Judas - narrative FPS set on a disintegrating starship from Ken Levine's Ghost Story Games

[ciox]

Looking Glass Studios had a kind of magic that enabled them to both make deep games and ship them relatively quickly. Levine and his team were strongly influenced by it but the further they got from 1999 the weaker that influence got.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Levine is a misunderstood genius.

You mixed up a few words there, buddy. It should read:

Levine being a genius was a misunderstanding.

System Shock 2 was a fluke and any good that came out of Irrational (up to and including Swat 4, because afterwards nothing good came out of Irrational) most likely happened despite Levine, not because of him.

You shut your whore mouth when talking shit about the FFs.

 

[toro]

https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2022/01/03/ken-levine-new-game-development-hell/

Development on the game began in 2014, yet after nearly eight years in development it doesn’t have a name. There doesn’t even seem to be a concrete idea of what the game is supposed to be. The game is meant to be built on a “narrative LEGO” concept where every player’s experience is unique. This can happen through characters reacting to the different actions of a player, resulting in different scenarios each time.

Kenshi is the narrative lego concept. Ken didn't get the memo.

While an initial release window was set for 2017, this has obviously come and gone. The window has continuously been moved since and Levine gets away with this because of the leniency afforded to him by Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of Ghost Story Games. They sometimes check how the game is going but are reluctant to set a firm deadline, something that Levine seems to need. Ghost Story Games’ current employees believe the game is still at least two years away from release, but only time will tell.

The end is nigh for Levine.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Fuckin' Kenshi with one man and then a very small team did what a kike grifter, a hundred followers, and millions in $$ couldn't.

This is why the gaming scene is amazing. You can laugh for hours at the stupidity.

 

[Roguey]

Fuckin' Kenshi with one man and then a very small team did what a kike grifter, a hundred followers, and millions in $$ couldn't.

This is why the gaming scene is amazing. You can laugh for hours at the stupidity.

The article mentions that Levine's problem is that he wants to do this narrative legos stuff with a bunch of cinematics.

 

[A horse of course]

Fuckin' Kenshi with one man and then a very small team did what a kike grifter, a hundred followers, and millions in $$ couldn't.

This is why the gaming scene is amazing. You can laugh for hours at the stupidity.

There's an old video from one of Levine's talks (GDC, or maybe some university lecture) where he seems to be describing npc and faction reputation mechanics as if they were a totally new and revolutionary concept. Someone from the audience observes that it sounds very similar to something like STALKER and Levine doesn't know how to respond.

 

[Alienman]

I want to see that.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

This guy must be living in a bubble, or terrible at explaining his revolutionary new ideas.

Edit: Or he's a grifting POS dev who's past his prime and is hoping his previous work will carry him rather than be called out on his bullshit.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.videogameschronicle.com...s-ditching-work-should-be-viewed-as-a-luxury/

Amid ‘development hell’ claims, BioShock’s creator says ditching work should be viewed as ‘a luxury’
KEN LEVINE THINKS SOME DEVELOPERS STRUGGLE WITH “THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON IN GAMES”

Amid claims that his latest project is stuck in development hell, BioShock creator Ken Levine has discussed his approach to game creation, including what he called the “luxury” of being able to discard work and start over.

Levine closed BioShock studio Irrational Games in 2014 to form a smaller outfit, initially made up of 15 staff, called Ghost Story Games.

In the years since very little has been revealed about the studio’s debut project. However, early this month, Bloomberg reported that the game was meant to be a BioShock-style shooter set on a space station, where three inhabiting factions would react to the player’s choices.

It’s claimed the game was originally targeting a 2017 release, but that it has suffered from a series of reboots and staff departures, including half of the studio’s original team.

Bloomberg said it spoke to 15 current and former Ghost Story employees, many of whom described Levine as difficult to work for, with some claiming he would alienate or intimidate those he didn’t see eye to eye with.

Levine was criticised for what some viewed as an inability to clearly communicate his vision and accused of regularly making changes of direction which meant the project failed to progress and significant amounts of work thrown out.

While Levine declined to comment on the accusations when approached for an interview with Bloomberg, he’s now discussed his approach to game development—and what he called the “luxury” of being in a position to be able to throw away work that doesn’t achieve his goals—in a wide-ranging Arcade Attack interview published on Wednesday.

It’s unclear when the interview was conducted, but it sounded as though Levine may have been addressing some of the criticism levelled at him in Bloomberg’s report.

