Ken Levine's next game will be "small-scale and open world"

Bioshock developer Ken Levine has been speaking about his upcoming title, which currently remains shrouded in mystery. So far we know that it's going to be a first-person title built around replayability, but Levine spoke more about the project during a 'Take This' charity livestream event.

Levine discussed how his new game takes inspiration from titles such as Dark Souls, System Shock, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Civilization, and Dying Light, which also happened to be the game that he was playing during his time on the Twitch stream.

"The thing we're working on is sort of a small-scale open-world game," he explained. "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 play-through and something very different in another play-through?'"

While Levine isn't ready to talk specifics he did expand on the alternative approach him at the team at Irrational Games are taking on their next release which will retain the developers focus on narrative, but with extra layers to add replay value.

"We started this experiment after we finished BioShock Infinite," Levine continued, "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. That is not a simple problem to solve."

Levine refers to this approach as "narrative Lego", meaning that narrative pieces can be constructed to create many different things, just like Lego bricks.

It should be noted that the game won't closely resemble any of the aforementioned titles, it will instead be more "in the realm" of some of his previous outings. It was also stated that these shouldn't be taken officially as of yet, as naming influences for games in their early stages can be "complicated" as he's not yet sure how best to describe it. Furthermore the game is still evolving in development, so things could change before release.

Other than this we know little about the upcoming game, however Levine has made it clear that it won't be a large AAA game, and that it will be set within a small-scale sci-fi themed open world. This unannounced project will be the first title from Irrational Games following a major scaling back of the studio after development ended on BioShock Infinite in March 2013.