Irrational revealing new game this year

By Robert Purchese Published 20 January, 2010

Sometime after March, says Levine.

Ken Levine has promised that Irrational's new game will be announced this year, sometime after the Game Developers Conference 2010. That takes place in March, which leaves this June's E3 as a prime time and place for the reveal.

"This is the year we'll start talking about stuff, and we stop hiding behind the iron curtain of secrecy," Levine told GameSpot, but refused to budge on specific whens and wheres.

There are around 40 people working full-time at Irrational on the new game, and Levine said production will ramp up to include around 100 personnel during the peak-push period.

Speculators speculate that Irrational will resurrect tactical space game X-Com - a rumour Levine has never quashed.

While the identity of the game may be veiled, Levine's intentions are not. After claiming back the Irrational name and ditching the 2K Boston moniker, every ounce of effort will go into delivering the high quality game the studio's name is synonymous with.

"Irrational has got like an 88 or an 89 game ranking average," added Levine. "All we have is our quality."

"People hired us because they knew we made something good even if it maybe didn't sell 3 million units or 3.5 million units like BioShock did."

Levine created BioShock but has had nothing to do with the sequel, BioShock 2, development of which is being lead by 2K Marin and contributed to by Digital Extremes, 2K Australia, 2K China and Arkane Studios.

"I never want to take credit for anything that's awesome but I didn't do," said Levine, explaining that if he's "in for a penny" he's "in for a pound". "And my feeling is that, hopefully, BioShock 2 is going to be awesome."

BioShock 2 will be released on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on 9th February. Read our January 2010 hands-on impressions to find out how the sequel's shaping up.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (12) Latest comment 2 years ago

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  • Zephro #1 2 years ago

    God please let it be X-Com! I've been desperate since X-Com Genesis got canned.

  • Meho #2 2 years ago

    Announcements of announcements are increasingly becoming the most tiresome PR practice in this business.

    That said, I am holding my breath for what they will do next.

  • PlugMonkey #3 2 years ago

    @ Zephro: One of my favourite studios in the world working on one of my favourite franchises ever? Yes, that would be very exciting indeed.

    Pleaseohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease...

  • Zephro #4 2 years ago

    Exactly my thinking PlugMonkey! They've often shown they can manage different genres, and even did a squad based rpg (which clearly owes at least a little to X-Com) in the form of Freedom Force.

  • TeaFiend #5 2 years ago

    I dislike that many companies are now announcing they will be announcing something later.

  • ChthonicEcho #6 2 years ago

    Personally, I'd prefer SWAT 5. But I'm in the minority, no doubt.

  • systems #7 2 years ago

    @afroofdoom - there already was a game like that planned called XCom: Alliance. It was canned though, which was a shame.
    [link url=http://e n.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-COM:_Alliance
    ]http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/X-COM:_Alli...[/link]

  • glaeken #8 2 years ago

    A new X-com game could be good. Really the original structure of that game still stands up well so couple that with a cutting edge graphics engine and it could be brilliant.

    Given the last iterations of x-com games though they are probably going to want to make it non turn based which would be a shame. There was so much tension in the original game from its turn based nature but it seems everyone who has had a crack at X-com in recent times always wants to ditch turn based fights.
    Edited by 1 at 20/01/10 @ 13:02

  • Zephro #9 2 years ago

    Apocalypse's realtime aspect worked very well and still had turn based for the obstinate. the UFO games weren't rubbish because of realtime they were just rubbish generally.

    Also I think real-time is better on several levels (this is speaking as a table top gamer, where we are stuck with turns but it leads to poor modeling/simulation results).

    For instance you get a more natural simulation. Example: 2 combatants are spaced 20m apart, they can each move 20m per turn. In a turn based simulation they end up meeting at one end. In realtime, as in life, they meet in the middle. So you're forced as a dev to balance your "turn slice" between speed of play i.e. a turn a lot happens but small enough so that these artefacts don't become incongruous. Or you're forced into providing extra "mechanics" like overwatch or an intercept ability to try and make your turns closer to the "real world". So the players have more problems to reason about, rules to learn and remember and so on. Realtime is what we're used to reasoning in and is therefore far more natural.

    So speaking as a table top gamer I realise that turns are just an artifact of a difficult simulation environment which computers shouldn't be limited by. Plus in these things you can pause and run at a slow pace to have "thinking time".

    Oh there was also the canned X-Com genesis which was the next proper title after Interceptor and Alliance.

  • glaeken #10 2 years ago

    You know I don't care too much about how turn based game play does not match the real world. It's just a style of game too me that I like. What I loved on the original x-com was the tension from planning your entire squads moves and then clicking end turn to see just how well you had worked things out for the enemy turn. I just don't think you can get that tension from real time.

    This is just my personal preference really as I never really liked the X-com games that came after the original game and Terror from the deep.

  • CalmHorizons #11 2 years ago

    X company has hinted that it may consider advancing a proposal about intimating an indication specifying a tentative suggestion of giving an announcenement about the possible pronouncement of an eventual confirmation of a game to be released in three years...

    Writing about Games is a mockery of a pantomime of an already bankrupt career once called journalism.

  • jebus #12 2 years ago

    I'd be happy just to have a straight X-Com conversion on XBLA to be perfectly honest.
    Or Laser Squad Nemisis for the MP aspect. Or both in fact.