For years, all that was known about Ken Levine’s follow-up to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:BioShock Infinite was that it would incorporate an idea he called &ldq🧸uo;Narrative Legos.” All the way back in 2014, Levine gave🔯 .
“The challenge lies in building non-linear, replayable (narrative) sequences,” the overview for the talk on the GDC Vault website helpfully summarizes. “By breaking narrative down to its smallest yet non-abstract elements and finding ways to combine and recombine them, o🍸ne could potentially build a nearly infinite array of narrative opportunities out of these small building blocks.”
Even now that Judas has bee💝n officially announce♍d, with two trailers available online, Levine still . He has a Judas trailer linked there, too, but this idea seems to be as important to him as the actual game his team at Ghost Story Games is building.
And, you know what, I kinda get it. Thꦜe idea of building stories that can be rearranged endlessly like Legos is interesting. I’m curious to see what that looks like in practice, and how much it will actually differ from the emergent gameplay we see in roguelikes.
If you watch the talk, Levine’s take actually sounds more like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Witcher 3 or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur’s Gate 3, with the decisions you make having the potential to impact your relationships with ch🔥aracters and the buffs they can provide you down the road.
But, the trailers for Judas don’t really allude to the concept at all. "To do something different," Levine says during his talk, "we had to go back to the drawing board." But the trailer we got for Judas earlier this week basically looks like a new BioShock game. I like BioShock, so I🃏’m not opposed to that, but the marketing for Judas is selling a narrative FPS, not a bold new step in storytelling techniques. Levine pointedly says in the Narrative Legos talk that he’s speaking about general principles, not announcing a specific game. But these are clearly the things he was interested in when Judas was in the early stages of development, and he’s left that link to the N🦄arrative Legos talk in his Twitter bio for years. This is the Narrative Legos game.
There are faint traces of the concept if you squint. “The ship is dying… and my only way out of here… is with one of them,” the narrator says, before the trailer cuts to shots of three characters: a sheriff-looking white guy withܫ a Stetson and a mustache, a white woman with bright red hair and some kind of cybernetic augmentation around her bulging eye, and a Black woman with close cropped hair in a gleaming gold-and-black outfit. In the bits of gameplay, you can see these characters participating in combat. If I fill in the gaps with what I know from Levine’s talk, I could reasonably speculate that allying with one of these characters will alienate the others, and that the story could play out in at least three different ways as a result.
Judas Looks Jus☂t Like BioShock - How Did We Get Here?🐽
Judas looks like BioShock 4 in space, a🦄nd that feels like a waste of potential
But, the trailers aren’t selling this idea. If you haven’t recently watched a GDC talk from a decade ago, you would probably just assume this is a narrative-focused firstඣ-person shooter with companions who can help in combat, like in BioShock Infinite. It’s odd, because Levine shut down Irrational Games and has spent ten years working on this game, and so I would a𓄧ssume that he would want to highlight the things that make Judas different.
It’s possible, though, that those ideas aren’t part of Judas anymore. BioShock Infinite as its development stretched on, with to get the game out of development hell. It’s possible that after a decade, Judas just isn’t what we expected it to be. But on the off chance that it is what♛ Levine pitched — the fulfillment oᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚf the Narrative Legos idea — it needs better trailers.
