by Ever since the game was first revealed more than three years ago, we've been incredibly excited to play Judas; the next title from BioShock creator Ken Levine. While the game's upcoming Xbox launch still hasn't been dated (we're remaining patient, Ken), Levine has slowly begun opening up about the project - and a lengthy new interview with IGN goes into its development process, and why Judas is taking so long to make.
Early in the interview, Levine touches on just how much work is going into Judas, particularly from a narrative perspective:
"I think if you have the right art director and the right approach, you don't need to be on the cutting edge of technology all the time. Even the stuff we're doing with Judas, all this narrative stuff we're doing is not CPU intensive, it's work intensive on our side - massively.
It's not a technological hardware challenge, it's an engineering and 'thought' challenge - and just a huge amount of work. And stuff like that in Judas is just a huge amount of work. A lot of it's just organisation of the assets and tagging things and looking for certain minor game conditions that combo with other game conditions to trigger other events that are pretty responsive to player action."
Later on, the BioShock creator further talks about how it's not really the tech that's stretching out the development time of Judas (like it is with lots of other big games these days), but more how the team needed to figure out effectively telling stories within the game's framework.
"The reason it [Judas] took so long was not really due to rendering technology or anything like that [...] it was figuring out how we craft this narrative system that's combining modular elements together dynamically — at runtime — to make stories happen that's very reactive to the player. And then we had to figure out how to write story for that."
We're not sure how we feel about Levine talking about Judas in the past tense (we hope that just means that it's finally coming to its conclusion), but this is a super interesting interview nonetheless. In terms of what's going to be beamed onto your screens though, Judas is still going to be a "first-person shooter with deeply immersive environments and great characters" just like BioShock was, and it's coming to Xbox err, one day... eventually.