It’s been more than a decade since Bioshock Infinite’s 2014 expansion, Burial at Sea, tied a bow on the series that Irrational Games and director Ken Levine will always be best-known for. Infinite was an infamously chaotic development that resulted in a divisive game and a bloated studio, which would go through brutal layoffs before being re-branded as Ghost Story Games: the whole point of which is to operate on a much smaller scale than Irrational reached.
Its first game, Judas, certainly looks familiar. And in a new chat with Nightdive’s Lawrence Sonntag (spotted by GR+), Levine says that being “very old school” is what they’re going for. Discussing Ghost Story’s approach and how Judas fits into the contemporary gaming landscape, where singleplayer narrative-led shooters are now something of an endangered species, Levine reckons that the player appetite for such self-contained experiences is still out there.
“Judas is a very old-school game,” says Levine. “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 somewhere.
“And we’re very fortunate. This is no diss on any developers who have done that, because look, games are expensive to make, and 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.'”
The latter paragraph is a necessary caveat, because Levine is in an unusually fortunate position: the senior leadership at 2K clearly thinks he’s something special, and with a golden goose like GTAV can afford to bankroll a relatively small-scale studio like Ghost Story for over a decade. I suspect that, even if Judas doesn’t sell all that well, 2K will just greenlight the next game anyway.
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Levine adds that “I understand why it happens, right, and I don’t blame anyone for trying to make a living [but] I just want to have an experience with a game where all it wants to do is entertain me, there’s no ulterior motive.”
Large parts of the industry have “unwisely” decided that such “traditional single-player” experiences no longer make enough money but, as Levine points out, successful examples abound in recent years: he points to Baldur’s Gate 3, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
“These are games that are really traditional single-player games,” says Levine, “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. 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… just pursue the player’s joy.”
The most recent trailer for Judas is from January 2024, and Levine says it’s doubling down on reacting to player choices because that’s the future of games. As for the series that got us here, there is a fourth Bioshock game in development at Cloud Chamber, which may not have Ken Levine but is otherwise stacked with key staff from Irrational and 2K Marin.
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