For years, all that was known about Ken Levine’s follow-up toBioShock Infinitewas that it would incorporate an idea he called “Narrative Legos.” All the way back in 2014, Levine gavea GDC talk on the concept.
“The challenge lies in building non-linear, replayable (narrative) sequences,” the overview for the talk on the GDC Vault website helpfully summarizes. “By breaking narrative down to its smallest yet non-abstract elements and finding ways to combine and recombine them, one could potentially build a nearly infinite array of narrative opportunities out of these small building blocks.”
Even now thatJudashas been officially announced, with two trailers available online, Levine stilllinks to his Narrative Legos talk as his “Current Project” in his Twitter bio. He has a Judas trailer linked there, too, but this idea seems to be as important to him as the actual game his team at Ghost Story Games is building.
And, you know what, I kinda get it. The idea of building stories that can be rearranged endlessly like Legos is interesting. I’m curious to see what that looks like in practice, and how much it will actually differ from the emergent gameplay we see in roguelikes.
If you watch the talk, Levine’s take actually sounds more likeThe Witcher 3orBaldur’s Gate 3, with the decisions you make having the potential to impact your relationships with characters and the buffs they can provide you down the road.
But, the trailers for Judas don’t really allude to the concept at all. “To do something different,” Levine says during his talk, “we had to go back to the drawing board.” But the trailer we got for Judas earlier this week basically looks like a new BioShock game. I like BioShock, so I’m not opposed to that, but the marketing for Judas is selling a narrative FPS, not a bold new step in storytelling techniques. Levine pointedly says in the Narrative Legos talk that he’s speaking about general principles, not announcing a specific game. But these are clearly the things he was interested in when Judas was in the early stages of development, and he’s left that link to the Narrative Legos talk in his Twitter bio for years. This is the Narrative Legos game.
There are faint traces of the concept if you squint. “The ship is dying… and my only way out of here… is with one of them,” the narrator says, before the trailer cuts to shots of three characters: a sheriff-looking white guy with a Stetson and a mustache, a white woman with bright red hair and some kind of cybernetic augmentation around her bulging eye, and a Black woman with close cropped hair in a gleaming gold-and-black outfit. In the bits of gameplay, you may see these characters participating in combat. If I fill in the gaps with what I know from Levine’s talk, I could reasonably speculate that allying with one of these characters will alienate the others, and that the story could play out in at least three different ways as a result.
But, the trailers aren’t selling this idea. If you haven’t recently watched a GDC talk from a decade ago, you would probably just assume this is a narrative-focused first-person shooter with companions who can help in combat, like in BioShock Infinite. It’s odd, because Levine shut down Irrational Games and has spent ten years working on this game, and so I would assume that he would want to highlight the things that make Judas different.
It’s possible, though, that those ideas aren’t part of Judas anymore. BioShock Infinitereportedly scaled back on many systemsas its development stretched on, withplanned multiplayer being cut entirelyto get the game out of development hell. It’s possible that after a decade, Judas just isn’t what we expected it to be. But on the off chance that it is what Levine pitched — the fulfillment of the Narrative Legos idea — it needs better trailers.
