In a recent interview with GI.biz, Bioshock creator and industry veteran Ken Levine has shared his thoughts on the upcoming game from his studio titled Judas, on the emergence of A.I and what the future in Videogame Storytelling can possibly look like.
Regarding the upcoming Judas from the Bioshock helm, Levine has stated that the game’s narrative is full of incredibly high stakes that doesn’t sacrifice on player agency.
“We’ve actually never made a game before really where the stakes were this high and that’s for a specific reason,” he added. “This is the problem with Marvel movies: every f**king five minutes, the universe is about to end and eventually that stake can become sort of meaningless. I prefer to avoid that because a player will feel rushed–you want to keep the stakes dramatically high, but you also want to make them feel like they can do what they want to do and explore the environment down to every square inch.”
He also added that at the start of the development process, the story and the overall scope in Judas was actually much smaller but it grew over time, along with the team’s ambitions with the game. It’s also worth noting that Judas is now well over half a decade in terms of development time and according to Levine, one of the main reasons for this is how the game is being tailor made to be responsive with the player choices, in a wide variety of ways and possibilities.
“That’s a really hard problem, and that’s why you don’t see a ton of it [in games],” he said.
In the interview, Levine also spoke about how he thinks Videogames have yet to reach their full potential especially when it comes to Storytelling.
“Our industry is over 50 years old and we still don’t really know what it is, what games are. By the time movies were 50 years old, they were making Citizen Kane. It’s changed somewhat [since then], styles have changed, but they had it pretty well figured out by the 1940s–we haven’t,” he said.
Judas is currently in development for Playstation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, though a release date is yet to be announced.
