BioShock’s atmospheric pressure system - BioShock was slated to simulate deep-sea atmospheric pressure changes. In fact, the feature was functioning when the game shipped. Technical Director Chris Kline explains: “Any area in BioShock could be associated with a ‘pressure region.’ Machines in each region allowed players to change the local pressure between low, normal, and high parameters. For each room in the game, there were entirely different light, fog, and HDR rendering setups, and when the pressure was changed, the whole atmosphere in the room would smoothly blend from the current setup to the new setup. In addition, every AI responded differently to pressure, meaning that, depending on the current pressure, the AI would have different animations, vocalizations, appearance, speeds, vulnerabilities to different damage types, and damage bonuses.

“The system was originally designed so that the player had an additional way to manipulate the world to his advantage ,” Kline adds. “For example, perhaps one AI was immune to fire in normal pressure but susceptible to it in high or low pressures; or an AI had poor perception in low pressure.”

“In practice, the system was a disaster because it caused several gameplay and production issues:
 * The amount of work that artists needed to do in each room of the game tripled, because each pressure needed its own lighting and fog settings.
 * It was impossible to control the mood of any given space, because changes in pressure resulted in changes in lighting and fog.
 * Designers needed to plan for every permutation of pressure settings for every single room. QA then had to test these.
“Most importantly — and this is the issue that put the nail in the system’s coffin — was that we never found a good way to clearly convey the effect of pressure through audiovisual changes.”