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IGN recently spoke to Bioshock developer Ken Levine about his new game Judas and his thoughts on the ever-changing world of game development. He explained why cutting-edge tech and ultrarealism weren’t appealing to him as a creator.
“I don’t think we’ve ever been a company that was like, oh my God, we need the latest and greatest technology. In the rendering space we’ve never been a company; outside of SWAT 4, we never really tried to do ultrarealism in our games,” he explained.
“It’s expensive, and it doesn’t age as well as sort of more stylistic things because BioShock still looks good, I think, because it wasn’t trying to get every nut and bolt super realistically rendered. It was realistic-looking, sort of, but it was more stylized.”
He pointed to newer gaming machines like the Nintendo Switch 2 and the upcoming Steam Machine as signs that the medium has hit “a bit of diminishing returns” with the race for better and better visuals.
“I think if you have the right art director and the right approach, you don’t need to be on the cutting edge of technology all the time,” he said. “Even the stuff we’re doing with Judas, all this narrative stuff we’re doing is not CPU intensive. It’s work intensive on our side, and Baldur’s Gate is the same way. That was just like a ton of work behind that. None of it was particularly technologically demanding, right? It was just a billion branching tree structures that they had to manage and think about – which I tip my hat to those guys because they did an amazing job with it – but that’s not a technological, hardware challenge. It’s an engineering and thought challenge.”
Levine’s next game, first-person shooter Judas, doesn’t currently have a release date, but when it’s ready, it will be published on PS5, PC and Xbox Series X and S.
Levine spoke to IGN as part of our IGN Icons series, celebrating the last 30 years of the video game industry and the people responsible for pushing it forward.
Rachel Weber is the Head of Editorial Development at IGN and an elder millennial. She’s been a professional nerd since 2006 when she got her start on Official PlayStation Magazine in the UK, and has since worked for GamesIndustry.Biz, Rolling Stone and GamesRadar. She loves horror, horror movies, horror games, Red Dead Redemption 2, and her Love and Deepspace boyfriends.
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