Here, Finley, along with series newcomer and lead designer Zak McClendon, lay out the thinking behind building the sequel to BioShock, explaining what's required when approaching a property so many people have fallen in love with.
Q: Coming in as someone who didn't work on BioShock, how do you approach the role as lead designer? A good number of the other leads -- creative director, art lead, lead level designer -- all are from 2K Boston.
ZM: Ultimately, the same way you approach designing any kind of game, with the great advantage of it being a sequel and having a lot of things already figured out. There's also the advantage that BioShock went through a lot of different iterations and focus, and a lot of different things were tried, spending a lot of time delving into that history and finding out why those decisions were made and how they went from having, say, 50 different plasmids to the 12 that shipped with the game.
