Bioshock lead's fears about Judas were banished by Baldur's Gate 3 gibbing a main character on his second playthrough: 'He was gone'

Judas, the next game from Bioshock lead Ken Levine, is going to have a lot of branching content in it—if you've been following along with its development, you've probably heard the phrase "narrative legos" more times than you can count on one infusion-enhanced hand.

Which is a bit of a departure, given Levine's prior work—Bioshock games had some choices in them, but they were mostly the make-or-break points typical of early 2000s games that made a big hullabaloo about multiple choices. Don't eat Little Sisters and you'll get a different cutscene at some point, that's it.

Levine, in a recent interview with IGN, says he's fully relinquished the creative desire to make sure players see every little thing in their video game thanks to Baldur's Gate 3: "playing Baldur's Gate, I really understood the power of that. 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."

While Judas began development 10 years ago, if you were looking for modern examples of how to keep a story flowing with major character deaths that can happen at, well, basically any point? Baldur's Gate 3 is the game that'd pop to mind.

Also, I asked our own Joshua Wolens, who has played both BG1 and BG2 before, and he told me that "you could gib Jaheira and Imoen as soon as you saw 'em in BG1 but also the game simply did not care about them. Things were simpler back then." So he's almost certainly talking about Baldur's Gate 3, case closed.

"It was so powerful to see that happen that 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'."

Levine also recalls a vision for Bioshock Infinite with a far more reactive Elizabeth, who "could watch all the violence you were doing and be like 'no I'm done with you' … that was the thought that led me to Judas, where you really had to have—to have the game be highly reactive—that meant you were gonna have tons of stuff the player wasn't gonna see on their first playthrough, potentially.

"Because of the experience I've had with emergence and player choice, I don't have a heartbreak with people not seeing player content in the game because there's something so powerful about that." In other words, Levine says, Judas is "way, way, way more replayable than our previous games."