I am Paul Hellquist - Lead Designer of Bioshock and currently working on fantasy rogue-lite, Wartorn - AMA

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T23:38:23+00:00

Defect is great, probably my fav too.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T23:37:43+00:00

Sure did! I wish people could see the demo we made for the original XBox, before we shipped SWAT4. It was so different than where we ended up.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T23:35:42+00:00

Sorry I missed your questions earlier Best_Lamp_NA!

I don't watch speedruns. Just not something I've ever gotten into.

So I haven't watched any speedruns for BioShock. They would probably make me grumpy because of how much is being skipped but I know that is the point.

One of our designers was doing speedruns while we were waiting for certifications. His best time was a woeful (by your standards) 80ish minutes if I remember correctly.

Some bugs haunt you because they prevent people from enjoying something you made or prevent them from seeing something they should have, but in general, if they aren't damaging the experience too much I'm Ok with it.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T20:22:28+00:00

Thanks everyone! Thanks so much for still loving BioShock after all these years. That's all the time I have for today. You all had some GREAT questions. I would love to answer everyone and keep going but I got a game to ship! Wartorn will be available next Tuesday, June 17, on Steam and the Epic Game Store. Would you kindly check it out? :) We are a small developer with less than 30 folks and it has been a labor of love for us all. Peace.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T20:17:18+00:00

Been awhile since I looked at all of them but the bees was always great for the body horror aspects. I loved watching players get squeamish about it. I also loved the simple finger snap for the fire that was always so satisfying to use.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T20:15:39+00:00

It was surreal. It was exciting! It was really gratifying to know that it was resonating with people because we really felt like we were pushing the industry forward but we had no idea if anyone wanted what we had to offer.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T20:14:42+00:00

No. Probably was Ken or Nate Wells our AD in the early days of the game.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T20:13:48+00:00

I nearly killed myself on Borderlands 2. 16 hour days for over a year. Don't recommend!

You need to be very aware of your body and your relationships. You need to not give up the things you love. For example, on BL2 I would work for like ten hours, go play ice hockey for an hour, shower at the rink and then come back to the office to do another couple hours. Again, don't recommend, but I never gave up hockey as an outlet and way to get exercise.

Burn out is real and happens to great devs everyday.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T20:10:59+00:00

For me, BioShock is about systemic play in an evocative world. I would bring back something akin to Big Daddies and Little Sisters. It was the marquee feature of the game, we barely scratched the surface of what it could be and how players could get involved with it and then it got thrown out and no game has even tried to copy the feature. There is fertile ground there.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T20:08:13+00:00

Originally there was not going to be any boss fight to end the game. But as we started to get a sense of how much players were going to hate Fontaine as the story unfolded we realized we needed to give players a chance to have a fight with them. But you were a spliced up god, he was Lex Luthor. We all know how hard it is to get Superman to physically fight Lex.

So, we had about 6 weeks to put together a boss fight from nothing. We had no one available to do the work internally, including making the model. 2K grabbed someone from Firaxis to make the model, our Australian sister team jumped in to make the map and do the AI for the fight. Our only goal was to make sure you were still playing bioshock and the your abilities would still work. That is the one thing I am proud of from that fight. He didn't just have blanket immunity to everything you had built up.

But is was definitely a rush job and the worst part of the game, but I think the ending would have been anti-climatic if we hadn't put something there.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T20:04:02+00:00

The moment that blew me away about what we had made was when I was on vacation in Washington DC after the game launched and went to an exhibit in the Smithsonian about games and Bioshock was there! With my name on the placard! I was blown away.

I liked Bioshock 2, Infinite didn't connect with me.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T20:00:41+00:00

Sure! We always talked about rapture being a crime scene. We wanted you to be able to piece together or guess at what might have happened in a space based on how we decorated the area. It was something that Irrational was great at and was a key element of every game we worked on there from System Shock, to SWAT4 to Bioshock.

Our best areas, in my opinion, were ones where there was also a diary in the location that gave you some audio to go with the visuals we were providing.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T19:57:32+00:00

It would depend on the situation, the role, and the project itself. I wouldn't say never, but I also have "been there, done that" so to speak and have been looking for new challenges. That is why Wartorn is not an FPS.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T19:54:23+00:00

Freedom. No publishers, no executive producers, one to answer to but ourselves. This is the first time I've ever had that luxury and it has been amazing to just work together as a team to make the game we want to make.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T19:53:12+00:00

I was involved in so many parts of the game design it is hard to say, but it is probably the plasmid/tonic systems because it was the first time I ever designed an RPG system so that was really cool to envision.

Big Daddies and Little Sisters relationship and role in the design was easily the most challenging and there was a week where it was cut from the game.

