entry with something as deep as EVE Online and we wanted to make it more accessible, providing another portal and dimension into the EVE universe. What’s more accessible to a gamer in this day and age than a shooter?

Why did you specifically choose PlayStation as your partner in making that happen?

Brandon: Obviously, we were attracted to the power and the feature set of PlayStation 3, but it really came down to Sony’s willingness to work with us in bringing an MMO to the platform. There have been attempts to bring MMO games to consoles in the past but we believe we’re now in a position to do it properly, using existing features on PS3 and the PlayStation Network, and collaboratively developing new features to support our vision.

Can you elaborate on your vision for a ‘proper’ MMO?

Brandon: We’re breaking so much ground with DUST 514: we’re not only building a full console MMO; we’re building one that feeds into another MMO on a completely different platform [PC]. We’re breaking more ground by bringing the microtransaction business model to a console shooter for the first time. All of this was inconceivable not too long ago, and it’s the partnership between CCP and Sony that’s finally making it happen.

Talking about the connectivity between DUST 514 and EVE Online, is this something that’s going to most benefit EVE players or is there equal benefit to those players first experiencing the universe through DUST 514?

Brandon: It runs both ways – you can be sure that we’re very conscious of that in our design, we run through all the different use cases constantly to ensure its well rounded. EVE Online players can continue playing just the way they are and new players can jump into DUST 514 and get a traditional shooter experience, if that’s what they like. There are aspects that are consistent between the two platforms, such as in-game currency, and there are ways that EVE Online players can impact events in DUST 514 and vice versa, all without harming the overall ecosystem.

Because we have this living universe we call EVE – a single shard server, where all EVE Online players and all DUST 514 players are literally in the same universe, not a bunch of split instances, with a huge variety of dynamics and interdependencies within the ecosystem of the sandbox we’ve created – people playing DUST 514 and people playing EVE Online are essentially providing user generated content for each other, just by their sheer presence and their actions in the game world. To give an example, for a player fighting on a planet surfaces in DUST 514, the actions of the EVE Online players can trigger epic moments and provide support that is completely user-driven. Similarly, a DUST 514 player could trigger an event from the ground and do something spectacular in EVE Online. This emergent behaviour and gameplay is only possible with our level of connectivity. These are the broad strokes, the gameplay and interactions run a lot deeper than that.

In that case, what’s to stop an EVE Online veteran blowing my corporation out of space?

Brandon: We have some rules of engagement that ensure nothing drastic happens without some kind of fair warning and time to prepare, this is basically carried over and expanded upon from large scale player-driven warfare in EVE Online, where sometimes users are coordinating battles involving tens of thousands of players at once. Additionally, there are things that you can earn or build, independently in DUST 514 and / or EVE Online, or collaboratively between the two, that will mitigate those scenarios.

Putting the philosophy to one side for a moment, what is DUST 514 going to be like to play when you’re on the ground, in battle?

Brandon: Essentially it’s a vehicular combat game on an extremely large scale, and then when you move into installations and outposts, it’s more infantry based. We’re using Unreal Engine 3 and we’ve incorporated a Mega Terrain engine into it that lets us create huge levels with varied terrain, with a vast array of vehicles ranging from buggies to tanks to aircraft. Typically, you would use vehicles to traverse the landscape and engage in closer combat when you deploy into outposts, but there is a huge amount of tactical freedom, way outside of those broad examples.

There’s some familiarity for players of shooters in that we have general classes or playstyles that we’ve worked out, such as light infantry and heavy weapons, but we’re hesitant to label them that way because we have something called the Fitting system – something that has been entirely ported over from EVE Online – where you can attach all manner of weapons and equipment to your character and your vehicles. It’s better to think of it like the character systems found in the deepest role-playing games; you can have the broad classes that are familiar to shooter fans, but there is massive freedom to expand on or go totally outside of them.

What’s the plan for expanding content in DUST 514?

Brandon: Right off the bat, we have literally thousands of in-game items built into the system; likewise, in terms of scale, you’re looking at a conflict taking place across thousands of planets, so we’re not just talking a dozen maps – we’re talking an entire universe of planets and areas of engagement within them. That’s the difference in scale we’re looking at here, and taking our experience with EVE Online and also, some inspiration found in the best microtransaction based MMOs, social and mobile games, and we’ve set up our workflow so that we can iterate and add new content very quickly. In terms of scale, depth and volume of content, DUST 514 will easily be the biggest multiplayer FPS on the market – also by virtue of being an MMOFPS, not just an FPS.

Talk us though how your beta is going to work.

Brandon: Just as we have done with EVE Online, we’re going to be telling a story with each of the events that happen in our game. To give a bit of context, in EVE Online you play as the pilot of a spaceship – a capsuleer – and in DUST 514 you play as a mercenary on the ground. It’s going to be a bit weird if, all of a sudden, we release the DUST 514 beta and all these mercenaries suddenly show up in the EVE universe, so the setting is that the first small group of players that get access to the Private Trials will be the first trial of this new mercenary technology in the context of EVE Online. Just as you’re helping to test the game in the real world, in the EVE world you’re taking part in war games organised to test this new mercenary technology.

