Judas - narrative FPS set on a disintegrating starship from Ken Levine's Ghost Story Games

[Morgoth]

 

[Infinitron]

0:00 - Welcome Ken Levine
3:40 - Judas
5:29 - Judas Playtesting & Development
7:41 - Judas Mocap & Acting
8:42 - Was Ken an Actor?
11:10 - How Ken Become a Writer
13:56 - How Ken started Directing
15:23 - Writing for Hollywood & Rewrites
17:21 - Working with Troy Baker and Courtnee Draper on Bioshock Infinite
20:10 - Casting for Bioshock and Judas
21:34 - Ken didn’t know Troy Baker before Bioshock Infinite
22:03 - Casting Courtnee Draper as Elizabeth
22:34 - Directing Bioshock Infinite
23:26 - Biggest Problem with Voice Acting in Games
26:07 - Bioshock & Judas are very Theatrical & Importance of Music
29:32 - Music of Judas & Narrative Legos
30:10 - Troy Baker is back for Judas
30:55 - Celebrities in Games
32:11 - Emma Stone could of played Elizabeth in Bioshock
33:29 - Alec Baldwin could of played Andrew Ryan in Bioshock
34:49 - Entering Rapture Scene in Bioshock
37:23 - Music in Games
38:09 - Kevin is involved on every aspect of Judas
39:12 - Realistic Graphics vs Exaggerated Worlds & Mad Max
42:58 - Physics and Details in Games & Red Dead Redemption 2
46:05 - What is Ken playing atm?
47:11 - Triple A Games vs Indies & Innovation
48:04 - Cost of Game Development
50:31 - Call of Duty
50:59 - Prey: Mooncrash is the Best DLC of All Time?
51:08 - Big thanks to Ken

 

[Morgoth]

Ken mentioned he just hired 6-7 people from Arkane Austin last week.

 

[ghardy]

I saw the video from March that I had bookmarked but had forgotten about. The visuals are repellent. The systems, as explained in the video, appear to be hard to mesh together.

I understand that this game is to be Ken Levine's Next Great Game ImSim Interactive Experience.

The Steam discussions for Judas are a ghost town, except for one thread demanding fully localized subtitles in Ukrainian, by some chap with "(stop russia)" in his username. Said thread has over 430 replies as of date.
It is interesting to note that the neighboring thread making a similar request for Belarusian has precisely zero replies.

(But for Mr Putin's pretense to heading a superpower, would the world know or care about Ukraine? Could those who champion its cause locate it on a map?)

 

[duskvile]

I would like more horror vibe of the game.

 

[JC'sBarber]

>Game directed by a jew
>Literally titled "Judas", after the betrayer of Christ
>Previous BioShock saga was a jewish allegory that mocked gentiles

 

[duskvile]

Hey, how soonish is this coming out?

 

[HoboForEternity]

It kinda look vaporware ish but i hope i am wrong. Like it's waaay to damn ambitious to be a coherent product that the result will just be an outline of the promised feature

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

It kinda look vaporware ish but i hope i am wrong

Nah man, it’s only been in development for one decade. No vaporware here.

 

[duskvile]

It kinda look vaporware ish but i hope i am wrong. Like it's waaay to damn ambitious to be a coherent product that the result will just be an outline of the promised feature

They already had playtesting and most likely fixing stuff now.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

I'm expecting another Bioshock Infinite. It will probably be fine but overhyped and forgotten quick. Big difference is Bioshock Infinite had fantastic art direction. This does not.

 

[ghardy]

How I wish they had put this on Early Access. Would have been fun to see if it's indeed the trainwreck it seems to be from the outside.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

It just looks uninteresting and shit.

 

[ghardy]

Excerpts from a (rather) long interview with Ken Levine. There's talk of his new ambitions with Judas, bits and bobs about BioShock, and general musings on the industry, AI, and other things.

The future of storytelling with Ken Levine

[Interviewer questions in bold.]

...

While some may argue that video games as a medium may be reaching their limit in terms of graphics and production quality, the potential for interactive storytelling remains largely untapped. Judas attempts to explore this by mixing up the story's events depending on the relationship players develop with key characters, but Levine is keen to emphasise this is just one possible future of narratives in video games.

