BioShock Infinite Interview With Drew Holmes: Part 1 – The Iterative Process

Having only joined back in March 2012, for some games that's an entire development cycle, a generous time when you consider cosmic abortions like 007 Legends. Yet Infinite hadn't been publicly demoed since E3 2011, and only sporadically trailered in 2011. So how much has Infinite changed in that time?

DH: There are certain aspects that have changed a lot, and there are certain aspects that have changed very little. I think one of the really inspiring things about working at Irrational is the willingness to throw stuff away and start over, make it better. It's an iterational process that I think I'm familiar with, being a writer, you write and then you rewrite and you throw things away and you rework. I think that's pretty much the style of how we develop games at Irrational and I think it's due, largely in part to having Ken being the leader of the studio. He's a writer first and foremost and that's just what he's used to, he know that's how you make the quality of your product better. I think that it's certainly not without its heartbreak or head-butting and I think often, sometimes people work on something and invest so much of themselves, to see it get thrown away.

Almost like it's their 'child'. I don't know the ins-and-outs of most studios' approach to storytelling, but Irrational's willingness to chop, change and rework seems remarkably refreshing. 

DH: Yeah, exactly. My philosophy is 'kill your babies'. Don't become so attached to something that you can't be willing to throw it away, because in the end you're not doing it a service, you're not doing yourself a service and you have to be willing to take something that you're really attached to, if you know how to make it better, no matter how hard it is and how much pain its gonna cause and how much work you're going to have to throw back in to it, at the end of the day it's worth it if your goal is to create a great piece of art. 

No question here how Drew, and Irrational, feel about the age-old games-as-art debacle, something I'm not going to tip-toe into here as I think it's a matter a plain as the boredom on Holmes' face. There's also the plainly obvious follow-up question; was this the case with the multiplayer component?

DH: Partially. I think we play around with a lot of different systems at Irrational. I think you're always experimenting with what elements are going to make the best possible game experience and I think we were clear from the beginning that nothing was going to go into the game if it didn't reach a certain quality bar. It wasn't bringing anything new to the table. We toyed around with multiplayer, we also toyed around with lots of other things in the game: different weapons, different systems and full levels that got cut, so it's been interesting to see the focus of one aspect of the game when there was so much other stuff that we also tend to remove over the course of game development. It's true on every game that I think people work on, there's always stuff you tend to throw out. At the end of the day it was a matter of 'yeah, this isn't really working to a level that we feel is representing the BioShock brand and Irrational games, so it's not worth investing any more time in'. 

How candid, to expressly state that Infinite's multiplayer simply wasn't good enough and that it didn't serve to innovate. I'm sure the addition of a multiplayer component would've have harmed the game in any particular way, but such a discerning approach to additional, superfluous content really shows Irrational's desire to create a single, self-contained piece of art. Drew also seems slightly miffed that I only brought up the multiplayer, rather than the myriad of other hitherto unknown pieces of development junk. Ho hum.