BioShock creator Ken Levine’s new game has entered the ‘later stages’ of production

Ghost Story Games is working on an “immersive sci-fi game with RPG elements”

BioShock creator Ken Levine’s next game has entered the “later stages” of production, a job ad has claimed.

The latest listing for Ghost Story Games‘ unannounced “immersive sci-fi game with RPG elements” claims that the title is being created by a team of less than 35 people, which is said to be operating under a flat structure so that “every opinion counts.”

“You’re welcome to join any meeting, walk up to (or Slack) anyone and have your voice heard. Team-based decision making is important to us, regardless of your position,” the job ad says.

Levine closed Irrational Games – the studio behind BioShock and its sequel Infinite – in 2014 to form a smaller studio which eventually became Ghost Story Games.

At the time, he said the Take-Two owned company – initially made up of 15 staff – would be dedicated “narrative-driven” digital games that were “highly replayable”.

In the six years since, very little has been revealed about Ghost Story’s debut project, other than that it features “narrative legos” which Levine has said will combine to create a player-driven, highly-replayable game.

In January 2015, writer and designer Levine suggested in a tweet that his next project would be a “first-person sci-fi” game, and at EGX Rezzed in 2017 he revealed that the game would use a system inspired by Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor ‘s Nemesis System.

Commenting on the project during a Gamelab stream this summer, Levine suggested the project would feature some outlandish elements.

“I can’t really talk about the new game but there’s some weird shit in it,” he said. “I think if you don’t have people saying, ‘that sounds a little insane’, you haven’t gone close enough to the edge.

“Because the great stuff exists on the edge of ‘over the top’ and ‘just OK’ [and] sometimes you’ve got to push past the point and make something outrageous and ridiculous, then pull it back.”

He added: “But if you don’t go to the outrageous and ridiculous, you never know where that boundary is… that means you’ve got to go into the office sometimes, tell people things, and they’re going to look at your like you’re insane, and then you sort of bring it back to something that you can actually accomplish.”

Meanwhile, Publisher 2K confirmed last year that work had begun on a new entry in the BioShock franchise at its newly announced Cloud Chamber studio, but that Levine is not involved.

Scott Sinclair, the art director of the original BioShock and BioShock Infinite, is working on the new game, among others.

“I think that they’ve announced that there’s going to be [a new game], but I’m working on my own thing,” Levine said during the Gamelab stream. “I think I sort of said what I wanted to say about it, so I wanted to do something a little different.”