Ken Levine, a lead developer of the upcoming first-person shooter Judas, has confirmed that the game will not follow a live-service model. Instead, Judas will be a fully offline, single-player experience.
Levine is a celebrated auteur in the game industry, best known as one of the key figures in the creation of the BioShock franchise. His past work was recently highlighted again this past June, thanks to Nightdive’s remaster of System Shock 2, a game for which he originally served as the lead designer. Levine’s latest creative endeavor is Judas, which will be the debut release of his development team Ghost Story Games.
In a recent interview with Lawrence Sonntag of Nightdive Studios, Levine expressed the guiding principle in developing Judas: “It’s a very old-school game… there’s no online component, no live-service, because everything we do is in service of telling the story and transporting the player.” The BioShock games were often praised for their complex narrative themes, and it seems that Levine’s emphasis on story will also be present in this title. The three main characters of Judas each embody different philosophies concerning existentialism and the human experience, and the interplay between these ideologies will provide narrative designers multiple ways to transport the player into a fictional power struggle.
Later in the interview, Ken Levine discussed the financial aspects of game development. He cited Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as successful examples of games that have avoided microtransactions and the online multiplayer model. He remarked that the industry has mistakenly concluded that all these elements are necessary. Levine stated, “This is no diss on any of the developers who have done that because, look, games are expensive to make… I understand why it happens and I don’t blame anybody for trying to make a living.”
Ghost Story Games has been vocal about its plans to maintain replayability even in an offline game. Levine described Judas’ storytelling system as “narrative LEGO,” where each decision a player makes builds upon previous choices, influencing the overarching story in a nuanced manner. The developers aim for this level of agency to encourage players to return for different playthroughs and experience various branches of the game’s plot.
