Exclusive info about the Little Sisters

[2K Elizabeth]

http://blogs.ign.com/Irrational_Games/2007/05/23/55572/

I have just posted in my IGN Blog about the Little Sisters. This is a nice twenty minute interview with me and Ken talking about Little Sisters, what they are, what you can do to them, and many other goodies.

This will help answer a LOT of questions about Little Sisters, I think.

[Jeshibu]

But I wanted to be able to shoot little sisters indiscriminately.
I get that it's not about pointing a gun at a child, but it would force the player to be careful when fighting a big daddy. Fights would be a lot different if the little sisters could be collateral damage.
Invisible War got away with it, so censorship and rating shouldn't be an issue.

Anyway, lighting them on fire actually should be a valid gameplay choice as someone who thinks like the Templars in Invisible War: not interested in modifying himself, and extremely disdainful of anything that has already been modified.
A little girl surviving a rocket to the face would just be odd, too.

Thanks for posting that bit of insight into the game, though.

[paloalto]

Just think of being a character in a twilight zone episode where you enter a world where not being able to directly damage sisters is one of the many mysteries.

[Moldova Casa Mare]

Thats IT!!! I'm definetly not buying this game now. You all suck and I hate you. Thanks for ruining something that i have been looking forward since SS2 came out!

[Mr.WaeseL]

Awww man! You can't kill the little sisters?

[Bjossi]

I was kind of surprised when he mentioned that too in the interview. The freedom is the center of the universe in the case of BioShock, and we aren't allowed to harm the little sisters with weapons?

[paloalto]

So you've been looking forward to being able to shoot little children?Is that the main pull of the game?I agree with Ken's reasoning and think it is a brilliant solution to a delicate issue.I guess it will be a longer wait for you to spray children with bullets.

[Moldova Casa Mare]

i did play pray...

Edit:
And to hell with children, they're just small adults.

PS I'm trolling, you don't have to bite. It's just you people are so freakin' sensitive about this game. Remember that spermbank issue, or quickiemart, slpice-o-matic, whatever that was, jeez! It don't matter, none of this matters. IG made good games before. I trust them that they'll make another, if not, I'll return it or something.

PSS it's not that all this forum bickering will change anything...

PPSS Suck it! (little sisters that is)

PPSSS I'm talking about adam

[Jeshibu]

So you've been looking forward to being able to shoot little children?Is that the main pull of the game?I agree with Ken's reasoning and think it is a brilliant solution to a delicate issue.I guess it will be a longer wait for you to spray children with bullets.

No, but I think it should be a possibility. Oh well, we'll see how it works out. There'll probably be an unofficial patch to add that possibility soon enough anyway.
Oh, and the genebank/plasmiquick thing didn't bother me at all.

[bigheadah]

so whats the downside to hoarding adam?...that you have to fight the big daddies right?

[Bjossi]

So you've been looking forward to being able to shoot little children?Is that the main pull of the game?I agree with Ken's reasoning and think it is a brilliant solution to a delicate issue.I guess it will be a longer wait for you to spray children with bullets.

Is it wrong to shoot little kids? They are just smaller versions of a human.
Morality shouldn't be an issue in a computer game anyways, because nothing in there is real. Making you unable to harm a little sister just because she is little would be stupid, a more logical reason would work for me.

[killed]

I have mixed feelings on this one.

It could go bad either way. I think being able to kill Little Sisters is a much riskier thing to deal with. While it does slightly disappoint me that the game doesn't allow you to be that "bad", if you think about it realistically, gameplay would turn into "Kill the big guy, stay alive, and try not to hit that little girl". There's various ways they could get around that, but still, I have to say I respect their decision. Because ultimately, it isn't what the game is about. The choice is about exploiting the girl, not necessarily killing her.

So, think about a likely gameplay comparison:

You fight the big daddies to get the little sisters. You manage to avoid killing the little sister somehow, even though there are tons of explosions. (Maybe only the wrench could harm her?) So now you can kill her with a weapon at your leisure. So, now you have a corpse of a little girl. Or maybe you intentionally try to go for her first. The game turns into "Use stealth to snipe little girls." The game is now much more disgusting.

Or

You spot the big daddy and little sister around a corner. You decide to battle it out with the big daddy while the little girl scampers away and hides behind him. You manage to take down the big daddy and "harvest" the little sister. Visuals and suggestive sounds communicate that what you're doing is pretty horrible. The scene ends with a collapsed little sister on the ground, staring at you, completely helpless. You walk away with the adam, leaving her utterly alone and defenseless against the wolves.

Which one has emotional impact? Were talking basic murder vs abandonment. Basic murder has been done in games, hasn't it?

