Ken Levine’s Judas has been in development for a very long time, and it will be his first major project since BioShock Infinite’s Burial At Sea DLC in 2014. A few of the gameplay elements we’ve seen from Judas greatly resemble BioShock’s interface. But according to Levine, his team doesn’t think of it as a first-person shooter. Instead, he called it a “Judas simulator,” since the main character’s name is Judas.
“Judas … understands machines in a way she can never understand people,” wrote Levin in a developer’s blog shared on PlayStation’s official site. “That became her greatest strength… and greatest weakness. We put her in a science fiction world, a colony ship filled with robots–a futuristic setting that makes someone like her extremely powerful. But it’s also a world where personal success hinges on how well you can conform to the rules, because dissent would lead to the failure of the mission. That makes her an outlaw, a pariah–a Judas. That tension at the heart of the character came to inform everything about the game, which we stopped thinking of as an FPS and started calling a ‘Judas Simulator.’ Everything comes back to that core idea of you interacting with the world as Judas.”
Levine noted that Judas isn’t overly fond of other people, but the game’s narrative forces her to pick between three different leaders on the colony space ship called The Mayflower. Players’ choices as Judas will determine which of the three will call her an ally, while the others condemn her as an enemy.
Judas has previously been described as a procedurally generated roguelite set in a dynamically shifting open world. That open world is The Mayflower, and Levine noted that it is also dynamic in the game and design elements will be put in place based on choices made by the player.
“When assembling the layouts in game, the system has to understand the various buckets of puzzle pieces and the hierarchy of the content so it can stitch it together in a meaningful way that supports the storytelling,” wrote lead artist Karen Segars, “More exclusive and fancier places can have high ceilings, giant windows, and grand lobbies. But the Violator space is in the lower, grungy, underbelly of the ship and you have to take what we call the ‘Stairway to Hell’ to get to them–separating these spaces both visually and physically.”
Levine has stated that Judas will buck modern gaming trends by excluding live-service elements from the game. He also demonstrated how players will make friends and enemies among the three major characters.
Judas doesn’t currently have a release date.
