Ken Levine Talks System Shock 3 and New Title

As part of a longer interview that will be presumably be published soon, the folks at GameInformer have asked Ken Levine his opinion on the recently-announced System Shock threequel from OtherSide Entertainment. In short, Ken Levine wishes the team good luck, though he isn’t interested in personally working on the title himself, as he feels he prefers to create new worlds and that his upcoming title hits on many of the same themes:

(I’m so deeply involved in the themes of our new thing, our new game is a science-fiction game,” Levine said. “It involves themes like artificial intelligence and what it means to be programmed, that you are a thing that was created by programming. That’s a big theme in the new game. And how much agency you have outside of what you are as a piece of programming instructions. So I’m scratching a lot of those itches in the new game already. I don’t really feel a need to go back to touch those characters again, in the same way that I didn’t need to when I made BioShock. Say we would have gotten the rights to System Shock before we did BioShock, there wouldn’t have been an Andrew Ryan, or Big Daddies, or Elizabeth. I do think it’s important to move on and make different things in life.)

Earlier this year, Levine explained his new title would be a sci-fi action-RPG with a focus on systems-driven reusable narrative pieces over bespoke content. Levine’s early ideas sound pretty ambitious, so it’ll be interesting to see how exactly they will pan out and how the project will compare with OtherSide’s System Shock 3.