Ken Levine, a lead developer of the upcoming first-person shooter Judas, has confirmed that the game will not follow a live-service model. Instead, Judas will be a fully offline, single-player experience.
Levine is a celebrated auteur in the game industry, best known as one of the key figures in the creation of the BioShock franchise. His past work was recently thrust into the spotlight again this past June thanks to Nightdive’s remaster of System Shock 2, a game which he originally served as the lead designer for. Levine’s latest creative endeavor, however, is Judas, which will be the debut release of his development team Ghost Story Games.
Related
Ken Levine Compares BioShock’s Scope to New Game Judas
BioShock creator Ken Levine shares his thoughts on how his ambitious upcoming game, Judas, will size up to his iconic previous works.
In a recent interview with Lawrence Sonntag of Nightdive Studios, Levine shared the principle that guided development on Judas. It’s “a very old-school game,” he said, “there’s no online component, no live-service, because everything we do is in service of telling the story and transporting the player.” The BioShock games were often praised for their complex narrative themes, and it seems that Levine’s heavy emphasis on story will be present in this title as well. The three main characters of Judas each embody different philosophies regarding existentialism and the human experience, and the interplay between these ideologies will give the narrative designers many different ways to “transport the player” into a fictional power struggle.
Later in the interview, Ken Levine touched on the financial side of game development. Before mentioning Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as recent examples of successful games which eschewed microtransactions and the online multiplayer model, he said that “unwisely, I think, the industry has decided that you need all these elements. But if you look at the games that have really landed in the past couple of years, they are… traditional, single-player games.” Despite Judas’ departure from many industry trends, Levine acknowledged the factors that led to the prevalence of live-service monetization in the contemporary gaming landscape: “This is no diss on any of the developers who have done that, because, look, games are expensive to make… I understand why it happens and I don’t blame anybody for trying to make a living.”
One of the major benefits of online multiplayer games is that, in theory, they have an infinite amount of content. As long as there are enough players to be paired up with, an online game can continuously facilitate unique, unreplicable experiences. Periodic “seasons” and other forms of DLC help to bolster this system, keeping the core gameplay fresh and providing new reasons for players to return.
Ghost Story Games has been outspoken about its plans to maintain a high level of replayability, though, even in an offline game. Ken Levine has described Judas’ storytelling system as “narrative LEGO,” where each decision the player makes will build on top of their previous decisions and influence the overarching story in a complicated, nuanced way. The developers hope that this high level of agency will keep players returning for repeat playthroughs to experience different permutations of the game’s branching plot.
Judas
- ESRB
- t
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 4