...

Video game storytelling has advanced so much in the last decade or so, but what would you say is the biggest challenge that remains?
...
I don't think there's one way to make games, but personally, as a narrative games maker, I've never been a big fan of cutscenes because they're not interactive. One of the reasons Judas is taking so long is trying to figure out how we get the game to be substantially more responsive to player decisions. That's a really hard problem, and that's why you don't see a ton of it [in games].

Our industry is over 50 years old and we still don't really know what it is, what games are. By the time movies were 50 years old, they were making Citizen Kane. It's changed somewhat [since then], styles have changed, but they had it pretty well figured out by the 1940s – we haven't.
...

Branching narratives and a lot of interactive movies are locked to the decision tree structure. We recently spoke to the team behind Bridge Command, an immersive Star Trek-style live action bridge simulator, and they can break away from that decision structure because they have live actors who can react and people behind the scenes who can adapt to what the players are doing. But video games have to be programmed to react to players – you have to predict what the players are going to try. How do we overcome that barrier?
...
The approach we're taking with Judas is heavily based upon recognition of player action and response to player action. Even just characters' observing a long range of player action and commenting on it. 'Hey, you saw this and you did that and then you did this and that was interesting because that caused that' – we're doing that kinda stuff right now. And it's really just observing the players and then writing the types of lines that could react to various types of things. It's a huge amount of work because you have to think of all the things a player can do and then write in-character responses for different characters to those actions in a way that feels organic.

Another thing we figured out is that continuity is really important. You can do individual moments like a Madlib, filling in the blank. So, an orc comes to you and puts you on a quest to find X, right? Those just feel very boring and rolled out of a random number generator. But once you start observing sequences of events – having characters observe 'You did this and then you did that and that caused this and I'm mad because it did that' – that's when it gets really interesting. That's the space we've been exploring.

It's a complicated problem and I don't think there's any one way to solve it. What I'm interested in is giving the player more space to explore and then supporting that, rather than just say 'No, you're doing our story. Fuck you.'

Advocates would argue that generative AI is the solution to this. What are your thoughts on that technology and its capability to react to players?
I don't want to underestimate it. I think it's very powerful.

One limitation AI seems to have is persistence. You look at Sora, the ChatGPT video generator, you see a woman walking down the street and the street scene is beautiful – but if she were to turn around and walk backwards, it wouldn't remember where she has been. It doesn't currently understand persistence, although that may change. We can't tell if it's a limitation of just the nature of the technology. So for all the concerns about AI, have you seen it write a good 20-page movie yet? Scene-to-scene? It doesn't know how to do that.

There are useful elements of AI right now – for instance, training your bug database to query how many bugs you have in certain situations. But what it can't do is tell me a really compelling story that has a three-act structure, or even tell me multiple scenes. It gets extremely confused.

We've not used any generative AI in the development of the product outside of things like bug databases, clearing our analytics database – that's what it's good for. We haven't used it for [concept art] because there's some legal issues around [sourcing images]. Right now I'm not overly impressed when it comes to game development – I'm sure there will be more to it [in future] but I'm not super worried about it yet in a 'it's coming to take everybody's jobs' perspective.

You were saying about giving players a bit more room to explore, but that brings up the challenge of pacing. Does that affect the type of story you can tell? If the main plot is about the world ending imminently, that can be undermined when players spend 20+ hours doing side quests.

It's really funny because we're making this game where the ship is falling apart and you've got to get off. So we think about it all the time because anything you're going to be doing, if it's not about getting off the ship, the big question that will come up is 'Why am I doing this?' and you [risk] the player losing faith in the story you're telling. You have to respect all that stuff.

There's no universal answer except, I guess, don't make problems for yourself. Does the world have to be ending in your story? ln Judas, that is what we bit off, so we have to think about that problem. But you try to align your story with your capacity to tell it. Originally when we started on Judas, we were thinking of a smaller thing and the story was much smaller, but then as our ambitions rose, and the game had to sort of catch up to it in terms of where you're trying to do a story and character.

