Jean-Paul LeBreton is a level designer for Bioshock and Bioshock 2. He’s just reworked Arcadia, the undersea forest from the first game, using the Doom 2 engine. Yeah, Doom 2. As you can see in that dark screenshot, it’s pretty, uh, retro. It takes a lot of compromises to do Arcadia with those graphics. For instance, the pile of red skull keys you find is supposed to be a rose bush. In case you have Doom 2 installed somewhere, you can get the level here. Also, why do you still have Doom 2 installed?

LeBreton’s reverse engineering was an exercise inspired by the concept of “demaking” levels, which means creating them as if they were built for older graphics engines. But the true value of the exercise is that in the process, LeBreton writes an extensive and fascinating discussion of that whole section of Bioshock. He discusses how it came about, how it evolved, how it got its name, what Easter Eggs lurk therein, and what he would do differently if he were making Arcadia today. He even reveals a last-minute sex change for one of Arcadia’s notable characters.

As LeBreton explains at the end of his article:

I sincerely hope it’s better than those DVD commentaries where the actors just go “Uh-huh. Oh yeah, this scene. This was great. That guy, he was great to work with. Just great. Uh-huh.”

Would that half the DVD commentaries I listen to were half as good as LeBreton’s Arcadia commentary.

More here: 
What if Bioshock used the Doom 2 engine?

Tags: arcadia, article, dvd, easter-eggs, exercise, from-the-first, half-as-good, half-the-dvd, level-designer, older-graphics, process, shooters, sincerely-hope, undersea, used-the-doom

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Extreme Games, Microsoft Research & Defense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.