Ghost Story Games creative director Ken Levine has shared an update on single-player, narrative first-person shooterJudas on PlayStation Blog, including new key art, details on the “Villainy” system that can turn allies into enemies based on player choices, and plans for more frequent developer updates.
Get the details below.
We know, we know… we’ve been silent for a while. It takes a lot of time and energy to make marketing materials like trailers, and we’re trying to focus all our efforts on finishing Judas.
But we also miss the days of having a more direct relationship with you, the gamer, so we thought, “Why not start releasing some dev logs?”
Through these, we hope to communicate more frequently to update you with new details of what we are working on, without spoiling too much of what Judas has in store. The goal is to keep this pretty lo-fi, meaning more frequent updates than before, but not necessarily always with fancy trailers and super polished final imagery. (Though there will be more of those as well!)
Feature Update: Villainy
We’ve just finished a major milestone: Villainy. Villainy is a central feature of Judas. When you play BioShock or BioShock Infinite, the villain is always going to be the villain. Fontaine, Comstock—they’re always going to be the bad guys. In Judas, your actions will attract members of the Big 3 to you as friends. But ignore one of them enough, and they become the villain. From there, they will get access to a new suite of powers to subvert your actions and goals. The clips below demonstrate just a little bit of the feature.
This is just one example of how the Big 3 can retaliate. The more dangerous and character-specific stuff will be kept a secret, for now.
Eventually, you’ll have to make decisions about who you’re going to focus your energy on… and who you’ll wind up alienating.
—Want to Rent-A-Deputy?
—But… be careful not to rent one when Tom is pissed off.
A Focus on Character
One of my personal favorites of all time is Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor because of the emergent gameplay made possible by their Nemesis System. The system allows you to develop small relationships with multiple orcs. However, their goals were a little different than ours, because there are so many different orcs and they don’t have time to develop them into characters.
In Judas, you’re going to get to know these characters intimately. We want losing one of them to feel like losing a friend. We want to play with that dynamic, and we want that choice to be super hard. The Big 3 are all going to be competing for your favor and attention. They can bribe you, save you in battle, talk shit about the other characters, and share with you their darkest secrets. But eventually, you’ve got to decide who you trust and who you don’t.
In BioShock Infinite, there was a lot of energy invested into developing your relationship with Elizabeth. By the end of the game, you knew everything about her, her abilities, her hopes and dreams.
But the truth is she knew almost nothing about you, the gamer playing Booker. In Judas, the Big 3 observe you as you play, and they have feelings not only about how you approach combat, hacking, and crafting, but most importantly your interactions with the other two characters.
As part of the Villainy Milestone, we also completed the biggest Judas playtest yet, where new players experienced this feature firsthand. Every time we test, we learn so much, and we love having that level of knowledge when working on the game. The testers shared tons of valuable feedback on the weight of decisions and how it impacted outcomes, their interest in learning more about character motivations, and how moments where the Big 3 helped—or turned on them—changed their future decisions.
New Key Art
Another thing we’re excited to be able to share is… this:
We’re really happy to finally show this off. I have always personally been a huge fan of Drew Struzan’s work and that era of movie posters. The style is great at presenting films that have a big cast, like Star Wars. And Judas has a big cast. Outside of the lead roles, there’s likely going to be more than one hundred speaking parts… If you look closely, there’s probably some details you might be curious about. Let’s just say there’s some stuff in this game that we’re not going to talk about right now, but everything here is relevant.
There’s one thing we’re sure you all want to know: when is Judas coming out?!?!
While we wish we could give you an exact date today, we’re not quite ready to finalize that. As you know, release dates have a way of slipping by, and we’d like to avoid having to change the date after we announce it. But we know Judas is not really a game until the players get their hands on it, and that’s a day everyone on the team is working toward.