We've actually never made a game before really where the stakes were this high and that's for a specific reason. This is the problem with Marvel movies: every fucking five minutes, the universe is about to end and eventually that stake can become sort of meaningless. I prefer to avoid that because a player will feel rushed – you want to keep the stakes dramatically high, but you also want to make them feel like they can do what they want to do and explore the environment down to every square inch.


When you're creating a game with multiple endings, what are your thoughts on developer canon versus the player's decision on what the ending is? There's always debate as to which is the true ending of a game, and Ubisoft is trying something with Assassin's Creed Shadows, which will have a 'canon mode' that makes decisions for the players. What impact does that have on the choices made by other players?

I haven't played the game so it may be brilliant and they may have made all the right decisions. At first blush, it sounds to me like, maybe you're doubting yourself a little bit. At the end of the day though, I kind of feel that there is no 'canon'. I don't really believe in authorial intent, because one day I'm going to be dead and if I'm lucky enough that people are still interested [in my games] when I'm gone, they're not going to be able to ask what I think.

I really try not to overly insert myself into that decision because it doesn't matter. The user's experience of the art is central, not the artist's experience of the art. Art is the intersection of the art and the person viewing the art. It's different for every painting, every song, every book, every game. If you read a book when you're young and then you read again when you're old, that's a different book, right? And that's beautiful, man. I never want to take that away from you.

People often ask me about the end of BioShock Infinite, what was happening there? Did this happen or did that happen? Maybe I'm just being a douche bag for not answering it, but I kind of feel the answer is, 'Well, what do you think of this?' That's the beauty of what we do. There's no medium that's more user-involved than our medium.



There's also no other medium that can tell stories in a way that doesn't necessarily have a beginning, middle and end. Look at Her Story by Sam Barlow – it's not a branching narrative. There's a story, but you discover it in a non-linear way. The moments that make one person realise what's happening will come in a different order than they will for another person. How do we explore that further as an industry?

Game stories are very fungible. What's your story in Mario 64, right? There is a story because you remember your experience in playing it. And then there are stories that are very suggested, like Inside by Play Dead. They use a lot of sort of amorphous edges around the story. They don't want you to know exactly, but you get to sort of form a lot of what's happening because it's fairly abstract.

The more literal you get, the harder that is to do. There are certain expectations that arise from dialogue, and characters are motivated by naturalistic things. [Judas] has lots of different ways it can go, which is very different to the games we've made previously. There are beats and how you got there is going to be fairly different from one player to the next. And places you'll get to are very different from one player to the next.

There's different types of stories. Some stories really want sort of very naturalistic beats in it, beginning, middle and end. Some things like Inside or even Katamari Damacy, there's some kind of player story there but it's just not very literal. So it's really a question of how literal your storytelling is. We're trying to find a more literal storytelling thing that is incredibly open-ended, which is one of the hardest things to do because you have to have the story make sense in a very organic fashion, but you also have to have it be more open-ended. That's tricky, but that's why I've been working on the game for so long.

...

What restrictions or challenges do the time pressures of development put on storytelling, and advancing how stories are told in games? You've been incredibly lucky in having ten years since BioShock Infinite – not many developers get to spend a decade working out how to make a game in a different way. Most people just have to get something out of the door.

I think one of the problems we have in this industry right now is that games have gotten bigger and bigger and the graphical capacity has gone up and up. Just creating a door now versus creating a door ten years ago just takes a lot more time, because you have normal maps and traders and higher polygons and physics and all this other stuff to contend with.

Everything's getting more expensive, especially in the big AAA space because they're spending the most money. And when you're spending all this money, naturally you have people concerned about the commercial viability of it. But the problem with AAA is if you don't innovate, especially in games, you start losing people because they've seen it before. And so we have a potentially an over reliance, in some cases, on franchises.

It wasn't easy to step away from BioShock. I never thought I'd have an established franchise. I tried multiple times and I've only made a couple of games that didn't have a sequel, but certainly I never really had a successful franchise before BioShock. But I saw an opportunity to create a new IP and take on some risk.

