The year is 2014. You’ve never heard of Covid and Donald Trump is a game show host. The world is a very different place. Meanwhile, . The studio, which had 200 employees in 2013 when it launched 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:BioShock: Infinite, has just 15 employees left keeping the lights on. Levine departs for "a smaller, more entrepreneurial endeavour", having grown tired of the triple-A scene he helped grow into the 21st century with BioShock. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Now he's back with Judas. Which is just BioShock.
In this climate of layoffs, you have to wonder if it was all worth it. At the time, it seemed like a better reason than most - the founder of the studio was leaving to create very different types of games that didn't require so many hands. It wouldn't have felt any better for the people who were laid off, and you have to wonder why it was decided Irrational couldn't possibly continue without Levine, but this wasn't the result of chasing endless growth or layoffs to aid profit margins. But now that we're getting BioShock again, something somewhere has gone very wrong.
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A lot of things can change in a decade (we now all know what Covid is now, and Donald Trump is not a game show host any more). It may well have been that Levine intended to make something completely different, but ended up right back at BioShock. You can't un-lay off people from a decade ago. You'd be naive to give too much benefit of the doubt, with the trailer so obviously BioShock coded, but we haven't seen the final game yet to see how similar these games are.
It would be a shame in more ways than one if Judas was just BioShock. Firstly, it's pretty sour for those people laid off in the name of an auteur making something new, only to see that auteur make the same thing. But for Levine himself, I can't help but feel a little sympathy as well.
Maybe I'm the one being naive now.
I don't think Judas was supposed to be so close to BioShock, and I wonder why all roads led back to Rapture this way. Is there really always a lighthouse, always a man, always a city? Was he pushed in this direction by moneymen who found his IP a safer bet than his name, or did he end up here himself? When Rod Humble, pioneer of The Sims, left for new challenges, he found himself at Sims competitors Second Life and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Life By You, trying to do the same thing again. It feels like Levine is going through the same thing. To see Judas appear alongside Kojima's latest experiment swinging for the fences with new ideas, it feels like for Judas, the year really is 2014.
The worst part is it looked fine. Good, even. Gaming has made a lot of progress in the past decade, both in terms of visual presentation and narrative depth. But it loves to revisit its past almost as much as it loves to erase it in the name of progress, and after everything that has happened, the fact 'we've done BioShock again' still flies suggests gaming could do with more fresh ideas. Again, maybe that's not being fair - we don't know how Judas plays and my most anticipated game right now is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, a game that I very much hope does the same as Inquisition did in 2014. It just feels like 'I closed my company to make something completely different and then made something that looks exactly the same' should be a brighter red flag.
Maybe this flag has been waving the whole time. Levine saying this was a "more entrepreneurial endeavour" does not suggest artistic experimentation was at the heart of it all. He did add that it would lead to "a more direct relationship with gamers" and was "a return to how we started: a small team making games for the core gaming audience", so you can see where the misunderstandings come in. We don't know how many people have worked on Judas, and this being only the second thing we've seen of it besides a short teaser at 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Game Awards does not suggest this "direct relationship" has been all that direct this decade. Which audience this hits that BioShock didn't, I'm also not sure.
Judas shouldn't have the albatross of Irrational's layoffs around its neck, and deserves to be judged in its own stead when it launches. But right now, it's difficult to think about how we got here, why we got here, and what that means for where we go in the future. If Judas is any indication, the future will just be shades of the past.
