Ken Levine, mannen bakom Bioshock, har sedan 2017 varit i full färd med att utveckla sitt nästa spel Judas med den egenskapade studion Ghost Story Games. Vi vet sedan innan att Judas inte varit en dans på rosor att utveckla och Levine har tidigare gått ut med att säga att det till och med har varit svårare att utveckla än Bioshock. Men efter ett och ett halvt år av tystnad av Levine och hans team hos Ghost Story Games, verkar vi äntligen få lite mer info om utvecklingen.
I en intervju med Lawrence Sonntag från Nightdive Studios berättar Levine vidare om projektet, samtidigt som han lyfter utgivaren Take-Two Interactive för att inte tvinga på Judas mikrotransaktioner.
"I grew up playing single player games, and I grew up before certain types of monetization existed. And again, I’m not here at all to say this is bad or this is good, right? That’s not really my thing. I know the kind of games I like to make. Judas is a very old-school game. Like, you buy the game and get the whole thing. There’s no live service, because everything that we do is in service of telling the story and transporting the player somewhere. This is no diss on any developers who’ve done that, because look, games are expensive to make, and we’re very fortunate that we work at a company where they believe at least in us enough where they will say okay, you’re going to work on this thing for a long time, and it’s going to cost a reasonable amount of money, and we’re not going to push any of that stuff on you."
Han fortsätter:
"But I understand why it happens, right? And I don’t blame anybody for trying to make a living, but I like making the games I want to play, and the kind of games I want to play are I just want to have an experience with a game and have that game be just that. All it wants to do is entertain me, right? It’s got no other ulterior motives and Judas and our games have not had ulterior motives. And I’m lucky that we’ve been able to do that. It’s a difficult time in the industry, as you know, and not everybody is as lucky as we are that we get to make a game that can really just pursue the player’s joy. I think unwisely the industry has decided that you need all these elements, but if you look at the games that have really landed in the past couple of years, they are the games providing this, whether it’s Baldur’s Gate 3, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, or even Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. These are really traditional single player games and they don’t have that kind of monetization in them, and I think the audience has rewarded those games, especially in the AAA space, because it gets so expensive that people want other methods of monetization. I’m just grateful that we’re allowed to not have to do that because that just frees us to purely design the game for the player’s experience."
Det återstår att se när Judas kommer ut på marknaden, men tills vidare kan vi luta oss lugnt tillbaka i att vi åtminstone slipper mikrotransaktioner.
Ser du fram emot Levines nästa spel?
<bild>Förhoppningsvis släpps det någon gång.</bild>