Ghost Story Games’ Judas just had its first round of hands-on previews, an oddly restrictive affair in which Geoff Keighley got a taste of the action ahead of many high profile journalistic outfits. That’s fitting for where Judas is - it still feels like it’s in the advertising stage of its life, rather than the promoti🦋onal.

It can be difficult to track this shift from one to the other. Advertising and promoting seem like the same thing. But to me, a game is still in the advertising cycle when all we’re getting is flashy logos and proof that it exists - 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Outer Worlds 2’s reveal trailer is a great summary of gaming advertising. Promoting tends to 𒐪offer more depth and specifics much closer to launch, where developers and publishers want to nail in pre-orders and get us ready to play the game for ourselves.

Judas should be promoting by now. It had 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:an extended trailer featured in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation’s State of Play, and now has given hands-on opportunities, albeit to an extremely limited number of tactically chosen voices. But all that is being said about it, all that it seems is ever being said about it, is that it’s just like BioShock. After a while, you start to wonder whatﷺ th🧔e point is.

How Is Judas Connected To BioShock?

For many of you, all you will care about when it comes out is ‘is Judasꦉ any good?’, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Games, like movies or books or songs, are capable of inducing a range of emotions, but primarily we engage with them for enjoyment. Judas will either be good, bad, or okay, and we’ll all - myself included - enjoy it based on where it falls on that scale. But there’s still a little more to it we need to consider.

Judas is being made by Ken Levine… and a whole team, but that’s kind of the core issue with my wariness over Judas. Levine is best known for his work on BioShock, and after Infinite released, he disbanded most of his team with layoffs across the board, in order to form a smaller s💦tudio focussed on making a different sort of game, calling new studio Ghost Story Games “a smaller, more entrepreneurial endeavor”. And now he’s making BioShock again.

Worse, it’s BioShock in space, which makes it System Shock, the game tha🉐t was the core inspiration for BioShock to begin with. Given that Levine was lead designer on System Shock 2, even adding that as a more prominent inspiration is nothing new. It feels little like Levine has spent 25 remaking th🌱e same game over and over again.

When Judas’ trailer in that State of Play I mentioned earlier dropped, I wrote about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:my general disappointment about this. I don&rs𓆉quo;t have many strong feelings about BioShock Infinite (a rarity for a game so deliberately divisive), but enjoyed the first two games, and of course, Burial at Sea. I was not upset that Judas was so like BioShock because of any ill will towards BioShock, but because of how it came to be. 🐻Levine wanted to make something different, and then spent a decade making exactly the same thing.

There’s obviously some sympathy for the staff laid off, and it does feel as though🐼 the studio could have continued under someone else’s stewardship even if Levine wanted to move on - but being laid off at the end of a series’ full life cycle because the creator is making something completely different feels a little more logical than mass layoffs to cover the fact that profits weren’t quite as high as optimistic projections, profits though they may still be.

Despite Irrational disbanding, itsꦇ parent company👍 2K is pushing ahead with a new BioShock anyway, and it feels odd that after killing a studio to move on from it, we’re now getting two at once.

But I find myself feeling sympathy for Levine too. I believe he really did want to make something completely different after BioShock, and has ended up right back where he started. The first two games were under the sea, the third was in the clouds, and the fourth is in outer space. Same idea just rising, rising, rising. I can’t imagine when he d🍌issolved his own studio to move on from the BioShock legacy he expe𝔍cted to have just one game (still in development) to show for it a decade later, especially not one that led with ‘it’s BioShock, you know, by the BioShock guy!’.

What Does Judas Have That's New?

There are some interesting facets to the Judas coverage buried beneath the constant comparisons. It has roguelike elements and uses narrative, Levine says, like “Lego”, just as he did when he first talked about the idea a d🥀ecade ago. The idea is that “pre-crafted bricks” can communicate and slot together to form a coherent story, with the🐟 game reac꧙tively building levels in response to how you play. How does it work? Well, we don’t really know.

In large part thanks to the advertising cycle, nothing much was learned here. (two of the three people given access, along with the FPS podcast) spent six hours playing Judas, and then had a lengthy joint interview with Levine. On both the roguelike elements a🔯nd the narrative blocks, both elected not to press Levine much for fear of “spoiling&💖rdquo; things for the players.

I understand that games journalists make these choices all the time. Even without embargo restrictions, we wouldn’t write that so𒅌mebody dies while writing a review. We understand that most of our access to developers and actors and the like is pre-release during the promotional cycle, so there is some element of knowing your work will be read by people who have not experienced the game themselves, so ask questions we expect will get answers that will appeal to them.

But it’s hard to care about Judas when all we know is the BioShock guy wiped out his studio to make something not-BioShock and now he’s making BioShock but it’s a Lego roguelike maybe, only yo🎃u’ll need to wait unt𓆉il next year to find out what those last two parts mean.

Judas could🌼 yet be a great game. Though we know little about them, the roguelike and Lego elements sound intriguing, and if it’s just BioShock in space, and therefore just System Shock, well, both of those are great games too. We won’t know until it gets here, and until then, it’s hard to feel anything but a touch of sadness.