BioShock creator Ken Levine has shed new light on his upcoming next game, Judas. Speaking to Nightdive’s Lawrence Sonntag in a wide-ranging interview, Levine described Judas as being an “old-school” kind of game, adding that it eschews modern trends like online and live service.
“You buy the game and you get the whole thing. There’s no online component, there’s no live service, because everything we do is in service of telling the story and transporting the player,” he said, as reported by GamesRadar.
Levine went on to say he doesn’t want to “diss” developers who make those kinds of games, noting that they are expensive to make and companies want to see a return on investment. For Levine and his studio Ghost Story Games, the developer said he feels fortunate that company owner Take-Two gives the team freedom. “We’re very fortunate to work at a company where they believe in us enough that they say, ‘OK, you’ve been working on this thing for a long time, it’s gonna cost a reasonable amount of money, and we’re not gonna push any of that stuff on you,'” he said.
He also cited recent examples of games succeeding in the market that do not contain live-service and major online elements, mentioning titles like Baldur’s Gate 3, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
“These are games that are really traditional single-player games, and they don’t have that kind of monetization in them, and I think the audiences reward those games, especially in the AAA space because they can get so expensive that people want other methods of monetization,” Levine said. “I’m just grateful that we’re allowed to not do that because that just frees us to purely design the game for the player’s experience.”
Judas was announced years ago, but it still has no release date, or even a release window. The game is in the works for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.
It’s Levine’s first project since BioShock Infinite, which was released in 2013. In 2022, Bloomberg reported that the game was originally targeting a 2017 release but has been stuck in “development hell.” The report said Levine was given time and creative freedom to realize his vision for Judas, and this “lack of oversight seemed idyllic at first” but ultimately became “detrimental,” developers said.
Mike Snight, who previously worked with Levine at Irrational Games and joined him at Ghost Story, said Levine is a “very hard person to work for.” Snight, and half of the original team working on Judas, left the company during development. Levine was reported to have told staffers that the money Take-Two gave to Ghost Story amounted to a “rounding error” for the GTA company, and one analyst, Michael Pachter, said he believes Take-Two will give Levine all the time he needs.
As for the BioShock series, Take-Two’s 2K division is producing a new BioShock game at Cloud Chamber. Levine is not involved at all and the game has no release date.
