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

Also lots of industry news, including lots more layoffs

Mar 29, 2024

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.

Live Service Interrupted

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League's long-awaited “free” season 1 update just hit and fans are in disbelief over just how underwhelming it is. The Joker is playable but needs to be unlocked by grinding over a dozen repetitive missions for those who don’t want to pay the $10 for the premium battle pass. The Brainiac boss fight is a reskin of the Green Lantern encounter. There aren’t any new story missions either. Even the true believers are wilting now. Fans on the Discord and Subreddit are in shambles saying they’ve finally given up. “Was a champion of this game,” wrote one player. “Fuck it now.”

Bungie is walking back plans to drip-feed new loot after players revolted. Destiny 2: Into the Light is a free update coming April 9 ahead of June’s The Final Shape expansion. It adds a horde mode called Onslaught and a new Brave Arsenal of weapons from the sci-fi shooter MMO’s past. But instead of unlocking the weapons for players to earn all at once, Bungie was originally going to time-gate them behind regular updates. The studio has now relented, however, and will make most of them available in the first four weeks. Weirdly, the news was shared on Twitter rather than in yesterday’s blog post, suggesting it was a pretty late change.

Helldivers 2 is still going strong with new flying enemies, powerful stratagems, and a Major Order to “disassemble” the Automatons once and for all in some really bloody fights that recall the terror of Malevelon Creek. I’m starting to get lose patience with all of the crashes though. After fixing an arc bug last week, players have now discovered that throwing too many snowballs can crash the game as well. I haven’t thrown a single snowball this week and I’ve still had he game crash at least once or twice per session on PS5. It’s particularly annoying when it happens 20 minutes into a match with strangers where you can’t easily rejoin. I guess it’s a sign it’s time for me to finally give it a break.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 Digest

Here’s everything you may have missed from Capcom’s latest off-the-rails fantasy action-RPG. Some players started freaking out when they discovered Dragonsplague, a disease that infects pawns and can wipe out every NPC if left untreated. Throwing them into the sea is one way to heal it. If your pawns stay health, however, there’s a money exploit where players band together to complete infinite pawn quests for 10,000 gold each. It’s a good thing too because the economy in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a mess. Swords cost half the price of haircuts. Sleeping at an inn is 20 times an Oxcart ride. Time for the mainland to start a Federal Reserve. One thing that’s free are catapults and they can break through mountain paths. There’s not a census yet on the most powerful vocation (classes) yet, but Magick Archer might be completely OP. There’s also an arrow that you can use one time to instantly kill anything. I really could have used that when I got trapped out in the wilderness with no health or camping kits earlier this week. A new update also just dropped adding the option to start a new game, lock the framerate at 30fps, and addressing some performance complaints.

Patch Notes

Diablo IV’s season 4 update will be tested on a PTR ahead of launch. The patch notes are over 10,000 words long. While the big change is an overhaul of loot to make it feel more meaningful and make it easier to upgrade over time, tons of other things are getting reworked and added as well, including a new Elixir of Momentum that massively buffs speed and experience earned. Power leveling is about to get wild.
No Man’s Sky’s 4.6 update “Orbital” introduces the game’s first-ever ship editor. Players have been having a field day with it so far. In addition to overhauling space stations and guild benefits, the update also expands the number of alien words in the game. One player doesn’t like the new economy scanner interface. Another has played for hundreds of hours and didn’t even know it existed.
Tekken 8 version 1.03.01 arrives next week and adds Eddy Gordo to the roster. Among other changes, the game will now invalidate match results when connectivity is especially poor during a fight. More ominously, Bandai Namco is taking a look at “correcting unintended move behavior.” Most of the changes are bug fixes, though some fighters like Zafina did get buffed.

Industry News

Grand Theft Auto VI publisher Take-Two announced yesterday it’s buying Borderlands maker Gearbox for $460 million from sale of new shares of stock. That’s half the amount existing owner Embracer promised pay to acquire the company just a couple years ago, though most of that $1.3 million was stock in Swedish holding company which quickly became worthless and wasn’t going to fully pay out until six years in anyway.

