Following on from the hints gotten from job listings that were posted last week, we're beginning to get a sketchy picture of the type of game that Ken Levine's hoping to make next, albeit a really bare bones picture.
Speaking on NPR's On Point, Levine emphasized the importance of replayability in games and this new game is apparently an experiment in achieving that; one that he's been working in some way since Bioshock Infinite was finished.
"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.”
He spoke about how he felt that because players no longer wanted to spend $60 on an experience that was only 10-12 hours long, he felt that the triple-A single-player narrative in games is vanishing. He's using something that he called "narrative Legos" that he mentioned back at GDC 2014, where dialogue, relationships and other parts of a game can be used to form several non-linear narratives.
On the clue that we got form the job listing - that the game could be an open-world one - Levine says that it won't be an open-world game in the way we might think of it traditionally.
"The thing we're working on is sort of a small-scale open-world game," he says. "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 playthrough and something very different in another playthrough?'”
Of course, this is all experimentation right now. Levine isn't ready to make any big concrete reveals about the game yet, so we can keep on guessing what we'll be getting at some point in the future.