That’s why Ken Levine says his next game, currently in the final stages of development, will be more responsive to player choices.

In an interview with Gamesindustry, Levine talked about how the ability to give players choices remains a “hard problem” even after five decades of development in the gaming industry. We’re just starting to catch up to the role-playing games and immersive simulators of the ’90s in terms of granular responsiveness. It’s just that it’s taken more time and more money to make a game since then. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Disco Elysium have recently reached a higher level…

“It is very easy to show a story to a player. The harder part is to get them to participate and react to how they participate. I don’t think there’s one way to make games, but personally, as a maker of narrative games, I’ve never been a big fan of cutscenes because they’re not interactive. One of the reasons Judas is taking so long is because we are trying to figure out how to make the game much more responsive to player choices. It’s a really hard problem, and that’s why you don’t see a lot of it. In the future, it will be player-driven, that is where we want to go. That’s what makes our medium unique.

The approach we’re taking with Judas is very much based on recognizing player actions and responding to player actions, even just characters observing and commenting on a wide range of player actions. Hey, you saw this, and you did this, and then you did this, and that was interesting because that caused this – we’re doing that kind of thing right now. And it’s really just watching the players and then writing the kinds of lines that might respond to different kinds of things. It’s a huge amount of work because you have to think of all the things that a player can do and then write in-character responses for different characters to those actions in a way that feels organic,” Levine said.

Hopefully Judas, which will be released this spring, won’t be a sellout…

Source: PCGamer