Discussing his early career at Looking Glass Studios, Levine detailed the process of writing Thief, which saw him forced to go back to the drawing board on multiple occasions.

“Thief was a bunch of different game ideas before they became Thief but they all shared a common element, which was this notion that it would be cool to be working around a world and hear an AI talk in the world and say, ‘is somebody there?’ And that’s not something that really existed in games – maybe Metal Gear had the initial impulses of AI awareness ramping up.

“We sort of took that notion of having AIs, that their whole awareness arcing up and down was this whole cycle that you go through, and that was really good for stealth because you were getting a lot more feedback. That element really remained through all those game ideas.”

Levine wrote pitch documents for games with titles such as Better Red Than Undead, Dark Camelot, and Dark Elves Must Die. He said he built a different world setting and mechanics for each of them which were ultimately discarded.

“The guy I was working with, my mentor figure at the time, was Doug Church at Looking Glass, and we’d talk about them for a while, and he’d end up saying this isn’t going to work. I’d have to learn very quickly to bounce back from rejection and I think he was right in all those cases, like I think Thief was the best of those ideas, it was the most unified of all those ideas.

“But it was a very good lesson. I think it’s an important lesson for young developers to learn, that just because you wrote something, you created something, doesn’t mean it’s good, or good enough.

“And I can go back and think about all those things – they were good, and they had their strengths, but we actually came up with something better, and it really gave me the most important lesson in games, which I think a lot of developers struggle with, which is you’ve got to throw out your work.

“As a writer, there’s a saying: writing is rewriting,” he continued. “And it’s a luxury in the games industry to be able to do that. I have been fortunate enough to be able to have that luxury and I think most of the reason that if the work I do is good, it’s because I’ve been able to say no, this isn’t working and move on and throw it out.

“And that can come across as indecisiveness and I can definitely see why people feel that way, but for me, I don’t know another way to get there, but it also requires you to be willing to pick up that pen again and start over, and I think it’s critical, so I view it as a luxury.”

One Ghost Story employee told Bloomberg the studio’s debut game now appeared to be on track, but that it could still be a couple of years away from releasing.

Levine didn’t comment on when the title might come out, but he told Arcade Attack that he’s keen to avoid the mistake of showing it too early, as he feels Irrational did with BioShock Infinite.

“I think people will be surprised but unsurprised by what they see in equal measures,” he said. “But it is something quite, quite interesting and I’m looking forward to showing it to people.

“I don’t want to have a long period of having to build up interest and hype because it would end up feeling fairly inauthentic and I think that gamers want to know what they’re getting and the only way to do that really is to announce closer to launch.

“We just don’t want to go out there and show something that won’t end up being completely representative of the final game, as much as we can,” he added.

“And so it’s been hard because we haven’t been able to share any news with our fans for a very long time and I think a lot of people are like, ‘what are they doing there, are they just sitting around doing nothing?’ And I understand that, but we are taking on a very challenging product, but I can promise you it’s being worked on every single day and we’re very excited about it.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Levine confirmed he is not involved with the next BioShock game, which is in development at 2K studio Cloud Chamber and is reportedly targeting a 2022 release.

“Same as [with] BioShock 2 – I’m not involved with it at all. I don’t want to do half measures, I never want to be half in and half out, so I wish them the best and I know as much about the game as anyone else essentially and I’ll play it as a player when it comes out.”

 

[Alphons]

OMG! A fellow NV fan?!

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

I don't get Ken Levine at all. So Irrational Games gets rebranded into Ghost Story Games because Levine is tired of doing big first person shooters like the BioShock games they were doing. He wants to do something smaller. So what does he do? Does he take this cachet he seemingly has and use his rebranded smaller studio to make something smaller like Freedom Force or whatever? No. Instead he spends seven years jerking off, and it doesn't sound like his smaller project is smaller at all so I'm not even sure what the rebranding was for.

It's like:

- Oh, I don't want to do first person shooters anymore.

- Well, what are you doing?

- I'm doing a first person shooter.

What?

It's honestly kind of surprising Take-Two and 2K have given Levine the leeway they have. You'd think he made them Rockstar money with the amount of time they've let him spend without releasing anything, and Rockstar seems to be on a tighter leash than Levine. Like I can't imagine Take-Two letting Rockstar go seven years without anything to show to the public, and they're their biggest money maker.

That PlayStation Life story is funny too. Without going into any details or specifics about what they're trying to do, the broad strokes of it (each for the three factions could be an ally or an enemy depending on the player’s actions) just sounds like things open world games like GTA2 and Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction did decades ago.

