Ken Levine, best known as the creator of the BioShock series, says there's still a huge demand these days for traditional single-player games that don't conform to recent trends like added online components and monetization outside of the initial price tag.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Nightdive's Lawrence Sonntag (queued up here), Levine digs into his new studio Ghost Story Games' philosophy on game design and how its upcoming single-player Judas fits into the modern landscape of AAA releases.
Levine makes clear he doesn't fault game developers for what he calls "ulterior motives" beyond entertaining players, but he also highlights the success of "traditional single-player" releases where you just buy a game and play it and beat it and that's it. You know, like the good ol' days.
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"Judas is a very old-school game," Levine says. "You buy the game and you get the whole thing. There's no online component, there's no live service, because everything we do is in service of telling the story and transporting the player."
"This is no diss on any developers who have done that, because look, games are expensive to make, and we're very fortunate to work at a company where they believe in us enough that they say, 'OK, you've been working on this thing for a long time, it's gonna cost a reasonable amount of money, and we're not gonna push any of that stuff on you.'"
Levine adds that he "understands why it happens" and doesn't "blame anyone for trying to make a living," but he points to recent hits like Baldur's Gate 3, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as specific examples of no-BS, AAA-grade, single-player titles that sold well and were incredibly well-received. (Yes, Baldur's Gate 3 has co-op, but it's a single-player experience first and foremost.)
"These are games that are really traditional single-player games, and they don't have that kind of monetization in them, and I think the audiences reward those games, especially in the AAA space because they can get so expensive that people want other methods of monetization," Levine says. "I'm just grateful that we're allowed to not do that because that just frees us to purely design the game for the player's experience."
Judas is Ghost Story Games' debut title and the first game from Levine since the BioShock Infinite expansion, Burial at Sea, was released in 2014. There's still no release date or window, but in 2022, Bloomberg reported that the project was in "development hell" due to burnout stemming from Levine's managerial style.
The most recent trailer is from January 2024, and Levine said earlier this year that Judas is being "made very, very differently" from the BioShock series, which he described as "a very, very long corridor."
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