BioShock creator Ken Levine has revealed that his upcoming narrative FPS game, Judas, has been inspired by the dense choice-based gameplay of Baldur’s Gate 3.
Judas, Levine’s first game since 2013’s BioShock Infinite, aims to return to the narrative depth of his earlier games, such as System Shock 2. While Levine was always looking to make Judas as choice-based as possible, playing through Baldur’s Gate 3 made him realise he was on the right track.
“Playing Baldur’s Gate, I really understood the power of that [player choice],” Levine told IGN in a recent interview. “I played a second playthrough, and like one of the main characters got killed very early… “I only knew he was a major character from my previous playthrough, and then I did something different, and he was gone, and I saw his dead body there.”
In Judas, Levine is crafting a dynamic world that allows players to kill any character and make sweeping choices that can drastically change the course of the game. The game has spent 10 years in some form of development, although it has only been in full development for the last few, and Levine is working to make player choice the heart of the game.
Levine explained that watching a main character die during their playthrough “was so powerful”, inspiring him to continue down his choice-focused role. “Any frustration I had with people not seeing stuff immediately became, ‘I can’t wait for people to realise the huge things they maybe didn’t encounter [on the first run],’” he said.
Combined with earlier drafts of BioShock Infinite, Baldur’s Gate 3’s dense player choice inspired him to create a game that is truly “highly reactive” with “tones of stuff the player wasn’t gonna see on their first playthrough, potentially”. With that in mind, Judas is planned to be “way, way, way more replayable than our previous games”.
Judas is not the only game that has been inspired, in some way, by Larian Studios’ work on Baldur’s Gate 3. Just last week, The Witcher 3 designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz admitted that he was inspired by Larian’s RPG for his upcoming vampire RPG Blood of the Dawnwalker, again focusing on its heavy player choice. “I love the games that did this in the past, and I loved what they did with Baldur’s Gate 3,” he said.
Baldur’s Gate 3’s influence is also having an effect on The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2, and even directly inspired the final battle for Netflix’s Stranger Things series. The RPG has also given new credence to the CRPG genre as a whole with other developers claiming the game’s success “reaffirms there is a large audience for deep, story-driven CRPGs”.
Now that Larian is done and dusted with Baldur’s Gate 3, the studio is working on its next RPG, Divinity. However, the legacy of BG3 lives on. Alongside an upcoming HBO show, which Astarion actor Neil Newbon hopes fans will give a chance, Hasbro is adamant that Baldur’s Gate 4 is “of course” going to happen at some point in the future.
Judas doesn’t currently have a release date, but it’s expected to launch on PC, Xbox Series, and PlayStation 5.
