Ken Levine’s Next Game May Feature A ‘Small Scale Open World’

Ken Levine has once again spoken publicly about his new project. Talking to Tom Ashbrook on the On Point show (Via IGN and Gamespot), Levine said that “AAA, single-player narrative games are starting to disappear,” tapping into the long-held notion that players want longer games with more content. Levine continued to discuss how he wants his next game to be highly replayable.

"We started this experiment after we finished BioShock Infinite, which was, 'How do you make a narrative game feel like the kind of games we've made before but make it replayable and make it extend and make it react to the players?' Make it replayable by giving players different ways to approach the problems and really letting them dictate the experience. That is not a simple problem to solve."

Tom Ashbrook pressed on about Levine’s new project, asking if it is an open-world game. Levine conceited that it can be, but not in the same vein as Minecraft, or even something with more traditional narrative like Fallout 4 or The Witcher 3:  

"The thing we're working on is sort of a small-scale open-world game. And the reason ours is an open world game is because if you want to give the player the agency to drive the experience, that really fights against the linear nature of the games we made before like BioShock and BioShock Infinite. What it really means though is, 'How do you make your content so it feels like the quality of the content you've made in games before but reacts to the players' agency and then allows the player to do something in one play through and something very different in another play through?'"

This interview comes just days after Levine’s studio posted a job opening for someone with open world game design experience. In a different interview earlier this week, Levine also spoke about his new project and its connections with the recently announced System Shock 3: "I'm so deeply involved in the themes of our new thing, our new game is a science-fiction game," he said. "It involves themes like artificial intelligence and what it means to be programmed, that you are a thing that was created by programming."

From both of these interviews and the job opening, we’re starting to get a decent idea of what we can expect next from the BioShock writer. Perhaps this means more solid information on the game will come in 2016? Keep an eye on Gameranx to find out.