Ken Levine, the director of Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite, hasn't announced what game he's working on, but a new job posting reveals the sort of project it is. Going back to Levine's roots, working on System Shock 2 and Thief, his new game is "a creatively ambitious project in the immersive sim genre".
Though, if we were hoping to play the game any time soon, you best dash those hopes on the rocks, because the job posting for a cinematic narrative scripter also says "We are committed to making games that we judge by quality, not arbitrary timeliness". That certainly suggests they'll be happy to delay the game and take as long as they need to get it right.
Interestingly, the role needs someone who can develop not just scripted narrative sequences, but also "systemic" ones. This suggests a game that creates story moments in response to the way you play, not simply a branching narrative.
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Levine's been awfully quiet since he took the dramatic decision of laying off all but 15 of Irrational Games' staff and renamed the studio Ghost Story Games. At the time he said he wanted to start "a smaller, more entrepreneurial endeavor at Take-Two", saying that Bioshock: Infinite was an altogether too stressful production. That downsizing happened back in 2014, and in the five years since the team at Ghost Story Games hasn't shown off what they're working on.
It will be fascinating to see what Levine and the team have been working on all this time. Back in 2014, Levine gave a talk at GDC in which he described something he was developing that he called "narrative Lego", that it was possible to break narrative down into small elements that can be combined and recombined almost infinitely into new stories, much like Lego bricks. Is that still the focus of their games? You can watch that talk above or here if you're reading this on mobile.
Featured Image Credit: Take-Two InteractiveTopics: Take-Two Interactive