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Bioshock was “basically a corridor”, says Ken Levine - Judas won’t be, and characters will have long memoriesNo “random number generator” quests, hopefully
No “random number generator” quests, hopefully
Image credit:Ghost Story Games
Image credit:Ghost Story Games
I come and go with the work of Ken Levine, celebrated auteurman andreported burnout-inducing manager, but I’m interested to see more ofJudas, his current project at Ghost Story Games. The concept for Judas is that you’re trapped in a computer-run society housed aboard a colony ship, the Mayflower. The titular Judas has managed to break free of the AI-groomed status quo, and is out to start a revolution.“Bioshock Infinite in space”, we called it, back in 2022, but Levine says it’s more open-ended than either of his Bioshock endeavours, with a greater emphasis on other characters remembering and responding to your actions over time.
But I won’t do that: you came here to read about Judas. The interview harbours a few more concrete details about the narrative design of the game, which Levine acknowledges istaking a fair long while. One of the reasons it’s taking a while is that he basically wants every notable NPC to be capable of harbouring very meticulous grudges.
“The approach we’re taking with Judas is heavily based upon recognition of player action and response to player action,” Levine told the site. “Even just characters' observing a long range of player action and commenting on it. ‘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.
“And it’s really just observing the players and then writing the types of lines that could react to various types of things. It’s a huge amount of work because you have to think of all the things a player can do and then write in-character responses for different characters to those actions in a way that feels organic.”
Levine is keen to avoid “random number generator” moments, with characters handing you quests out of the blue. As he reiterates: “once you start observing sequences of events - having characters observe ‘You did this and then you did that and that caused this and I’m mad because it did that’ - that’s when it gets really interesting.”
The result, Levine promises, will be a game that supports many more routes to certain outcomes. “There are beats and how you got there is going to be fairly different from one player to the next,” he says. “And places you’ll get to are very different from one player to the next.”
It sounds like the Mayflower itself will be a more open-ended environment than Bioshock’s Rapture or Infinite’s Columbia. “BioShockandBioShock 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 concedes. “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.”