On the other hand though, it will look very strange to try to shoot her (even accidentally) and see nothing damaging her. When it comes down to it, my biggest concern is that this will be a huge immersion breaker. This is all how Irrational decided to deal with this. If done right, it can add a great deal of emotional depth to the game.

EDIT:

Is it wrong to shoot little kids? They are just smaller versions of a human.
Morality shouldn't be an issue in a computer game anyways, because nothing in there is real.

Going by this logic then, all fiction shouldn't have any moral decisions in them. They should just completely abandon any moral decision making characters might encounter, because it's not real. Yes, I understand it's just a game. But, it's a controlled environment where players can experiment with moral choice and see the outcomes of both. That's why it works as a game.

Making you unable to harm a little sister just because she is little would be stupid, a more logical reason would work for me.

I definetely agree on this one though. There has to be a good reason why you can't harm her.

[Bjossi]

Which one has emotional impact? Were talking basic murder vs abandonment.

Don't both situations have an emotional impact? If you can kill her you will feel powerful and might use them to your advantage (if there is an advantage...), or you can harvest her and be the really bad guy.
The former situation makes you able to feel powerful and bad at the same time, while in the latter you won't really feel powerful, just a really bad guy I guess.

Would it be ok to allow killing of little sisters if it had a negative effect towards the player's progress of the gameplay? So you'd need to think about if the positives outweight the negatives in each particular case. But then we come to the problem of the fights agains the big daddys, little sisters will often or maybe always die in the heat of the battle.

[killed]

Don't both situations have an emotional impact? If you can kill her you will feel powerful and might use them to your advantage (if there is an advantage...), or you can harvest her and be the really bad guy.
The former situation makes you able to feel powerful and bad at the same time, while in the latter you won't really feel powerful, just a really bad guy I guess.

Normally, I would say yes, murder would have more impact. But because it is a game, that means shooting and killing has been done. Even killing children has been done. How much emotional impact is it really going to have to sneak up, shoot a little girl and see her go "BLAH!" (in the raspy voice) and fall over dead? I don't know about you, but I wouldn't feel bad about it. It might even be funny.

Now compare that to completely robbing her of power and leaving her defenseless. It's almost like a non-sexual rape, if you will. To me, that seems pretty disturbing.

[Bjossi]

In my opinion it depends on how it is implemented. The more realistic the scene gets, the more disturbing kid-killing will become. It's a co-op of visuals and audio that make the disturbance.

Leaving a little sister defenseless would definitely impact me too of course. I think I saw in a video where the player approaches her and she's scared shitless, without anyone to protect her, and that is before you harvest her right?

[killed]

In my opinion it depends on how it is implemented. The more realistic the scene gets, the more disturbing kid-killing will become. It's a co-op of visuals and audio that make the disturbance.

That's true too. But as stated above, in the heat of the battle, her dying isn't going to make much of an impact. Plus, the game is about exploitation of the little sisters. So, it just goes back to what the message really is here. But, I'm just hoping they give some sort of story explanation to why she can't be killed.

Maybe she does react to your shots, but doesn't ever actually die? You could explain this away by saying she has powerful genetic regeneration powers and she actually has to be torn apart to be killed. The splicers have many sharp edges that could do the trick. But, you wouldn't actually see this in the game, it would just be implied. Anyway, that's just an idea, and hopefully they came up with something stronger than that.

[redrain85]

This is disappointing news. The idea that you can fire your weapons all day and have no effect on the Little Sisters whatsoever, means that the immersion factor of the game is going to take a huge hit. No, I don't enjoy the idea of going around and indescriminately killing children in a game. But there should be consequences for your actions.

I see now that the fact the Little Sister seemed invulnerable in the Hunting the Big Daddy trailer, was not something done just for demo purposes. It's actually in the game.

A way around this dilemma would be that if you kill a Little Sister (either accidentally or intentionally), you can no longer harvest Adam from her. This would punish people for killing Little Sisters. It could be explained that the Little Sisters have been engineered in such a way that when they are killed before harvesting, some process occurs that destroys the Adam and renders it useless. Therefore, Adam can only be obtained by harvesting it while she's still alive (killing the Little Sister in the process, unfortunately) rather than by killing her first and then harvesting it.

Where's the true challenge in killing a Big Daddy, if you don't have to worry about the Little Sister being caught in the crossfire? Having to make strategic attacks that avoid harming the Little Sister, would add so much more to the triumph of defeating a Big Daddy.

[demagogue]

Well, this was enlightening.

It explained some of the early hints some devs were dropping that one point to BS was exploring the difference between what's human and what's not human. Alexx quoted something by Ayn Rand in this forum to the effect that humans need total freedom to pursue great projects, but anything non-human doesn't have any right to anything (talking about abortion). They were implying what's now clearer as the Atlas - Tennanbaum divide about what counts as human, what counts as exploitation, and who gets rights, to do what to whom?

