It's been more than a decade since Bioshock Infinite's yono all app 2014 expansion, Burial at Sea, tied a bow on the series that Irrational Games and director Ken Levine will always be best-known for. Infinite was an infamously chaotic development that resulted in a divisive game and a bloated studio, which would go through brutal layoffs before being re-branded as Ghost Story Games: the whole point of which is to operate on a much smaller scale than Irrational reached.
Its first game, Judas, . And in a new chat with Nightdive's Lawrence Sonntag (), Levine says that being "very old school" is what they're going for. Discussing Ghost Story's approach and how Judas fits into the contemporary gaming landscape, where singleplayer narrative-led shooters are now something of an endangered species, Levine reckons that the player appetite for such self-contained experiences is still out there.
Levine adds that "I understand why it happens, right, and I don't blame anyone for trying to make a living [but] I just want to have an experience with a game where all it wants to do is entertain me, there's no ulterior motive."
Large parts of the industry have "unwisely" decided that such "traditional single-player" experiences no longer make enough money but, as Levine points out, successful examples abound in recent years: he points to Baldur's Gate 3, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
"These are games that are really traditional single-player games," says Levine, "and they don't have that kind of monetization in them, and I think the audiences reward those games, especially in the AAA space because they can get so expensive that people want other methods of monetization. I'm just grateful that we're allowed to not do that because that just frees us to purely design the game for the player's experience… just pursue the player's joy."
is from January 2024, and Levine says it's doubling down on reacting to player choices because . As for the series that got us here, there is in development at Cloud Chamber, which may not have Ken Levine but is otherwise stacked with key staff from Irrational and 2K Marin.

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