Original text too short.
The next Ken Levine video game is having a problematic development and is not expected to reach short / medium-term stores, as detailed in an article published by Bloomberg.
Levine, known for his work in System Shock 2 and for leading the development of Bios hock and Bios hock Infinite, announced the closure of Irrational Games in 2014 to found a new study, Ghost Story Games, focused on the development of narrative games that would be published by Take-Two. The reason for this surprising decision (Irrational was not in trouble, given that Bios hock Infinite was a sales success) was that the creative wanted to work on other projects with a much smaller team, of a size similar to that of an independent study.
The first of these titles should be published in 2017, but almost five years later it remains stuck in what is popularly known as Development Hell. The reason, according to people who worked at Ghost Story Games, is Levine’s own leadership, as well as the frontal shock between the director’s pretensions, much closer to a triple A title, with the size of the study, which barely has Thirty two employees.
Mike Night, one of the founders of Ghost Story Games, blames Levine’s creative process as the main factor that motivated the march of him next to the other half of the founders. Six of them have declared Bloomberg that this game was going to be settled at a space station, with three different factions with which the player could align. Once again, it seems a much more complex project than it could encompass with the resources of a study of an indie size.
According to people who have previously worked with Levine, in his previous games there was a moment in which the editor (as happened with 2K and Bios hock) acted to try to keep the creative at bay, even though this used to derive in periods of Crunch. In this new project, however, there has been no one on top of Levine to keep him with his feet on Earth.
Two ex-employees, for example, remember that in 2016 there was a version with very elaborate levels and good graphics. However, there were serious doubts about how to finish it with less than thirty people in the team, and there was also another problem: Levine had devised a complex system of dialogues that changed according to the player’s decisions, something that required a huge script impossible to complete in less than a year.
In the Bloomberg article, the behavior of Ken Levine is defined as Voluble, also pointing out that there were people who, after discussing some decisions with him, mysteriously stopped appearing by the office.
All this, in the end, translates into something very simple: we are not going to see Levine’s next game in quite some time. The current employees interviewed by Bloomberg say, in fact, that they do not believe that nothing can be published until at least a couple of years.