The next BioShock game is still in development with currently no official indication of when it’s aiming to release, and fans of the beloved FPS series have long been wondering when it’ll see the light of day.
Strauss Zelnick Shares his Frustration
It’s been a very long time, 13 years now, since the most recent BioShock game was released. BioShock Infinite marked an extreme shift for the series away from its underwater home of Rapture, taking fans up into the clouds of Columbia. After shipping Infinite, development studio Irrational Games was effectively dissolved, kicking the BioShock franchise into a pit of dormancy it has yet to fully climb out of.
In the very last month of the 2010s, Take-Two announced that it had created an all-new studio named Cloud Chamber that would develop the next BioShock game. Years of radio silence followed until last year, when the studio underwent a round of layoffs, which included a change of leadership. Leaving behind his leadership role overseeing Diablo at Blizzard Entertainment, Rod Fergusson, who was a lead producer on BioShock Infinite, made his return to the FPS franchise as the new head of Cloud Chamber.
There’s still no telling when Bioshock 4 will release
In an interview with Game File’s Stephen Totilo, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick talked briefly about BioShock 4 and shared his frustrations with how much time it’s taking to develop. He mentioned that the team at Cloud Chamber tried out different creative ideas that didn’t pan out well, costing the studio more and more time.
“I think we, in retrospect, wasted a lot of time and money chasing down some creative alleys that turned out to be dead ends”
Looking ahead, though, it seems that Zelnick has a more positive outlook on BioShock 4‘s development moving forward. After all, Rod Fergusson has garnered a strong reputation as a “closer” in the industry and has a history of joining struggling projects and bringing them to the finish line. That was the effect he had when he joined Epic Games in 2005 to help push the original Gears of War out the door, and the same can be said for his role at Irrational Games, as he swooped in during BioShock Infinite‘s final months in development. Knowing that, a bit of hope has been restored among many BioShock fans, a hope that Zelnick also seems to be feeling.
“What we do is a big team activity in the same way that making a movie is a team activity. And with big team activities, you can’t necessarily tell how it’s going to be until it all comes together, or begins to come together, and that can take a while.”
While Strauss Zelnick has expressed both his disappointment for BioShock 4‘s prolonged development and his hope for the game’s future, when the game will finally be ready for release is still a complete mystery. 2026 is almost certainly out of the question, and even a potential late 2027 window seems like a stretch. It’ll surely be some time before fans will be able to learn about BioShock 4‘s release window, but Zelnick’s comments seems to indicate that things at Cloud Chamber are going more smoothly with Fergusson at the helm.
Meanwhile, BioShock creator Ken Levine has a new studio of his own named Ghost Story Games and is working on a spiritual successor to BioShock named Judas. Compared to Cloud Chamber’s new BioShock game, Judas has received far more buzz, as it’s released a number of official trailers and gameplay looks, with press even going hands-on with the game in 2024. However, it too seems to have fallen into a bit of a rut, having experienced internal delays since.
BioShock 4 is in development.
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