I'm very fortunate that Take-Two put their faith in me and not everybody has the wherewithal to do that – especially in the last few years, which have been very challenging. Take-Two has had success and I'm very grateful to everybody else who's done well – like, obviously, the Rockstar guys, who bring in a lot of revenue and who allow this kind of experimentation – because ideally you want to be putting bets on people taking risks in any sort of endeavor.

You also want to have people not taking as much risk – you need to sort of diversify. But AAA has become very difficult to take risks and mostly because it's so expensive. And so I'm incredibly fortunate to be able to have the faith from the company to take risks and spend the time I need to make this successful.

It is hard to do new things. Quite often even if you take those risks, sometimes you're going to fall flat on your face. And the more expensive it gets the trickier it gets. But I do think that without that… look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe – you stop taking risks and people just tune it out.

Nothing is blessed by God to be successful. You've gotta give some people something that excites them and that gets harder every year. But you know what? That's the job.

Which other games inspire you with the way they tell their stories?

I think there's different ends of the spectrum. What [Naughty Dog's Neil] Druckman has done in The Last of Us, in terms of telling compelling human stories, was a big step because most games didn't get sort of naturalistic storytelling and were able to convey it that well.

But at the other end in the spectrum, what excites me a lot – at least as a gamer – are things like Inside, which is a great example of storytelling in a way that only a game can do it: without a word, without dialogue, without really understanding exactly what's happening, it still gives you this amazing experience.

I remember when we were working on Thief talking about story versus vibe. It's important that games have a vibe, it's not as important they have a story. The games I make tend to have stories in them, but Inside is more of a vibe. You get to immerse yourself in this crazy dystopian world, you get to be this kid and you know nothing about him. The first scene, you just see this character and he's just walking from left to right. And that's the whole game, basically walking from left to right and doing puzzles and counters and all that other stuff – but it's such a great feeling and it wouldn't be the same if you're watching it as a movie. I admire that game endlessly.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

I'll play it. While I don't think any of his games are great they certainly have interesting ideas. Aesthetically they are always superb. I love the way his games look.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/ken-l...e-the-decision-was-made-at-a-corporate-level/

Ken Levine never expected Take-Two to shutter Irrational after Bioshock Infinite: 'The decision was made at a corporate level'​

"Take-Two did a BioShock remaster: That would have been a good title for Irrational to get their head around."

The latest issue of Edge magazine includes a retrospective interview with Ken Levine, going over his career from Looking Glass Studios to Ghost Story Games and the upcoming Judas. When it gets to the latter, Levine's first game since the release of Bioshock Infinite, the director opens up about the subsequent closure of Irrational Games, which it's fair to say came as something of a shock: Both to the studio's staff, and the wider industry.

Bioshock Infinite was released in March 2013 and, while its reputation is now decidedly mixed, it was greeted with almost uniform critical praise and high sales. Less than a year later, on February 8 2014, Levine announced that Irrational Games would close and almost all staff would be made redundant. The way Levine tells it now, it seems it was almost as much of a surprise to him.

"The closure of Irrational was complicated," says Levine. "I felt out of my depth in the role. You're this creative person and, all of a sudden, as your vision increases of what you want to do, you have to become a manager, in a way that you don't necessarily have any training or skill in. My mental health was a mess during Infinite. I was stressed out, a lot of personal things were going on in my life at the time, and then my parents both died. I just couldn't do it any more, and I didn't think I had the team's confidence."

The closing stages of Infinite's development are infamous within the industry, with Rod Fergusson brought in from Epic Games in order to take a hacksaw to the studio's ambitious plans and get the game shipped. The development of Infinite seems to have taken a lot out of Levine, and made him want to get away from projects on that scale.

"So my intention was to go [to Take-Two] and say, 'Look, I just need to go start a new thing, and Irrational should continue,'" says Levine. "That's why I didn't maintain the name Irrational. I thought they were going to continue. But it wasn't my company–I sold the company, so I worked for Take-Two, and the studio was theirs.

