Although Ken Levine won’t be involved in any more Bioshock titles, his studio Ghost Story Games, is currently working on Judas–a game which contains a lot of the core DNAs from the Bioshock series of titles including what made their narrative experiences so groundbreaking and endearing. The first Bioshock is still one of the greatest examples of storytelling and immersion in all of gaming and Levine’s upcoming Judas seems destined to take it all to whole new levels of awe, in more ways than one.
And in a recent interview with IGN, Bioshock creator Ken Levine has revealed why Judas is taking so long to develop which isn’t because of technology but because of the modular storytelling that responds to the player in real time, which is unlike nothing that’s out there in the entire industry.
“The reason it took so long is not really related to rendering technology or anything like that,” he said. “It was figuring out how we crafted the system, this narrative Lego system that is combining modular elements together dynamically at runtime to make stories happen that are very reactive to the player.”
“So we had a technology, and then we had to figure out how to write a story for that. Like how do we write stories at maximum leverage? As much as you love the stories from BioShock and BioShock Infinite, they are pretty linear experiences; outside of the combat, they’re not that highly reactive to player action in the same way. And I really wanted to do a game that was, you know, sort of the opposite end of the spectrum from that.”
Judas is a first person shooter that’s set aboard an interstellar ark carrying humans to a new home on Proxima Centauri which has an oppressive society run by machines and that’s the sort of narrative backdrop of the game.
“So first we’re just doing the raw technology, you know, something we build on top of Unreal Engine. And then there was, okay, how do we write for this? How do we build encounters for this? And we kissed many, many, many frogs along the way. And time just was passing. I get it that it’s a long time and it seems like a hugely long time. I’m not sure how we would have kissed those frogs any faster.”
Levine also stated that the overall scope as well as the narrative complexity are parts of why the game is taking so long:
“Some of it I’m sure is the scope of the games increasing; they just get bigger and bigger,” he offered. “When you increase the scope of the game, there are exponential effects on everything. Like you have more people… and more people means more communication problems.”
Judas is currently in development for Playstation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, though a release date is yet to be announced.
