Judas: Ken Levine explora cómo las decisiones de los jugadores definen al villano

We know, we’ve been a bit quiet lately. Preparing marketing materials like trailers takes a lot of time and energy, and we’ve been focusing all our efforts on finishing Judas.

But we also miss having a more direct relationship with you, the players, so we thought, ‘Why not start releasing some development diary entries?’.

Through these, we hope to communicate with you more frequently, bringing you updates on new details about what we’re working on, without spoiling too much of what’s coming in Judas. We want to present them unpolished, so you’ll get more news than before, but they won’t always come with cool trailers or highly polished final images. (Although we’ll also give you more of that!)

Want to hire a substitute?

New Feature: Villainy

We’ve just completed a major milestone: Villainy. Villainy is a core feature of Judas. In Bioshock or Bioshock Infinite, the villain is always the villain. Fontaine, Comstock: they’ll always be the bad guys. In Judas, your actions will attract members of the Big 3 as allies. But ignore one of them enough and they’ll become the villains. From there, they’ll gain access to a new collection of powers to subvert your actions and objectives. The clips below show a bit of that function.

This is just one example of how the Big 3 can counterattack. The more dangerous and specific aspects of the characters will have to stay secret for now.

In the end, you’ll have to make decisions about whom you’ll focus on… and whom you’ll end up alienating.

But… be careful not to hire one when Tom gets angry.

Focusing on Characters

One of my favorite games of all time is the Nemesis system in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor because it made emergent gameplay possible. The system allows you to form small bonds with various orcs. However, their goal was different from ours, as there were so many orcs that they didn’t have time to develop them as characters.

In Judas, you’ll get to know these characters intimately. We want losing one of them to feel like losing a friend. We want to play with that dynamic and make those choices extremely difficult. The Big 3 will all vie for your attention. They can bribe you, save you in combat, speak ill of the other characters, and share their darkest secrets with you. But in the end, you’ll have to decide whom to trust and whom not to.

In Bioshock Infinite, a lot of effort was put into developing the relationship with Elizabeth. By the end of the game, you knew everything about her, her abilities, her hopes, and dreams.

But the truth is, she knew almost nothing about you, the players in the role of Booker. In Judas, the Big 3 observe you as you play and have opinions not just on how to approach combat, jacking, and building objects, but more importantly, on your interactions with the other two characters.

As part of the Villainy Milestone, we’ve also completed the largest playtest for Judas to date, where new players experienced this feature firsthand. Every time we test it, we learn a lot and love having that level of insight when working on the game. Testers shared a lot of useful feedback on the weight of decisions and how they affected outcomes, their interest in learning more about the characters’ motivations, and how moments where the Big 3 helped (or refused to help) changed their future decisions.

New Key Art

Another thing we’re excited to share is… this:

View and download image

We’re very excited to finally show this design. Personally, I’ve always been a big fan of Drew Struzan’s work and that era of movie posters. The style is great for showcasing films with a large cast, like Star Wars. And Judas has a massive cast. Beyond the main roles, there are probably over a hundred characters with dialogue… If you look closely, you might spot a detail that piques your curiosity. Let’s say there are things in this game we won’t be talking about just yet, but everything here is relevant.

There’s one thing we’re sure everyone wants to know: ‘When is Judas coming out?!’

We wish we could give you an exact date today, but we’re not ready to set it yet. As you know, release dates have a way of coming up fast, and we want to avoid having to change it after announcing. But we know Judas won’t be a real game until players have it in their hands, and the entire team is working hard to make that day arrive.