 

[Roguey]

There's a time to throw stuff out and it's far before it's in a finished state, wasting far more time than necessary.

I don't get Ken Levine at all. So Irrational Games gets rebranded into Ghost Story Games because Levine is tired of doing big first person shooters like the BioShock games they were doing. He wants to do something smaller. So what does he do? Does he take this cachet he seemingly has and use his rebranded smaller studio to make something smaller like Freedom Force or whatever? No. Instead he spends seven years jerking off, and it doesn't sound like his smaller project is smaller at all so I'm not even sure what the rebranding was for.

It's like:

- Oh, I don't want to do first person shooters anymore.

- Well, what are you doing?

- I'm doing a first person shooter.

What?

It's honestly kind of surprising Take-Two and 2K have given Levine the leeway they have. You'd think he made them Rockstar money with the amount of time they've let him spend without releasing anything, and Rockstar seems to be on a tighter leash than Levine. Like I can't imagine Take-Two letting Rockstar go seven years without anything to show to the public, and they're their biggest money maker.

That PlayStation Life story is funny too. Without going into any details or specifics about what they're trying to do, the broad strokes of it (each for the three factions could be an ally or an enemy depending on the player’s actions) just sounds like things open world games like GTA2 and Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction did decades ago.

He's making a shooter with a lower polycount. The "Levine *wants* to make smaller games" thing was a face-saving cope; his particular management style wasn't suited for making profitable big budget games, so they're limiting the costs he can rack up. The Levine Bioshocks sold a lot of copies and got a lot of critical acclaim, so there's arguable-value in keeping him around if one is convinced he's the biggest reason for those sales and that acclaim (and Bioshock 2 being good but not Levine-good when it came to those two metrics is evidence that they "need" him even if there are people like me who insist it's better than 1 and Infinite).

 

[Major_Blackhart]

I just think someone doesn't like him and has given him more than enough rope to hang himself with.

And now, all this negative press and him trying to save face and cover his own ass, this might be the beginning of a death knell for the guy.

 

[Morgoth]

So this is why Ken has shut down Irrational..... to make another Bioshock??

 

[vortex]

How soon is Coming soon ?

 

[Alphons]

If Bioshock was underwater System Shock, does it mean that Bioshock in space is System Shock?

 

[Fronzel Neekburm]

Grrreat, more Bioshit Infinite-tier garbage. Can't wait for another 3-hour on-rails shooting gallery with teh deep, emotionally engaging storyline conjured up by a reject screenwriter that couldn't hack it in Hollywood and had to resort to ruining video games instead.

Citizen Kane of video games/10

 

[Dodo1610]

Judas aka Bioshock 4, Systemshock 3 and Prey 2/3

Truly a game of the year.

 

[Gargaune]

The art style looks awful. Just like 90% of new titles, it's like everyone's trying to create the videogame equivalent of CalArts. Bioshock always had a degree of stylisation to its art and it got progressively worse towards Infinite, but this crosses the line into offensively bad.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Looks exactly like Bioshock. After all that time wasted they probably decided to just make what they know and get something out.

 

[Spukrian]

Spoiler

Just kidding. I'll wait for a sale and then complain about the game in this thread.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

This yid is a proper pretentious twat ain't he?

 

[Duraframe300]

- Women protagonist and heavy female focus in the trailer in general
- Strong relationship focus (Statues kissing, that Cookie picture)

.....

I have some concerns about what this game is about.......

 

[Lyric Suite]

That art is fucking atrocious WTF is this shit.

 

[†††]

That art is fucking atrocious WTF is this shit.

Fortnite and its consequences.

 

[good fucking shit happen]

Fuckin' Kenshi with one man and then a very small team did what a kike grifter, a hundred followers, and millions in $$ couldn't.

This is why the gaming scene is amazing. You can laugh for hours at the stupidity.

Skill and merit based free market baby! Kenshi will sell more copies than this fucking FMV shit guaranteed.

This yid is a proper pretentious twat ain't he?

Fucker had me going with the title. Thought the fake gaming rabbi had finally started reading kabbalah and was going to make a game around how fucking based Judas was instead of regular old commie shit about how capitalism hurt his feelings. Cult of Golgotha shit let's fucking go. I click that fucking video with the force of Baphomet and what do I get? Bioshock in space done tumblr. Shieeet, that big rusgoblin pile of shit Bioshock clone that's going to bomb 100% looks better than this quirky indie game.