Also, he didn't say where the Little Sisters were going, but he did drop a point that Atlas was using the little Sisters to get enough Adam to get himself and family/friends out of Rapture, and recruiting the player to help him (I'm sure one point of resistance is Ryan, who doesn't want people abandoning his utopia he still thinks he can pull off?). Anyway, it sounds like to me Atlas is using all that Adam to create something big that the player will have to face sooner or later.

Also, I'm not worried that you can't physically harm little sisters, except for harvesting. Games do that all the time, e.g., to protect NPCs you need to stay alive, so it's not like it will be that jarring. But anyway, the more important point, as an element of the gameplay it will start to feel natural to think of Little Sisters as a sui generis gameplay mechanic in themselves, all their own (sorry for the Latin, but it just really captures the idea), like they are more like resources/tools to frob than enemies to shoot at (at least as far as the gameplay is concerned) ... which even further blurs the "tool to exploit" vs human/NPC line. (You get an idea that can't injure little sisters in the same kind of way you can't blow up lockboxes or vending machines). I think that will have a really interesting effect on how the gameplay plays out, how the player even conceptualizes little sisters in the space and what they can "do" to them and what it means, all in a good, very interesting direction.

[Gingerbread Man]

And here was me hoping there'd be a pants-soiling moment somewhere along the way where little sisters could get caught in crossfire with splicers, and then oh god there's a Big Daddy after me too now because I accidentally killed the Little Sister he was escorting nearby.

[paloalto]

I was wondering how the Big Daddies were going tp protect the Sisters anyway,as you could find a vantage point and fire at them or lob a grenade and hit them.Knowing that you can't means your focus will be on Big Daddies
and gaining access to the choice of harvesting or saving.It makes the choice more powerful in my opinion.
I suppose a Big daddy could be able to throw a shield around Sister while there is a battle but that raises other techie questions about the game.

[ckline]

And here was me hoping there'd be a pants-soiling moment somewhere along the way where little sisters could get caught in crossfire with splicers, and then oh god there's a Big Daddy after me too now because I accidentally killed the Little Sister he was escorting nearby.

Get your brown pants ready, because even though the Little Sisters cannot be hurt by you, the Big Daddies will most certainly pummel you for trying to do so. Even if it was by accident.

-Chris Kline, Irrational Games

[redrain85]

And here was me hoping there'd be a pants-soiling moment somewhere along the way where little sisters could get caught in crossfire with splicers, and then oh god there's a Big Daddy after me too now because I accidentally killed the Little Sister he was escorting nearby.

Right, this is exactly what's going to be missing now. If you could kill a Little Sister, it meant that the Big Daddy escorting her would have gone into a rage and hunted you down. Again, as punishment to the player for killing the Little Sister. Not to mention the depth it would add to the game, to see this kind of emotional attachment between the characters.

Seems that this will no longer occur. Unless a different Big Daddy spots a Little Sister after you harvest, and then goes into a rage. But to have a Big Daddy come after you long after the fact, would be a bit confusing and - frankly - lessen the emotional impact on the player.

EDIT: Never mind . . . ckline posted as I was writing this. Still, I think this decision by 2K and Irrational is the wrong one.

[flexbuster]

Wow. I'm just kind of speechless about this.

My expectations of this game just dropped about 90%.


Seriously, the game is supposed to be about choice, and the actions you take to survive in the ruins of a city... yet one of the most obvious, glaring, emotionally-charged decision-making moments was just removed from the game with a melon baller.

I'm not sure even sure what else to say about this. I would think it should be self-evident why this is a terrible idea, but evidently it's not.

[Brigg]

Well, So much for making moral choices. Seems they've already been made for you.

Its not going to stop me from playing the game, as I wasnt planning on going around shooting little girls, But the whole premise just lost alot of credibility.
If we're going to be making moral choices, Then make a moral choice and dont water it down. The game is already rated M.

This wouldnt have even been an issue if that whole "Moral choice" issue hadnt been harped on so much. Thats what really burns me. What this really boils down to is caving in to pressure from censor groups.

I can only imagine what would happen if someone suggested removing the scenes of corpses from Schindler's List because they were disturbing. Of course its disturbing, thats the POINT. Its supposed to rouse emotion, And a vague suggestion that something bad might happen is not the same as being forced to face the foul results of your actions.

[Scots Taffer]

Unlike the unkillable NPCs that you must escort/protect in certain games, I think this will have a serious impact upon immersion since you are choosing to exploit them anyway (hence can be viewed more as an "enemy") so where is the major difference in simply killing them as opposed to abandoning them.
I wonder if anyone at Irrational would comment as to whether this decision was influenced by the potential ESRB ratings backlash it would receive?