Ken Levine, who is currently working on a game called Judas at Ghost Story Games, thinks publishers just don’t have the guts…

Levine’s game has been in the works for at least eight years. In 2017, Take-Two fired Irrational Games, the development team behind previous BioShock installments, and he launched Ghost Story Games shortly thereafter, which was first seriously rumored to be making Judas in 2022, but that “coming soon” turned into a three-year wait. Levine spoke to Gamesindustry about his unique situation, but acknowledges that many in today’s game industry are stuck in a cage of deadlines or graphics. Last year, both Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (one of January’s PlayStation Plus Essential titles, by the way…) and Concord showed what it’s like to be a big failure…

“I’m incredibly lucky to have the trust of the company to take risks and put in the time I need to make this successful. I think one of the problems we have in this industry right now is that the games have gotten bigger and bigger and the graphics have gotten more and more powerful. It just takes a lot more time to make a door now than it did ten years ago, because you have to deal with normal maps and [shaders] and higher polygons and physics and all this other stuff. Everything gets more expensive, especially in the big AAA space, because they spend the most money. And when you’re spending all that money, of course you have people who are concerned about [commercial viability].

The problem with AAA is that if you don’t innovate, especially in games, you start to lose people because they’ve seen it before. And so we potentially have an over-reliance on franchises in some cases… It’s hard to do new things. Quite often, even if you take those risks, sometimes you’re going to fall flat on your face. And the more expensive it gets, the harder it gets. But I think without that… look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe – you stop taking risks and people just tune it out,” Levine said.

Hopefully Take-Two won’t shut this studio down in the near future, because Judas won’t be as mainstream as Grand Theft Auto VI…

Source: PCGamer