BioShock Infinite's 11-Year Legacy Weighs Heavy On Judas

May 2024 · 14 minute read

Ken Levine's next game has finally come out of hiding. After an initial reveal at The Game Awards 2022 and a story trailer in January, we now know a lot more about Ghost Story Games' sci-fi shooter Judas thanks to two extended, old school-style previews by IGN and the Friends Per Second podcast at the studio's Boston office. While the game certainly looks like BioShock in space, Judas sounds a lot more interesting than that glib appraisal initially lets on. Understandably though, that franchise and Levine's history are saddling the upcoming immersive sim with a ton of baggage. 

Judas is a first-person roguelite where you start a revolution onboard a colony ship controlled by robots that's carrying the last remnants of humanity to the Proxima Centauri star system. There are hand-powers, hacking, and lots of guns–the kinds of things you'd expect from a BioShock successor–but also three fleshed out characters whose personalities, motivations, and relationships the player will purportedly be able to cultivate in multiple ways over the course of the game. That's the part where Judas is apparently trying to push beyond the linear, pre-ordained constraints of the previous games Levine has directed.

The marketing buzzwords that have become synonymous with Levine and Judas to describe these evolved NPCs are "narrative Lego." The concept is derived from a 2014 GDC talk he gave one month after shutting down Irrational Games to form Ghost Story with a much smaller team for his next project. What if you could break a game's story down into pieces that could be secretly reassembled into all sorts of alternative configurations based on the player's actions that made sense and felt meaningful without them ever knowing? Maybe if he'd simply called the new design conceit "modular stories" or something that didn't sound like it was trying to be more revolutionary than it was, some people wouldn't have made as much fun of it as they did. And maybe if Judas was much smaller and had only taken five years to make instead of 10, people would be much more willing to give Levine the benefit of the doubt on whether this was a bold new idea or just clever branding. 

Listening to Levine describe what Judas actually is made me think a lot of Deathloop, another immersive sim with roguelite elements that revolves around shooting your way to a revolution in a world of colorful pastiche and competing egos. Arkane Lyon's 2021 FPS played with repetition and memory in some interesting ways but lost a lot of its magic for me once I understood the limits of its mechanics and how to exploit them. Deathloop funnels you toward one "perfect run" that makes you feel a bit like Neo the first time he sees the Matrix for the elaborate stream of computer code that it really is. It seems clear that Levine's hope with Judas is the opposite–that players go from feeling in control of a familiar game world with a clear set of rules to something that's more opaque, responsive, and potentially unsettling. 

It's a lofty goal Judas, simply by virtue of actually needing to eventually ship, will no doubt fall short of. But I don't want to underrate the significance of Take-Two, Ghost Story's parent-company, funding this quixotic effort for a decade with apparently no questions asked. In an era subsumed by existing franchises and safe sequels, I'm excited to see a bigger-budget game at least gesture in the direction of trying to explore new possibilities for character storytelling and interacting with NPCs. This is, after all, what Nvidia, Ubisoft, and others are promising with large language model-powered chatbots, except that Ghost Story is claiming to do it through the meticulous work of a writers' room rather than machines sucking up huge amounts of energy to spit back out mangled Reddit posts. 

But we've been here before of course and what we got was BioShock Infinite, which is why people have learned to be wary of Levine, his promises, and his auteur mythmaking. The game had a notoriously difficult six-year development cycle. The team at Irrational was rewarded for sticking with it by all getting laid off a year after it came out. And BioShock Infinite  whiffed on more of its big swings than not. I don't think it's bad and there are plenty of interesting things in it beyond its boring "No Labels" centrism and shallow treatment of racial politics. But there was a lot of padding and some really terrible boss fights. Its artistry often felt at odds with the rote juggling of ammo, health packs, and rummaging through drawers for money that drove 99% of its action. Most importantly, its NPCs felt like superficial foils rather than fleshed out characters. Should we blame the technology for that or Levine's own creative instincts? It sounds like Judas will offer an answer. 

Bloomberg reported that Levine's reputation for being a bad boss has continued at Ghost Story where some original members of the team eventually left because they just got fed up. Levine "can be quite charming and charismatic,” Giovonni Pasteris, an AI programmer at Ghost Story early on, told the outlet in 2022. But he could also "become moody and lash out, singling out an individual, while berating them in front of their co-workers." None of this comes up in the recent previous of Judas, despite how inseparable Levine, his management style, and his legacy are from the pitch for the game. That's not a reason to write Judas off, but it is a reason to stop treating Levine with kid-gloves and pretending like the last 11-years didn't happen. 

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