We've known for a while now that Ken Levine, creator of BioShock and co-founder of the now-closed Irrational Games, is working on a new project. Last year, he mentioned he was pursuing a different path with his project, one that looks to break the boundary of linear storytelling.
Earlier this week, Levine took to Twitter to formally announce he is indeed working on a new game. Included with the announcement was a video of a talk he game at last year's Game Developer's Conference in which he talked about "narrative Legos," a concept where a player's actions and choices trigger different narrative events. It's a concept that is designed to make narrative-focused games replayable.
While we don't have specific details just yet, the developer did at least shed some light on his new game which will almost certainly adopt the "narrative Legos" approach.
According to Levine, the game is "something sci-fi. Or sci-fi ish" and set in a new universe. The scope is "large-ish," and will be "heavily reliant" on the reusable "Lego" narrative and game systems, which Levin also says are "combinable." He also explained that the narrative Lego concept "can exist outside of any game system," referring to the diplomacy system in Civilization as an example. That being said, he did mention he's leaning towards a first-person perspective, which leads me to believe it'll be an action-centric narrative. It's going to have voice actors, but Levine adds that they're writing them "very differently so smaller chunks recombine in meaningful ways."
It's still very early in development which explains why most of his answers are conceptual. Levine said they've got some "very rudimentary gameplay. Concept art. Passions system in code. A working board game to demonstrate passions."
As of now, the game is in development for PC, and for those of you hoping for a reveal at E3, don't count on it. "That's not how we want to share it with people," Levine says.
And because you are all wondering, "There's always a lighthouse," but probably not in this new game. I think that means the game won't continue the exploration into quantum space mechanics.
[IGN]
