I come and go with the works of Ken Levine, the eminent author and reported by a manager causing burnoutbut I would like to see more of Judas, his current project at Ghost Story Games. The concept of Judas is that you are trapped in a computer-controlled society housed aboard the Mayflower colony ship. The titular Judas managed to break away from the status quo maintained by artificial intelligence and is about to start a revolution. “Bioshock Infinite in Space” – We called it in 2022, but Levine says it’s a more open-ended project than any of his Bioshock ventures, with a greater emphasis on other characters remembering your actions and reacting to them as they happen passage of time.
This is from the recent one GamesIndustry.biz an interview that also includes Levine’s thoughts on generative AI (ambivalent) and whether today’s triple-A budgets are vigorous (no), as well as some repeated rhapsodizing about the power of choice and interactivity and the importance of players telling their own stories history. After the last installment, I feel like it’s 2003 again and I’m writing my first reader review for Eurogamer dot net, terrified at the thought that one day I might discover Citizen Kane from the games.
I don’t doubt Levine’s sincerity, but comments like “no medium engages users more than ours” now really bug me. They make me want to write an editorial about how most of the vaunted choices games offer are tedious work or empty gestures that weigh down the quieter, more graceful acts of interpretation that characterize the experience of non-interactive works of art like, say, these silly movies and books where you can’t even press a button to make the characters talk.
But I won’t do that: you came here to read about Judas. The interview includes some more specific details about the game’s narrative design, which Levine admits takes quite a while. Part of the reason it takes a while is because he basically wants every significant NPC to be able to hold a grudge very carefully.
“The approach we take with Judas is largely based on recognizing and responding to player actions,” Levine told the site. “Even regular characters observing and commenting on a long range of player actions. “Hey, you saw this and you did that, and then you did this and it was interesting because it caused this” – we’re doing it right Now.
“It’s really just observing the players and then writing the types of lines that might react to different types of things. It’s a huge amount of work because you have to think about all the things the player can do and then write character responses for different characters to those actions in a way that feels organic.”
Levine tries to avoid “random number generator” moments where characters give you tasks out of the blue. As he says, “when you start observing the sequence of events – you allow the characters to observe: ‘You did this, and then you did that, and this caused this, and I’m mad because this did that’ – that’s when things get really interesting.”
The result, Levine promises, will be a game that supports many more paths to specific outcomes. “There are beats, and how you achieve them will be completely different from player to player,” he says. “And the places you get to vary greatly from player to player.”
It looks like Mayflower itself will be a more open environment than Bioshock’s Rapture or Infinite’s Columbia. “BioShock and BioShock Infinite, if you look at them from a development standpoint – which may be a little off-putting to some readers – but they are basically a corridor,” admits Levine. “A very, very long corridor with many trigger points that cause story elements to take place. Judas is created very, very differently, which makes him much more reflective of player agency, but also much, much more difficult to execute.”
I like the idea of a version of Bioshock where Rapture is not a challenging race populated by rampaging actors, but a persistent society with memory. I wouldn’t rule out Ghost Story setting us up for a fall, though – the biggest change in Bioshock is that many of your choices weren’t choices at all. If you find this perspective exhausting, the good news is that Alice Bee (RPS in peace) has already jumped ahead a decade to review the negative reviews of the game’s positive reviews.
