Judas, the next game from Bioshock lead Ken Levine, is going to have a lot of branching content in it—if you’ve been following along with its development, you’ve probably heard the phrase “narrative legos” more times than you can count on one infusion-enhanced hand.
Which is a bit of a departure, given Levine’s prior work—Bioshock games had some choices in them, but they were mostly the make-or-break points typical of early 2000s games that made a big hullabaloo about multiple choices. Don’t eat Little Sisters and you’ll get a different cutscene at some point, that’s it.
“It was so powerful to see that happen that any frustration I had with people not seeing stuff immediately became ‘I can’t wait for people to realise the huge things they maybe didn’t encounter’.”
Levine also recalls a vision for Bioshock Infinite with a far more reactive Elizabeth, who “could watch all the violence you were doing and be like ‘no I’m done with you’ … that was the thought that led me to Judas, where you really had to have—to have the game be highly reactive—that meant you were gonna have tons of stuff the player wasn’t gonna see on their first playthrough, potentially.
“Because of the experience I’ve had with emergence and player choice, I don’t have a heartbreak with people not seeing player content in the game because there’s something so powerful about that.” In other words, Levine says, Judas is “way, way, way more replayable than our previous games.”
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