Thanks to technical limitations, the visuals from the 2007 game turned out to be surprisingly memorable, and we can still vividly recall them today.

The Big Daddy from BioShock is one of the most iconic enemy characters in gaming. Armed with a drill and wearing a diving helmet, this guardian of Rapture became synonymous with Irrational’s classic shooter, even gracing the game’s cover upon its 2007 release. However, it turns out that—like many elements of BioShock—Big Daddy drew direct inspiration from System Shock 2. The character’s appearance was shaped by the technical limitations of 1990s 3D game development.

This was recently revealed by Nate Wells, the latest interviewee in Nightdive’s in-depth conversation series on System Shock 2. Wells served as art director at Looking Glass Studios during the game’s co-development with Irrational Games, and he currently works at Epic Games. During the interview, Wells shared that the foundations for Big Daddy’s design were laid when the team was struggling with polygon limits while planning the sequel to System Shock.

“I work on Fortnite now, and we don’t talk about polygon counts anymore. I think BioShock was the last time we seriously talked about polygon counts in a limiting way. Many of the characters were based entirely or partially on Thief characters, or were just reimagined versions of them. We used those meshes because they were optimized down to the very last triangle. I remember one of the first things I did was remake a texture that perfectly matched the layout of the Thief characters, so we got those crew members essentially for free.

The first character I created—concept and all—was the maintenance droid. Big Daddy ended up being an evolution of that… like that on steroids. Its shoulders are actually at eye level, giving it a squat, sad appearance. As I was sketching the concept, I thought about how most of its body parts were boxes. I knew I’d end up building those boxes anyway. You can make a concept full of curves, complexity, and delicate antennas, but why? They’d all be removed. So, I thought, ‘What’s a cool robot I could build that’s mostly boxes?’ If you embrace your design limitations, you’ll get a better model, with better unwrapping, which means more texture space,” Wells explained.

He noted that the Big Daddy in BioShock consisted of between 2,500 and 3,000 polygons, which he still considers very few. However, that was ten times more than the polygon count available for characters in System Shock 2. At that time, each character was limited to 250 triangles. Such constraints forced developers to use creative tricks when designing the character models.

According to Wells, designing with the game’s technical limitations in mind was always preferable to creating complex concepts that later needed simplification. It’s another example of how working within boundaries can often lead to greater ingenuity in art and design, rather than having total freedom.

Source: PCGamer