BioShock creator Ken Levine has praised Baldur’s Gate 3, explaining how developer Larian’s “amazing” work shares certain similarities with the “engineering and thought” challenges his studio is trying to solve for its upcoming first-person immersive sim Judas.
Ghost Story Games has been relatively quiet about Judas since its unveiling in 2022 (although Levine did pop up to confirm it was still in the works last year). However, during a recent interview with IGN, Levine talked at length about his upcoming game, some of the lessons learned, and where the industry is right now. Moreover, he had things to say about how it all works under the hood.
“The stuff we’re doing in Judas, the narrative stuff, is not CPU intensive: it’s work intensive on our side,” he explained before comparing the work Ghost Story Games has been doing to Larian’s approach with Baldur’s Gate 3. “None of [that game’s narrative] was particularly technologically demanding,” he continued. “It’s just a billion branching tree structures that they had to manage and think about. I can only tip my hat to those guys because they did an amazing job with it… [it’s] not a technological challenge. It’s an engineering and thought challenge and a huge amount of work.”
Judas, he suggested, is similarly involved, pointing to the required “organisation of assets and tagging things and looking for certain minor game conditions and combinatorial game conditions to trigger other events that are responsive to player action”. For context, Levine has been talking about the concept of “narrative Legos” for years; curated bits of narrative that are mixed together and rearranged as you play (or replay) the game.
Elsewhere in the interview, Levine shared his thoughts on ultra-realism in video games, and how it’s hitting the point of “diminishing returns”, something “people are realising”. “If you have the right art director and the right approach, you don’t need to be on the cutting edge of technology all the time,” he added, pointing to the BioShock series as good examples of games that still hold up well. Looking at Judas, it’s clear his new studio is approaching visuals from the same angle, even if rendering techniques have improved.
We still don’t know when Judas will arrive, but it’s coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. The official website has been updated over the years with new plot and character details, if you’re curious about the BioShock-inspired space adventure.
