Ken Levine felt the boss battle at the end of Bioshock was a failure. He told Craig Pearson, our News Editor, that by the time he noticed that the final clash in Bioshock sucked, it was too late to change it. Here's the transcript of what he said:
Ken Levine: If I had to do it over again I would never have had the boss battle at the end of Bioshock. It was something that was against my better judgement. If you look at the Shodan battle at the end of System Shock 2, if you look as that battle, I hate them in games, I despise them in games. I get through a Zelda dungeon I'm loving, I'm having a great time but then I've got to figure out how to take this guy's shell off and hit him in the butt six times. I hate that as a gamer and I find it very hard to do as a developer. If I had to do it all over again I would never have done that final boss battle.
PC Gamer: Was it a retrospective thing? Did you look back and go “we really didn't do a good job there”?
Ken Levine: No. I'm sure you have this thing in your life, right? When you're dating some girl and you're with her and you know this is totally wrong, yet you don't break up with her and yet you kind of don't go through the process, you stick with it and I knew at some point it wasn't the right thing and by the time I absolutely was certain, it was too late.
PC Gamer: What do you think went wrong specifically, or was it a number of things?
Ken Levine: What went wrong? It's not in our DNA, it's not something we do well, and we tried to do something and we didn't do well. It wasn't the right thing. It's an American expression, nobody bats a thousand*.
* Fellow brits: This is a baseball thing. It's something to do with the alignment of celestial bodies and the number of right angles in a triangle.
