You don’t often see game developers knock down their most iconic work, but Ken Levine recently called his famous, sometimes infamous, shooters “basically a corridor” while hyping up his next BioShock-but-in-space game Judas.
That comes from a chat with Gameindustry.biz where Ken Levine broke down how he wants Judas (the game) and all the characters living inside its utopian/dystopian space colony ship to remember and react to all the little things the player might do.
“BioShock and BioShock Infinite, if you look at them from a development standpoint – and this may be a bit alienating to some readers – but they’re basically a corridor,” Levine says. “A very, very long corridor with a bunch of trigger points that make story elements happen. Judas is made very, very differently and that makes it much more hopefully reflective of players agency, but also much, much harder to make.” (Good spot, RPS.)
How much harder? Well, apparently the game will be “observing the players” and then reacting to a bunch of different stuff, so Levine probably needs to keep track of enough variables to fill a few Excel sheets. “Even just characters observing a long range of player action and commenting on it,” he explained. “‘Hey, you saw this and you did that and then you did this and that was interesting because that caused that’ – we’re doing that kinda stuff right now.”
Levine calls the process “a huge amount of work because you have to think of all the things a player can do and then write in-character response for different characters to those actions in a way that feels organic.” Characters aren’t just going to be commenting on, I dunno, whether you decided to shoot fire or bees out of your palms, though. How you get to certain places “and [the] places you’ll get to are very different from one player to the next.”
The BioShock games were a touch more fun than your average Xbox 360 shooter since you weren’t just plopping in and out of cover until your enemies had to reload, but they sometimes did feel like being funnelled through back-to-back shooting ranges with, admittedly, the most immaculate vibes imaginable. We’ll see how much Judas differs when it eventually comes out on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. I also wonder how strictly the next, still untitled BioShock is following the formula, too.
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