A week ago, a job listing for Ken Levine's new project appeared, revealing that the BioShock creator was planning on utilizing features similar to Borderland and Destiny in the unannounced game, as well as building a semi-open world for it.
Apparently, the semi-open world will be done on a small-scale in order to keep the game less linear that Levine's previous games. Levine's goal with creating the world like this was to make the game have a different experience per each playthrough.
"The thing we're working on is sort of a small-scale open-world game and the reason ours is an open world game is because if you want to give the player the agency to drive the experience," said Ken Levine to NPR's On Point.
"That really fights against the linear nature of the games we made before like BioShock and BioShock Infinite," explained Levine. "What it really means though is, 'How do you make your content so it feels like the quality of the content you've made in games before but reacts to the players' agency and then allows the player to do something in one playthrough and something very different in another playthrough?'"
There's no denying that, while linear in nature, the BioShock games had a world that invited you to come back for more. Each playthrough was without very much variety, but it was still replayable. It will be exciting to see what Ken Levine offers with a bigger world, I know I wanted to explore more of Rapture and Columbia than was available.