After Ken Levine closed the door on Irrational Games in 2014, he confirmed that 2K Games had also taken over ownership of the BioShock franchise. At the time, fans assumed that a BioShock 4 announcement was imminent, but here we are in 2018, and the publisher has yet to announce a return to Rapture (or its skybound cousin Columbia)
While this lack of communication through official channels is standard operating procedure for 2K Games, a new report on Kotaku has shed a little light on what fans can expect from the fourth entry in the BioShock franchise.
While investigating the aftermath of Mafia III‘s launch on Hangar 13, Kotaku’s Jason Schreier stumbled upon the existence of a small 2K team operating right next door… a small team that’s secretly working on BioShock 4 (currently codenamed “Parkside”):
In the midst of all this confusion, some employees of Hangar 13 couldn’t help but look with envy at their neighbors. Next door, a small group of people were working on a project code-named Parkside, quietly recruiting from across the video game industry for a game so secret, they wouldn’t even tell their colleagues at Hangar 13 about it. Word got out, though, that it was in fact a new game in one of the most interesting shooter franchises of the past decade: BioShock.
According to Schreier’s sources, 2K Games is proceeding very carefully with the creation of BioShock 4, as they try to figure out the “core thing” of the franchise:
“The issue is that Parkside’s not ready for lots of people,” said one person involved. “They’re trying to be really smart about figuring out what the core thing is. They’re careful about not falling into the same problem every studio has, where they have too many people and nothing for them to do.”
Schreier’s inside look at the development of Mafia III and the trouble Hangar 13 ran into when developing their followup project is well worth your time, but it looks like we’ll have to wait for another day to learn more about BioShock 4.
Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of 2K Games parent company Take-Two Interactive, told investors that the company plans to publish a “highly-anticipated new title from one of 2K’s biggest franchises” sometime in the next 12 months. It’s certainly possible that he was talking about BioShock 4, but we won’t know for sure until the notoriously tight-lipped publisher makes it official.
That said, the 2018 E3 Expo is right around the corner…
