Surfer Girl is known to pick up accurate gossips that soon enough turn into news and todays treat picks up the lead of a Gamasutra job’s listing. Part of the team that developed Bioshock for 2k Games is setting up a new studio in the San Francisco bay area. The listing profiled the search for a lead animator with and since has been removed, but 1UP was fast to catch a cached version of the posting which can be found. That’s what I mean by Surfer Girl sending ripples through the online gaming press. Everyone seems to pitch in on the subject. The page reveals the name of the new studio: 2K Marin.

<-125x125 Button - left->Some of the people who created the award-winning “Bioshock” are starting up a new studio in the Bay Area called 2K Marin. We are looking for a character concept artist who can name all of the “Masters of the Universe” characters who had mustaches. That qualification, however, is less important than your DaVinci-like knowledge of anatomy coupled with drawing skills that easily put the entire Hanna-Barbara pantheon into question” in Surfer Girl’s own words.

In a rather ironic twist of events, the good people at 2K Boston don’t look forward to working with Ken Levine. Considering the game’s back story, the father of all things Bioshock seems to follow up on the evil odyssey of Andrew Ryan, his game’s arch villain. Levine used to be the head Irrational Games, the studio which originally developed the title. When faced with financial difficulties which threatened to impair the game’s smooth release, he was forced to make a so called pact with the devil and sell his company to 2K Games. It was so that the co-founder was faced with a choice, either releasing an incomplete Bioshock or losing his first brainchild. Levine played the PR machine aware of the implications of failure and maybe sometime along the way he started to ask too much of his development team.

Ken stated on several occasions that he isn't interested in doing BioShock 2 due to the ending of the story arc in Rapture, but the decision is not his alone. 2K Games feels like running the Bioshock franchise even further and will most likely get the new 2K Marin built up specifically for the job of developing a prequel of a sequel. As far as Ken Levine is concerned, he’s going to move on and develop a new X-Com game.

A very irritating bug that occured during the multiplayer online action was the fact that some group members became invisible and it was really difficult to go through the game like that. The multiplayer version of the game receiced a hotfix patch, namely 0.6, which adresses this particular issue. So now the co-op game should work flawlessly.

From the notes of the developers about the patch here's a quote: "Patch 0.6 has one very notable fix – the invisible group member bug has been slain. This was a crafty, fierce thing with rows of nasty sharp teeth, but we believe it has now fallen into the mists of legend. We’ll stay vigilant in case it raises its ugly invisible head again."(...) "We’ve also made great strides on the Engineer Drone issue where items become unequipped. There are some cases where Drones (as well as players), will still have items unequip. The main cause of this is when players “ladder up” the equipment on their Character or Drone by using items with statistic bonuses. This results in the Character or Drone being able to use a better overall set of gear than they normally could, and thus causes issues if the items are not equipped in a specific order (or used at all). We’re continuing to work on this one, but it is better with this patch."

The next problem they are going to look at and will find out how to fix is the memory management issue. The only thing that remains unknown is what will happen to the single player mode - a new patch to fix the memory management in single player mode hasn't been confirmed yet.