Although Bioshock and it’s subsequent successors were comfortably on the high-end in the tech spectrum when they came out, those titles were far more focused on the art direction and sense of aesthetics in order to portray an immersive and gripping narrative experience. And similarly, the upcoming Judas, which contains a lot of the core DNAs of the Bioshock games, isn’t looking to provide ultra-realism which is not particularly appealing to Ken Levine, the creator of the Bioshock series of titles. In a recent interview with IGN, he said that cutting edge tech doesn’t interest him all that much:
“I don’t think we’ve ever been a company that was like, oh my God, we need the latest and greatest technology. In the rendering space we’ve never been a company; outside of SWAT 4, we never really tried to do ultrarealism in our games,” he stated.
“It’s expensive, and it doesn’t age as well as sort of more stylistic things because BioShock still looks good, I think, because it wasn’t trying to get every nut and bolt super realistically rendered. It was realistic-looking, sort of, but it was more stylized.”
He’s absolutely right when stating that Bioshock has aged remarkably well, especially the remastered version which demonstrates that visionary art direction can trump sheer rendering horsepower every time.
Levine also said that both Nintendo Switch 2 and the upcoming Steam Machine points to the fact that videogames as a medium, has currently reached “a bit of diminishing returns” in it’s quest to deliver more and more realistic visuals.
“I think if you have the right art director and the right approach, you don’t need to be on the cutting edge of technology all the time,” he said. “Even the stuff we’re doing with Judas, all this narrative stuff we’re doing is not CPU intensive. It’s work intensive on our side, and Baldur’s Gate is the same way. That was just like a ton of work behind that. None of it was particularly technologically demanding, right? It was just a billion branching tree structures that they had to manage and think about – which I tip my hat to those guys because they did an amazing job with it – but that’s not a technological, hardware challenge. It’s an engineering and thought challenge.”
Judas is currently in development for Playstation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, though a release date is yet to be announced.