“We have loved partnering with Gearbox on every iteration of the Borderlands franchise and are excited to be in active development on the next installment in the series,” David Ismailer, President of 2K, said in a press release. I previously reported that some new projects had been shelved at the company to focus on Borderlands 4 and a sequel to Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. A number of senior devs on Borderlands 3 left Gearbox in 2022, and there was a leadership shakeup on the upcoming Borderlands game last year. I’d heard it was originally supposed to ship as early as spring of this year. Maybe it will end up helping to fill-in the massive hole in the release schedule for the second half of 2024.

But Gearbox’s acquisition was quickly followed by news of layoffs among some on the public relations and marketing side. While a spokesperson for the company confirmed there were cuts in an oddly worded statement, Gearbox didn’t clarify how many people were let go or from what roles. I understand that several departments were hit, including HR, finance, and playtesting. And that’s not all:

Sega announced cuts of 240 employees across its European offices the same day as well as the sale of Relic Entertainment to private investors. The Sega of America union, on the other hand, just secured its first contract, a landmark deal that could pave the way for working condition improvements across the video game industry.
Certain Infinity cut 25 staff in the studio’s first mass layoff in 17 years, a move that comes a few months after a rumored Halo battle royale project was reportedly cancelled.
An unspecified number of staff have also been laid off at Maxis Games, which manages The Sims for EA. According to one source familiar with the internal announcement, these cuts are in addition to already revealed 800 layoffs and the other ones at Maxis last fall. EA did not respond to a request for comment.
There’s been another round of layoffs at Ubisoft, too. The company confirms 45 people were cut from various publishing-side roles across the U.S. and elsewhere to “enhance our collective efficiency.” “These are not decisions taken lightly and we are providing comprehensive support for our impacted colleagues,” a spokesperson for the company said. “We also want to share our utmost gratitude and respect for their many contributions to the company.“

Nintendo is restructuring its massive testing department at its North American headquarters. The move resulted in over 100 people having their contracts terminated early or not renewed, with a much smaller number of staff being converted to full-time employees. It’s a bitter sweet moment for a department of undervalued and underpaid permalancers who assisted on everything from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to Luigi’s Mansion 3. In an internal FAQ on the subject, Nintendo stressed that the layoffs were not the result of cost-cutting but instead an effort “to make product testing a truly globally integrated team closely married to our development teams.”

GameStop’s meme stonk days are behind it. The brick-and-mortar gaming retailer announced poor fourth quarter results and layoffs from earlier in the month. I’m told there were as many as 100 let go in the latest round of blood-letting. The stock tumbled 16% as a result, and is down almost 50% from a year ago. In better news, Game Informer, the last U.S. print gaming mag, just re-launched a direct-to-consumer subscription so readers no longer have to deal with GameStop’s hijinks to get a copy.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer is still in damage control mode. In a GDC interview with Polygon Editor-in-Chief, Chris Plante, the executive riffed on the prospects of an Xbox gaming handheld, bringing Steam and Epic Games Store to the console, and why the video game industry is such a mess right now. Elsewhere, devs behind indie hits Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon told PC Gamer that generous exclusive deals for Xbox and Epic Games Store have dried up, while Gamesindustry.biz's Chris Dring said some third-party publishers are worried about “flatlining” sales on Xbox in Europe.

Over at his Hit Points newsletter, Nathan Brown combines it all into a particularly harsh assessment of Spencer’s strategy and Xbox’s future. “If there’s one lesson we can take from the Spencer era it’s that you can enact all the disruptive change you like, but you cannot disprove this industry’s oldest truth: great games sell consoles,” he writes. “A hundred billion dollars later, Xbox still doesn’t have them.”
The one Spencer quote that caught my attention was about GenZ and TikTok. “This notion that Xbox can only be this one device that plugs into a television isn’t something we see in the Gen Z research,” he told Polgyon. “Because nothing else is like that for them. Some of them will have an iPhone, some will have an Android, but all the games and everything is the same.” As a Google Pixel owner who can’t send videos of my kids to my father-in-law, I have to disagree. In fact, the DOJ is suing Apple in part because of how it leverages exclusive features and content to ruin things for consumers.