Billy Dee Williams in Bioshock 2: Underwater Brother.

Err, what the? Why the split? I thought Ken is a nice guy.

Hell, I'm a nice guy, but I still whip my underlings with extension cords when they fall behind on their schedule.

I'm sure there are a lot of angles going on here. Creative endeavours (and Bioshock sure as hell wasn't a grind-it-out game) means creative people, and, well, just look what happens in Rock bands.) And I also wonder if there's any "I don't wanna do a sequel" thing going on here. I always got the sense that Ken wasn't super keen on cranking out a "normal" kind of sequel to Bioshock. Witness this quote from a few months ago:

"Games take three or four years. I'm almost 41 years old. I'm going to be dead soon. I don't have four years to toss into being a human Xerox machine."

would you kindly post any info that you overhear please?

It's a WAYYY old rumor.

This just begs the question, "What the hell can you put into a Bioshock sequal?" I mean, they kind of wrapped up their story pretty tightly in the first. Let's try a pitch.

"Ok, so we all know Andrew Ryan built an underwater society right? Well, what you didn't know is this. He had an evil twin brother, Buddy Ryan (who also moonlighted as Defensive Coordinator for the Houston Oilers). Now Buddy also set up a society, even more secretive than his brothers. That's right, one inside of a volcano. And this volcano happens to be haunted by evil lamp monsters from the ancient Indian burial ground it was built on. See, this just writes itself."

In other words, a good sequel would have basically no connection at all.

I like Buddy Ryan. Sure fire winner.

You could always make it a prequel, set it when Rapture is being built and you have to fight off those who are against Ryan's bold new vision. Half-finished areas with artwork still to be installed, reintroduced characters not yet jaded from years of living in the underwater hellhole, new but unstable plasmids just gaining functionality, and so forth.

I always wished (not being a horror or FPS fanatic) that Bioshock were an RPG set during the rise and fall of Rapture. That's a game I'd love to play.

As Levine said, making a prequel to Bioshock would be, well, impossible, because wacky hostile zombies are a lot dumber than sane people AI-wise.

So for a suspension of disbelief that doesn't break after 15 seconds of entering the game, the characters would need to possess AI that can nearly pass the Turing test.

Either that, or they can all be scripted to behave with incredible intelligence as you pass by the inpenetrable glass-wall bunker they're pacing around, before it is inevitably filled with gas.

I wonder what kind of angle they might take with XCom. Bioshock was a clear successor to System Shock but would XCom's turn based strategy appeal to the "modern" gamer? I half expect them to put XCom in the same blender that made Fallout3 and that we'll see a FPS with turn-based elements incorporated into the combat.

Dear God, can you imagine how badass a Sectoid or Chryslis would look like in a Crysis like engine!

Now that I'm thinking about it, wasn't there already a XCom FPS? With helmet cams (a la Aliens) so you can see what your teammates see on your HUD?

I imagine if the X-Com rumours are true (and they've been repeated so many times from so many different places it's hard to imagine they aren't), it would probably be more along the lines of Freedom Force than Bioshock. I have a much harder time seeing X-Com work in first-person than Fallout. I'd love if it was turn-based, though I vaguely remember Ken Levine saying something about turn-based systems being outdated. I could be misattributing that to him, though. Maybe it was Warren Spector.

Either way, I'm totally excited for it.

All the times you have Ken Levine on the podcast and you can't get a peep out of him?

Fixed.