Bioshock was "basically a corridor", says Ken Levine - Judas won't be, and characters will have long memories

rockpapershotgun.com:

I come and go with the work of Ken Levine, celebrated auteurman and reported burnout-inducing manager, but I'm interested to see more of Judas, his current project at Ghost Story Games. The concept for Judas is that you're trapped in a computer-run society housed aboard a colony ship, the Mayflower. The titular Judas has managed to break free of the AI-groomed status quo, and is out to start a revolution. "Bioshock Infinite in space", we called it, back in 2022, but Levine says it's more open-ended than either of his Bioshock endeavours, with a greater emphasis on other characters remembering and responding to your actions over time.

That's from a new GamesIndustry.biz interview that also contains Levine's thoughts on generative AI (ambivalent) and whether today's triple-A budgets are healthy (no), plus some regurgitated rhapsodising about the power of choice and interactivity and the importance of players telling their own stories. The last part makes me feel like it's 2003 again and I'm writing my first reader review for Eurogamer dot net, transfixed by the idea that I might, some day, discover the Citizen Kane of Games.

I don't doubt Levine's sincerity, but comments like "there's no medium that's more user-involved than our medium" now make me powerfully grumpy. They make me want to write an editorial about how most of the vaunted choices games offer are boring busywork or hollow gestures that weigh down the quieter, more graceful acts of interpretation that characterise the experience of non-interactive artworks like, say, those stupid films and books, which don't even let you push buttons to make characters talk.

But I won't do that: you came here to read about Judas. The interview harbours a few more concrete details about the narrative design of the game, which Levine acknowledges is taking a fair long while. One of the reasons it's taking a while is that he basically wants every notable NPC to be capable of harbouring very meticulous grudges.

"The approach