Ken Levine, best known for creating the BioShock series and his work on the 1999 sci-fi classic, System Shock 2, has revealed that his upcoming first-person shooter (FPS), Judas, will be an “old-school” single-player experience, and will not include modern gaming troupes like live-service elements or any online component.
Speaking during an interview with System Shock 2 developer Nightdive Studios on YouTube, Levine confirmed that Judas will not only feel like BioShock, something that was already obvious from what its trailers have shown, but it will also follow the same format of the games, being purely a single-player adventure focused on “telling the story and transporting the player”, and not on an abundance of multiplayer content or monetisation that’s prevalent in many modern titles today.
“I grew up playing single-player games,” Levine said. “And I grew up before certain types of monetisation existed. 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 kinds of games I like to make, and so we never made a [live-service] game.”
“Juas is a very old-school game,” he continued, “You buy the game and you get the whole thing. There’s no online component. There’s no live service, because everything we do is in service of telling the story and transporting the player somewhere.”
In an industry so plagued with rampant monetisation and the constant push for “shared experiences” by including some sort of multiplayer component, it’s refreshing to see a developer double down on what makes gaming so great to begin with, transporting a player into an immersive digital world in a finely crafted story-driven experience, instead of blindly chasing trends.
Let’s hope that Judas becomes a great success, so that more developers will learn from Levine’s example and return gaming to its glory days, free of live-service and monetisation woes. For now, the game does not have a firm release window, so fans will just have to wait and see how it shapes up.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
Si Jia
