What's the life of Bioshock 2's Creative Director like now that the game is finished? "I'm mostly doing stuff like this," Jordan Thomas tells me over the phone, referring to the interview. "It's stuff that's not necessarily natural to my character, such as looking at action figure designs, promotional materials... it's not the main thrust of game development." He assures us that there has been a short break, but the game is due out on February 9, just a few short weeks away.

This gives us an excellent chance to look back not only to the first game, but to the entirety of the development of Bioshock 2, and why the team decided to make the decisions that lead to this game. Hold your breath: we're going deep.

Would you kindly start from the beginning?

Where Bioshock enjoyed a now-iconic introduction featuring a plane crash and then a short lesson in the philosophy of objectivism before we first laid eyes on Rapture, the second game has the handicap of taking place in a world we may feel like we know well. Was there fear about losing the lasting impact that the first game's introduction had on players?

"Yes, is the most honest answer," Thomas tells Ars. Some people will play the sequel, but many already know about Rapture. The answer? Create a character that has some known qualities, and build from there. As a Big Daddy in Bioshock 2, your existence and history is a mystery that the player has to solve. In the first game, the world of Rapture is a complete unknown, whereas in the Bioshock 2 you're trying to discover your past and deal with what has happened since the ending of the last game, roughly ten years ago.

The second game also doesn't track your saved game from the previous title, and that seems to have been for practical reasons. "People like to switch platforms and things, we didn't want to force you into a dependency with the previous game." Don't worry though, this game will reference the first experience in many ways. Ten years have passed since the events in the first Bioshock, and they have had a lasting impact on the world.

"[The first game's protagonist's actions] have been mythologized by the splicers that have been stuck down there for ten years, going crazier and crazier." Your story from the first game has become something of a twisted religion in the last decade. "You will see paintings where your chain tattoos are turned into religious iconography. The plane crash is on a mural."

Thomas says that moving forward is the only way they could have explored Rapture while keeping the feeling of Bioshock. "To be perfectly honest, my feeling on the true prequel, if it were to be honest at all in trying to portray a living city, would be a very different game than Bioshock."

We will get a glimpse of a pre-Bioshock Rapture, however, via the game's multiplayer modes. "With the multiplayer we have gone in an honest prequel direction: in the year between 1959 to 1960, it precedes the events of Bioshock, and is the real year where the civil war of Rapture began in earnest."

You'll see things from the first game, but before they have been torn apart, giving you a sense of the grandeur of Andrew Ryan's grand experiment. "You take the role of a splicer whose life has been torn apart by that war, and see what it was like to be there when dozens and dozens of clever, self-interested mutants are competing over this miraculous resource—ADAM—and I feel like multiplayer is the best way to experience that part of Rapture's history. If you go back further than that, you're dealing with a very different interactive model that we didn't feel like played to the strengths of Bioshock, something that makes you feel alone, paranoid, and hunted."

There is no master plan for Rapture, no concrete idea of the space it inhabits. We ask if, somewhere deep in the bowels of 2K Marin, there is a map of the entirety of the undersea heaven/hell. Carlos Cuello, the Lead Programmer on the title, thinks about it for a moment. "Not that I can think of, Rapture is very fluid, the way it was developed."

Thomas agrees, noting that Rapture itself is almost a matter of perception. "Our attitude is a bit more subjective than that. Giving it a strict layout keeps you from being creatively agile." He points to the feeling of exploration and sense of isolation that Rapture gives the player. "Your mind is like a flashlight, only seeing glimpses of things, and you never have a perfect picture. It's very creatively liberating."

The moral choices may become a little grayer

The first game gave you a binary choice as the player: you could either "harvest" the Little Sisters for their ADAM, or liberate them and get the "good" ending. The problem is that this decision only determines what ending the game shows you; the actual amount of ADAM given to the player for upgrades throughout the game is almost even. The choice, from a gameplay standpoint, is meaningless.

Cuello defends the disconnect between the moral choices and impact on gameplay. "I like the fact I can play the game I want to play, and not have a disadvantage compared to someone else who played a different way," he explains.

Thomas points out that there are two types of players who will pick up the game. "You absolutely will get people who aren't involved in the fiction, and won't allow moral or aesthetic skinning to affect what they consider to be the optimal gameplay decision." There is a flipside, however. "Others called me up after seeing the sisters they rescued [at the end of the game] after having a daughter themselves, and they wept. We have a large and highly gradiated spectrum of players."

The choice in Bioshock 2 is not nearly as clear. "Because the player has the ability to adopt Little Sisters, and carry them around regardless of what he plans to do with them, you have opportunities to gain ADAM as a rescuer and a harvester." After you create the symbiotic relationship with Little Sisters you encounter and take a cut of the ADAM they find, you can then either harvest or rescue them. "Once you do resolve a certain number of Little Sisters, there are rewards which affect the amount of ADAM, and other non-ADAM quantities that you unlock. Those kind of make the strictly optimal path more of a judgment call, and people will disagree with which one was optimal."

You're not alone

Even now, with the game around the corner, some gamers are upset at the idea of a Bioshock title that incorporates multiplayer. Cuello downplays the criticism. "Fan concerns stemmed from the fear that the single-player game would get hurt from working on multiplayer at the same time. We were able to focus on the single-player, and Digital Extremes was able to focus on multiplayer."

Thomas agrees that the final product will be cohesive. "We had an internal representative who is a multiplayer specialist. She took broad creative direction from me, and became a liasion to the Digital Extremes team, and those guys took the high-level direction and made the game their baby. They layered as much love on that as we did the single player. Because of that person walking between worlds, there wasn't much lost creatively." He notes there was some "gentle guidance" when dealing with the tone of Rapture.

Concept art for the Big Daddy

"On the technical side, we always felt the game was in good hands... we knew we were working with professionals with experience with the engine." The two teams talked daily, and there was a lot of sharing of assets and expertise. "Their game is a little different, in terms of weapons and plasmids, so it didn't make sense to share everything, but where we did it helped out a lot."

Since its fiction takes place before the events of the first game, there is a hook to get players to at least sample the multiplayer. "The response has been positive, consistently so, among people who have actually played it. We're not going to convert every single person who is coming for the single-player, but those who try it are going to be pleasantly surprised," Thomas assures us. "From there, if they decide to devote themselves to it, that's up to them." In single-player, many of those tricks and emergent strategies found by combining weapons and plasmids are "for style" and not strictly required. Now, to survive in multiplayer, "you need to be a master of the systems."

Will it all work?

Bioshock seemed to work as a standalone game, which makes the quick turnaround on the sequel—with multiplayer, no less—something of a worry for gamers. The team behind the game has strong ideas about what does and doesn't work in the world of Rapture, however, and hopefully that will be enough to see it through. We'll have to wait until the game is in our hands for our final thoughts.

Bioshock 2 launches on the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 on February 9.