"The decision was made at a corporate level that they didn't think they should continue with the studio as a going concern. My feeling was that it probably would have made sense. Take-Two did a BioShock remaster: That would have been a good title for Irrational to get their head around, build a new creative director structure, and then build off of that once they had the confidence to do the next BioShock game. I don't think I was in any state to be a good leader for the team."

Looking back on it now, Levine feels that, once this decision had been made, they'd at least done the right thing by Irrational's staff. "I had a lot of respect for the people on the team," says Levine. "Once we found out that the company didn't want to keep going, we tried to make that transition the least painful layoff we could possibly do. We had multiple job fairs for the team, we allowed them to stay in the studio, we gave them generous transition packages, we fed them. That's not to say that didn't suck. But I don't think I could have been their leader any more, and I knew the next thing I was going to do was going to have a very long period of R&D. The problem is, and you see this problem with big studios, what do you do with 300 people when you're going to have a multiple-year R&D project?"

Bioshock was at the heart of Irrational and, while the studio made many other great games, it's the series it will always be remembered for. If you were ever lucky enough to visit the studio, the first thing you'd see upon exiting the elevator was a reception desk flanked by an enormous statue of a Big Daddy. It's perhaps unsurprising then that, even if Take-Two didn't want to keep the studio going, many ended up circling back to the series, one way or another.

"Interestingly, a good chunk of those guys ended up coming back and working on the new BioShock game," says Levine, referring to the as-yet-untitled Bioshock 4 currently in production. "Then a bunch of them went and started their own companies. At Ghost Story we work with a whole bunch of companies that were founded after the closure of Irrational. I'm proud to say that, despite the negativity of that situation, there were a lot of young entrepreneurs that were just ready to go do their thing. I think it worked out for the best in the long run, but it was painful in the short term."

I visited Irrational not long before Bioshock Infinite shipped and, while Levine cut a somewhat harried figure, and everyone had their heads down working, that felt normal for a studio in the final stretch of a AAA blockbuster: There was little sign of what was to come. "Games are hard to make" is an industry truism and, as they get even bigger and more ambitious, some become Sisyphean tasks. Looking back on Infinite with over a decade gone, I no longer think about the parts that fall flat, or the ambitions unrealised, but am just glad that somehow, the team at Irrational got it out of the door. And it's probably unsurprising that, after such an experience, no-one from Levine to Take-Two seemed to have the appetite to go again.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

He saw it coming. No way in hell he didn't. If he was that much of a mess as he describes himself, being unable to complete the project, then he definitely saw the writing on the wall simply because of the level of political acumen you'd need to acquire to reach the level he was at.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Also, as an add, the fact that they brought someone in to chop his masterpiece up and deliver it for him would definitely be a signal that Biocorp Technocrats weren't happy. I mean Bioware executives. No way Bioware executives could ever be as cool as the Wight or Vovin.

Think about it. Let's say he was a mess. OK, then that means the big wigs, while sympathetic, can no longer tolerate a rudderless ship. And then their man in the inside, the replacement captain, sees the ship is full of leaks, has all sorts of issues, and costs way more to operate per annum than what they can make doing tours of they artic. The company decides to finish up the final tour, recoup at least some of their losses, and scuttle the wreck.

Now let's say he's using that as a bullshit excuse, which is entirely possible. I've known guys who lost parents and just buried themselves in their work as a way of dealing with it once the funeral was done and such. What that means is that he lost control of the studio and worse yet lost the confidence of the executives to run the show.

I find it much more likely that he lost control of the studio and the bosses just lost confidence due to cost overruns, and after a while the promises of it'll be great and a winner were no longer enough. They probably did a half-assed audit, found a bunch of shit that made them crap pecans, and brought in a hatchet man to stitch it all together and get something passable out there. Then they burned it all to the ground.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

BioWare? Might as well start blaming Bobby Kotick, Jack Ruby and Rasputin. They had nothing to do with IG; the studio was owned by 2K.

But regardless, it’s clear that Levine is a deeply terrible manager (at least when working in a AAA space) and should have seen the writing on the wall. If he genuinely didn’t… well that would almost indicate that he’s a deeply terrible manager or something.