It’s now been almost a whole decade since the last BioShock game. The franchise was a highly successful and influential one, but has been on ice ever since BioShock Infinite released. While we do know that a fourth entry is in the works, even if it won’t be for a good while now, a new set of job listings point to a potential picture.
Senior Voice Designer, Game AI Programmer and Lead Systems Designer listings have appeared for developer Cloud Chamber, the development house that’s been set up to work on the sequel. In them there’s a lot of details, such as the game being aimed to be narrative-driven, which is no surprise, but there’s also mention of “dialogue systems,” meaning there could be some type of choice system. Alongside that is also mention of an “emergent sandbox world,” which seems to hint something more open world. Maybe the most interesting bit is that of the work for AI, which they describe as “a meaningful AI urban crowd system and the systemic tribal ecology of a sometimes hostile AI.”
Of course, considering how this is all pieced together from various different job listing from a title that is clearly still in the pretty early stages of development with previous job listings pointing to it being exclusive to next generation systems, so this could mean nothing to the final project. It’s unclear when we’ll see BioShock 4 or whatever it’ll end up being called, but I wouldn’t expect it for quite some time.