With our Private Trials – we’re not calling it a Beta, but Private Trials in both the real world and the EVE fiction – we’re not taking the usual “on / off” method of rolling out a build and then taking it back and tweaking it, then rolling it out again; when we roll out with those first few users we are introducing mercenary technology to EVE, our “game as a service begins”, and the story will continue from there as that technology develops, further empowering the DUST 514 mercenaries from test subjects in war games to ultimately allowing them to take hold of their own future. It’s what we call a thematic rollout.

There will be people out there who will look at DUST 514 and assume it’s an EVE Online spin-off. How would you counter that?

Brandon: We’re not thinking of it in that way at all, I suppose is the easiest way to respond to that. The EVE universe is comprised of three experiences: one is the classic EVE Online play, “flying in space” or what we call FIS; there’s WIS or “walking in stations”, where you can now get out of your ship and explore the interiors of space stations; and the final piece is DUST 514 and we’ve nicknamed that SIF, or “shooting in face”. None of those three are spin-offs, they’re experiences of equal value that can be played independently or fully connected. If you’re connected then you’re going to get the rich emergent gameplay that runs through all three.

We have so much to talk about, much of which is new territory for me. Is there anything we haven’t mentioned that you really want to get across to our PlayStation.Blog readers?

Brandon: I hope it comes through that what we’re developing is a truly new experience on PS3 – on consoles in general. It is the deepest shooter with the richest universe ever conceived and, on top of that, by bringing to market an MMO with microtransactions, we could be changing the face of console gaming forever. This is groundbreaking stuff, but user choice is at the core – it’s playing the game however you want to play it. If you want a quick experience, you have it; if you’re looking for something deeper, it’s there. If you want to pay a very small amount of money to play, you can; if you want to be heavily invested, you can do that too. We’re providing a more extensive array of options than has ever been seen in a console game.

I checked out Aliens: Colonial Marines when I popped over to the SEGA gamescom booth to say hi to a friend and, within minutes, it became one my highlights of the show. I’m not as familiar with the Aliens films as many – I remember seeing one of them on TV as a child and not sleeping well for a few days – but judging it purely as a shooter, it is looking very impressive.

The level shown was a beautifully lit labyrinth of corridors on-board a craft sent to investigate LV-426, 11 months after Ripley escaped in Aliens. The most memorable aspect for me was the animation of the Xenomorphs and my skin is crawling as I type just thinking about them. This added to the level design, which always leaves you feeling exposed as creatures pour from every angle and air vent, produces an unnerving shooter that piles on the tension.

After the demo, I spoke with Gearbox Chief Creative Officer Brian Martel about working with such an iconic IP and why his team is best suited to bringing the essence of the Aliens films to the interactive space.

Earlier in the week, Rocksteady Studios told us that they had been given the creative freedom to build their own ‘Batman canon’ with the Arkham games. Is that what you’re trying to do with Aliens: Colonial Marines?

That’s exactly what we’re looking to do. Fox has been great to work with and SEGA has been a good partner in building the bridges between developer and IP holder. Fox is a little more flexible with the canon than other companies out there, but they do have to be careful not to annoy directors – if you put together a proposition that assumes a particular film never happened, the director isn’t going to like that very much and Fox may have plans to work with them again in the future.

We’re able to introduce our own elements that we feel are right for the interactive space, whether that’s weapons or new types of aliens, and we’re aware that in doing so we’re adding to the existing canon.

What is the essence of the Aliens films?

The aliens aren’t just looking to kill you, they’re trying to propagate the species and take you elsewhere so they can get you face-hugged. That’s the threat and it forms the scary aspect of the world, and then you also need to have the high action aspect. If you watch the film Aliens, there aren’t too many scare moments; it’s scary because you know what’s going to happen if you get caught but it’s action-packed, and to make a great game like this you have to have lots of aliens, lots of stuff to shoot at. You need the diversity between extremely quiet all the way up to high-octane.

What are the differences between creating fear cinematically, in a film, and doing so in the interactive space?

A lot of it is the same, so you’re going to have audio cues that catch the player unaware and you always want to use some misdirection, drawing the eye to one spot and then making something happen elsewhere. But at the end of the day, with a co-op shooter it’s pretty hard to truly scare the player so that’s why Colonial Marines is more action driven. It’s not like Dead Space, which has a fright around every corner, or something like Condemned, which was pure tension throughout.

We could talk about the Aliens IP all day; what gameplay innovations are you bringing to the table?

You’re going to see a lot of growth in terms of what you expect from a Gearbox game that is co-op focused. Obviously, things like the look and atmosphere belong to the Aliens universe, but underneath you’re going to get a sense of something that is totally Gearbox.

Why is Gearbox the right developer to take on the Aliens IP?

