BioShock 4 was announced publicly in 2019, with development beginning years prior. Despite this long wait, we haven’t heard much about what’s in the works at all. There’s been no grand reveals, no trailers, no official screenshot reveals. While we did get an alleged look via reported leaks of an alpha demo in 2021, this was the last surfaced tidbit about the game.
In a new interview, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, overseer of BioShock 4 developer Cloud Chamber, has been surprisingly candid about the long wait for BioShock 4, saying he’s ‘deeply disappointed,’ in response to a question about a lack of official updates.
BioShock 4 remains in active development – quick links
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick on BioShock 4‘s development
Speaking to Stephen Totilo of Game File (via VGC), Zelnick was asked whether he was ‘surprised’ by BioShock 4‘s long development cycle, and that it doesn’t even have an official title yet.
Zelnick said he was not surprised, as he doesn’t ‘run the business’ that way but: ‘… if you’re saying “disappointed” yes. Deeply disappointed.”
Despite this, he believed there was better things on the horizon for the game, saying he was feeling ‘a lot better’ about the project now, seemingly as opposed to years prior. Recently, Cloud Chamber has recruited former Diablo franchise lead Rod Fergusson to lead development, and that may be part of this renewed optimism.
‘I think finding the right creative purchase was hard, as it turns out,’ Zelnick said. ‘I think we, in retrospect, wasted a lot of time and money chasing down some creative alleys that turned out to be dead ends.’
‘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 and can be very costly.’
As Zelnick noted, and has been hinted over the latest few years, it appears BioShock 4 ran into a range of creative troubles during its development, with explorations and experimentation leading to its truncated development cycle.
The current status of BioShock 4
While Zelnick did not specify the current status of BioShock 4 and how new work is progressing, his comments do underscore that the game remains in active development, and that progress could be continuing at a more satisfactory speed, as of 2026.
For now, we only have rumour to go off, to understand more about what’s to come. Should any of the whispered details be true, we can expect BioShock 4 to be a new immersive, open world sim possibly set in an alternative history of the 1900s. Some rumours allege the game will be set in the 1960s. Others allege it could take place in Antarctica.
For now, Cloud Chamber is yet to reveal anything official about the upcoming game, so it’s best to treat any and all rumours with a healthy dose of scepticism. We’ll learn more about BioShock 4 in future, even if that’s a very far off future.
Also on ScreenHub: US bill to improve preservation of online games is facing major hurdles
In February, US Democratic Assembly member Chris Ward introduced Bill 1921 to the California courts, in an attempt to improve protections for consumers purchasing online games. Since then, the bill has been amended twice, with the current goal being to provide better warning to consumers in the event of planned game shutdowns, and to force companies to either provide an offline alternative to players, or to deliver full refunds.
Read more …
