Video game designer and BioShock creator Ken Levine has spoken about his upcoming project and hinted that gamers will be surprised, but that he doesn’t want to show anything until closer to the release date. Find out more in this note!
Ken Levine is a video game designer known for having been the creative director and co-founder of Irrational Games, however, as time passes, he stands out as the creator of BioShock Y System Shock 2. After the closing of Irrational Games, Levine founded Ghost Story Games, and kept his fans waiting for a new game ever since. For eight years, the designer has been working on a project about which little or nothing is known, but recently in an interview, he gave just a few details to reassure his fans.
First of all, let us remember that, according to a report by Bloomberg, the next project of Ken Levine I was going through production hell. 15 current and former studio developers Ghost Story Games The outlet was told that the project has undergone reboots and changes in direction since work began in 2014.
Eight years after the release of Bioshock Infinite, Levine and his team of Ghost Story Games they still don’t have something to show, due to the long development process. It is surprising that this next game is taking so long, but to calm the waters, the designer spoke on the Arcade Attack podcast and mentioned some details of what is coming.
“I think the players will be surprised, but not by what they will see“, assured Levine. He further added: “in equal measure. But yes… it is quite interesting and I really want to show it to people“.
The designer is working with Take-Two Interactive in this project, which apparently is going to be different and more experimental. In 2020, Levine had said that the video game would have “some weird stuff“So it’s pretty hard to figure out what he’s got on his hands. We will have to wait a little longer to see what he means.
He also talked about how long this project is taking and how little information there is about it. Levine He clarified that the lack of news about the video game is intentional, since he does not want to generate enthusiasm when it is still a long way from launch.
“We didn’t want to show it too early, because we thought we were going to release it earlier, and I don’t want to have a long period of hype and hype, because it would just end up looking pretty inauthentic and I think players want to know what they’re going to get, and the only way to really do it is to announce it closer to launch“, explained the designer.
At the interview, Levine could not avoid the questions related to the next game of Bioshock, on which the studio is working CloudChamber, and confirmed that he is not involved. “I don’t want to do half measures. I never want to do things halfway. I wish you the best. I know as much about the game as anyone else. And I’ll play it as a player when it comes out.”, he assured.
In the past, Levine talked about his interest in “Narrative Legos”, a concept that puts the focus on non-linearity, player-driven elements, and replayability. According to him, this termit’s like taking a narrative and tearing it apart. What is the minimum part of the narrative that you can then remix and build on? mix and match”. Basically the idea would be to deconstruct a narrative into minimal elements and then be able to remix them and have a game that is not the same in each game, since the story would change when we play for the second or third time.
These “narrative Legos” could play a key role in the first game of Ghost Story Games, but we are pretty much in the dark about this mysterious project of Levine. Neither the title, plot or release details are yet known.