If you take a look at our track record on working with IPs, whether it’s Half Life or James Bond, we’ve been true and honest with what it needs to be. We’re one of the best at that, looking at what gamers want and expect from the license and giving it to them.

What’s more important to Aliens fans: familiarity or surprise?

It’s important to have these little signposts or fan service moments, such as finding out what happened to Burke or seeing what happened to Hudson when he got pulled down. But then you also have people coming in who might never have seen the movies so we’re bringing something for everybody.

I remember the day my copy of Arkham Asylum arrived at the office because I hadn’t followed the game’s development too closely and, when I took it home just to check out what my colleagues had been raving about, I finished it that same weekend.

As a result, I’ve had a keen eye on Arkham City, so yesterday I swooped over to the Warner Brothers gamescom area and watched a demo of the new challenge maps, which offer a high-score chasing, combo-stringing alternative to the meat and drink of the story campaign. Compeered by Dax Ginn, marketing game manager at Rocksteady Studios, two members of the dev team played through identical challenge maps on different TVs – one as Batman and one as Catwoman – in a face-off as a small group of journalists watched the stereoscopic 3D beatdown.

Afterwards, I caught up with Dax to discuss the gamescom build of Arkham City and their approach to character development with this sequel.

What do you have to show us in this build of Arkham City?

At E3 and San Diego Comic-Con we showed some of our single-player story and side-missions and, here at gamescom, we’ve brought the third big part of our game: our challenge mode. We’ve brought both combat and Predator challenge maps and we’re showing it all in 3D.

We’ve put so much work into this area but we haven’t shown them to anyone yet so that’s what’s most exciting right now.

How are you treating the challenge mode in this sequel?

They’re kind of like a dojo where you can go to sharpen your skills. For all its atmosphere and emotional intensity, Arkham Asylum was a very driven, focused experience; with Arkham City the design is aimed towards giving the player freedom, so there are a lot of choices on offer at any given moment. The challenge in that, for us, is not being able to control and ramp up the difficulty in the same way we did in the first game, so if you find at any point you’re getting slaughtered in the main game, you have the challenge maps to work on your skills.

The second function of the mode is to massively blow out the amount of content in the game and we’ve added in a reward structure with the Riddler Revenge feature, where you earn up to three medals for getting a high score in combat or taking out enemies in specific ways in the Predator maps, and online leaderboards.

With Catwoman taking a central role in what we’ve seen of the game so far, and a distinct, Rocksteady take on Robin appearing in challenge mode, what is the essence of those two characters?

The ‘Rocksteady take’ is a very good way of putting it because we’re given a lot of creative freedom to define the Arkham verse, as we call it. Take a look at what we’ve done with Penguin – the monocle doesn’t really work in the 21st century so we’ve smashed a beer bottle into his face and that’s our take on it. That sums up our approach to character design: gritty and nasty, and with a tangible sense of threat in the game world.

Catwoman’s design is driven by the hostile atmosphere in Arkham City and her Catsuit has a military feel – if you look closely then you’ll see a very fine black and grey camouflage pattern, in keeping with her being very difficult to detect in the shadows.

Because Robin only appears in the challenge maps, our focus is on taking him in a direction not seen before. To fit in our world then he needs to be hard-hitting and have abilities that are approaching the potency of Batman’s, so he has a bow staff and shield, and he is an explosions specialist, with vision augmentation that allows him to identify explosives in the environment. Robin is a complex character and very different to Batman – it’s not a case that we’ve just reskinned him.

How has the Rocksteady team built up such an extensive knowledge of the Batman universe and characters?

Working closely with DC Comics helps a lot. They are masters of that universe and we consult them on every aspect of the game because we want to make sure any new idea is there to create a deeper experience of feeling like Batman.

The alter ego is a big part of any superhero and yet you have never explored that. Why did you decided to steer clear of Bruce Wayne?

Because it’s a Batman game. He’s powerful and aspirational but you never lose sight of the fact that he is mortal. It’s such fertile ground and in Arkham City we will go deeper into the man behind the cowl by bringing in characters like Hugo Strange, who knows Batman’s true identity, and Talia al Ghul, who has a romantic relationship with him. Through those characters we see his vulnerable side but our aim has always been to make an action game, not a business simulator, and when you start thinking about what you would do while playing as Bruce Wayne, it doesn’t seem terribly exciting in comparison.

My favorite parts of Arkham Asylum were when events would suddenly take a dark turn to the left, like the scene in the morgue and the Scarecrow levels. How will you surprise players this time around knowing that they are now expecting that kind of stuff?

It’s a really tough challenge. I can’t be completely truthful with my answer here because we want to make sure that surprises remain. We have moments in the game that are designed to take you by surprise and… this really is a difficult question to answer… players are going to appreciate what we have done because those moments you mentioned worked so well in the first game, and we totally understand that there’s an expectation now. We’ve thought a lot about what we think people are going to think, and then worked out ways to stay one step ahead.

Let me know if you have any questions based on my time with Arkham City and I’ll do my best to answer over the weekend.