inXile has shared new interesting insights on where they are in the production of Clockwork Revolution.
The studio made this post on their official Bluesky account:
inXile entertainment is a ~110 person team Working on @clockworkgame.bsky.social RPG Led by Brian Fargo (Wasteland), Chad Moore (Arcanum, VtM:Bloodlines), and Jason Anderson (Fallout 1&2)
inXile revealed Clockwork Revolution all the way back in the 2023 Xbox Games Showcase. Microsoft acquired InXile all the way back in 2018, but they spent the five years afterwards finishing up their last independent projects in Wasteland Remastered, Wasteland 3, and Frostpoint VR: Proving Grounds.
Of course, the game’s announcement was faced with comparisons to BioShock Infinite. Considering that we then saw that Ken Levine himself left the BioShock franchise to only make a similar looking game in Judas, it seems that the field is wide open for twenty more games that look like BioShock. inXile, of course, has a richer history to just be talked about like they only copy other studios’ games. As the proverbial spiritual successor of Interplay, they continued the Wasteland franchise, as well as delivering Torment: Tides of Numenera.
These were all deep RPGs, but as loyal fans may have noted, they haven’t made any 3D games for some time. AS their first 3D game for some time, inXile definitely needed to make changes to have the ability to properly develop Clockwork Revolution. Last year, inXile did announce that they partnered with Shapeshifter Games on production. Shapeshifter was founded by staff who came from Embracer after they shuttered another veteran studio in Saint’s Row creators Volition.
But this new indication at their headcount seems to be meant to give us an idea of the scale of the title, and how long they may expect to wait for it to come out. All things considered, it may be similar in length and depth as Compulsion Games’ recent release, South of Midnight, and perhaps also Ninja Theory’s Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II. These games aren’t endeavoring to be new gigantic AAAs, but falling a little bit short to be decent AAs isn’t that bad an idea in 2025.
Microsoft enabling their individual smaller studios to make games in this scale allows them to produce a steady stream of games that can fill up the Game Pass library. It also allows these developers to make the games they want to make, without having to worry about unreasonably higher expectations to become new cash cows. This arrangement means that Microsoft could support a lot of developers just making more games we want to play, instead of being limited with a smaller number of higher scale AAAs that may not even turn out well.
With all that said, we still don’t know when Clockwork Revolution is coming out, so Microsoft can still make changes to this project in the coming months or years. But we’re going to see how that plays out, and if this, Judas, or the next real BioShock sequel, comes out first.
