It's been nearly a year and a half since we heard from BioShock creator Ken Levine. As you're probably aware, ever since disbanding Irrational Games, he has founded a smaller studio called Ghost Story Games. For the last eight years or so, they have worked on a game that we now know to be titled Judas, a game that is based on Levine's concept of 'narrative LEGOs' to be endlessly replayable, at least in theory.
Earlier this week, the BioShock creator was featured in a video interview with Lawrence Sonntag from Nightdive Studios. In the hour-long conversation, Levine promised that Judas would be an old-school single player games and expressed gratitude to parent company Take-Two Interactive that they weren't forced to add any live service elements with additional monetization like microtransactions.
I grew up playing single player games, and I grew up before certain types of monetization existed. And again, I'm not here at all to say this is bad or this is good, right? That's not really my thing. I know the kind of games I like to make. Judas is a very old-school game. Like, you buy the game and get the whole thing. There's no live service, because everything that we do is in service of telling the story and transporting the player somewhere. This is no diss on any developers who've done that, because look, games are expensive to make, and we're very fortunate that we work at a company where they believe at least in us enough where they will say okay, you're going to work on this thing for a long time, and it's going to cost a reasonable amount of money, and we're not going to push any of that stuff on you.
But I understand why it happens, right? And I don't blame anybody for trying to make a living, but I like making the games I want to play, and the kind of games I want to play are I just want to have an experience with a game and have that game be just that. All it wants to do is entertain me, right? It's got no other ulterior motives and Judas and our games have not had ulterior motives. And I'm lucky that we've been able to do that. It's a difficult time in the industry, as you know, and not everybody is as lucky as we are that we get to make a game that can really just pursue the player's joy. I think unwisely the industry has decided that you need all these elements, but if you look at the games that have really landed in the past couple of years, they are the games providing this, whether it's Baldur's Gate 3, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, or even Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. These are really traditional single player games and they don't have that kind of monetization in them, and I think the audience has rewarded those games, especially in the AAA space, because it gets so expensive that people want other methods of monetization. I'm just grateful that we're allowed to not have to do that because that just frees us to purely design the game for the player's experience.
Understandably, the Ken Levine creator does not really reveal any significant new details about his next game, Judas, which remains without a release window. That said, for all we know, it could change either at Gamescom or at The Game Awards. Here's hoping anyway, as the actual new BioShock installment still seems far from launching.