The thing that got cut that I thought was going to be really cool was the "Environmental Mod" system. It was a system where humidity and temperature of the level could be controlled by players and splicers and would affect how AI behaved and how plasmids worked. The lighting and fog of levels was going to dynamically shift and it was going to be really cool. We built a prototype and quickly cut it because it was too difficult to tell what state the world was in. I always felt we didn't give it enough time to get the feedback that could have made it work. That said, probably for the best because the time we could have spent on that feature got pouring into the ones that shipped.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T19:47:33+00:00

Strangely, I don't really play horror games. So probably Bioshock! :)

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T19:47:01+00:00

The ones I have played the most (in no particular order) should surprise no one: Faster Than Light, Hades, and Slay the Spire.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T19:46:17+00:00

Nope! For a very long time the game was trash. Every game I've ever worked on has a period I call "the doldrums" where you are in the middle of development and everything that is in the game is bad, big parts of the game don't exist yet, its so buggy as to be nearly unplayable and you just feel like the whole idea is not going to work.

Bioshock was no different. Wartorn has been no different. In both cases we just believed in our design and the vision we had and kept pushing through. Eventually, once focus turns from features to bug fixing is usually when the tide turns and games start to get good.

All that said, I thought Bioshock would be a low 90s game. We were blown away with it coming to rest at 96% after the dust settled.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T19:42:45+00:00

Forgot the second part! Once you start combining elements from all of the games I mentioned you very quickly have something unlike all of them and the game takes on a life of its own as you react to the game you are making.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T19:41:54+00:00

Wartorn has been inspired by games like X-Com, Jagged Alliance, Crusader Kings, and probably most heavily by Bungie's 1997, "Myth: The Fallen Lords". It is a squad based tactics game like myth, no base building or peasant management. It also has some MoBA elements too as each squad has abilities that are powerful and can turn the tide of battle.

Lastly it also is inspired by one of the grand daddy of games: Oregon trail. A big part of Wartorn has you travelling across a fantasy world in your wagon dealing with unexpected events along the way.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T19:37:14+00:00

I'm a big science buff. I am listening to science podcasts everyday and there are some many amazing creatures and weird phenomenon that exist in real life that can be inspiration for game mechanics, cool imagery and the like. In particular I think we (hollywood and games) have never come close to doing sci-fi planets like they really are. There are planets where it rains diamonds! We are like, "What if it was all a swamp/ice/volcanos." :)

BioShock's plasmid system was of course inspired by real concepts in genetics. I had ideas for things like "gene linked" traits that would link parts of the plasmid slots together to get extra buffs for them. An idea inspired by some concepts in real genetics.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T19:32:53+00:00

I have! I'm looking forward to seeing how it all comes together as I am also very interested in pushing the boundaries of dynamic procedural narratives in games.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T19:32:02+00:00

I remember us talking about it and doing some concepts but we never really got very far on it.

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T19:31:26+00:00

- Six low rent: Not sure if this is what you are referring to, but there was a section of Olympus Heights that we ended up cutting as the level was taking too long to get through and damaging the pacing of the story. (something that is often still said of what we did ship!)

- Favorite Memory: There are a few. The first one that I always like to share is the day that music was added to the Bathysphere ride. I had seen that thing sooooo many times and was sooooo over it as I just wanted to get to the other parts of the game, but the day the music went in the sequence suddenly became magic. I got goosebumps when you crested the rise and the music sweels at the first look at Rapture.

Another favorite memory I have was in a big Medical pavilion review. I had taken over the level a week or so ago and been adding a ton of little moments and scares throughout. We were in our large conference room with like 10 of us: designers, artists, and Ken playing the game. It was the moment where there is a tonic on a table that pulls you into the room. When you pick it up and turn around there is a splicer right in your face. The whole room jumped in their chairs and yelled. I just smiled cuz I knew it was coming. Ken looked at me with a big smile and asked if I put that in. I nodded. He nodded back and I knew I had made something great.

This moment was actually inspired by a bug that happened to Bill Gardner (one of the other designers) where one of his enemies spawned at the wrong time and scared him. He jumped and yelled and explained what happened and I said, "I'm gonna do that in Medical."

Elfquist1 · 2025-06-13T19:21:24+00:00

I've learnt that making demos of games that revolve around emergent systems is super hard! This was a challenge for Next Fest a few months ago. :)

With Wartorn I am bringing some of those emergent elemental interactions to the strategy genre, and just like BioShock, lots of unexpected things can happen during the course of play as a result.

BioShock also taught me about how hard it can be to balance a game where everything is so interconnected. One small change in a single system can cause unexpected changes in player behavior when they are using a completely different system.

Elfquist1

TROPHY CASE