Earlier this week while participating at a charity livestream event called “Take This,” writer/creator of Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite Ken Levine revealed a little more about the next game he is currently working on. When asked what typically inspires him, Levine answered with games such as Dying Light, System Shock, Dark Souls, and Shadows of Mordor.
I’m so deeply involved in the themes of our new thing, our new game is a science-fiction game. It involves themes like artificial intelligence and what it means to be programmed, that you are a thing that was created by programming.
Levine also went on to reveal that his new game will be first-person POV, and that this game would also resemble more of his earlier work rather than anything current and designed to be “highly replayable” with an open world element.
‘How do you make a narrative game feel like the kind of games we’ve made before but make it replayable and make it extend and make it react to the players?’ Make it replayable by giving players different ways to approach the problems and really letting them dictate the experience. That is not a simple problem to solve.
After Irrational Games downsized a good portion of its staff back in 2014, Levine shifted his focus away from AAA large budget games, and began steering more towards smaller open-world games.
The AAA, single-player narrative game is starting to disappear. Kind of games like BioShock. There’s fewer of them being made. The real reason is they’re very expensive to make and I think gamers are saying pretty loud and clear that if they’re going to spend $40, $50, $60, they want an experience that lasts more than 10-12 hours. That’s a lot to ask somebody to spend.
Levine, it seems, is and has been going out of his way to be purposely vague while speaking publically about his new game. After such a high profile games like the Bioshock series, perhaps less really is more? Either way, fans are eagerly waiting for upcoming information on Levine’s newest game.