Ken Levine Challenges Gaming Industry Focus on Photorealism While Developing Judas with Narrative LEGO Systems and Branching Paths Focused on Depth Over Visual Fidelity
There is a major movement to combat the industry's persistent reliance on the photoreal. Ken Levine, developer of the BioShock series of games, has spoken out against the constant drive towards highly realistic visuals. Speaking to IGN, the founder of Ghost Story Games stated that there is too little strategy involved in devoting huge resources to rendering photorealistic skin texture and faces. The reason why these visuals are a strategic error is simple: their visual fidelity does not hold up and is far too costly to produce.
Levine went on to argue that the industry is approaching a saturation point in its quest for realism, beyond which the marginal increase in realism is simply too expensive to pursue. He pointed out the relative success of Nintendo and Valve and implied that a good art director and gameplay are much more sustainable means of success than top of the line tech. These companies, according to Levine, knew years ago that the visual difference between consoles was shrinking, leading to returns in realism that continued to diminish.
Realizing that the difference in graphics between consoles and PC is no longer that impressive to justify spending massive amounts on, if you have good art director and logical thinking, it will just be fine without high tech. Levine and his team is currently working on a game called Judas. The game is being described as narrative LEGO and the developers are focused on a huge amount of branching paths and reactivity within the environment, rather than improving poly counts, in order to create a radically different story dependent on player choice. Levine compared it to Larian Studios' work on Baldur's Gate 3 where the most massive part of the creation was not on the technological side but the narrative on the organizational and logical side.
Judas has 3 key characters that players need to interact with. The environment and world is being built around tags and assets, with each event triggered by player choice, in a way similar to the Nemesis system in Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor. Currently without a release date, the project is still in development but slated for 2026 and the focus is still on depth of character rather than the polish of the characters. According to Levine, the future is with branching stories and not photoreal faces.
