As Mafia III dev Hangar 13 struggles to nail down its next project, a neighboring studio within parent company 2K Games has reportedly started work on a new entry in the BioShock series.
This scoop comes from a Kotaku story chronicling Hangar 13’s recently turbulent history. In that story, a developer speaking anonymously mentions that a neighboring studio also owned by 2K is working on a project code-named Parkside that is, in truth, a new game in the BioShock series.
The original run of BioShock saw the release of three games, BioShock, BioShock 2, and BioShock Infinite, and the series has been sitting quietly since Infinite’s release 2013. Irrational Games, now Ghost Story Games, is well known for the role it played in developing two of the three games in the series, but the rights to BioShock remained with 2K when the two companies separated in 2017.
The unnamed 2K studio now working on the game has reportedly assembled a small team to do so, pulling developers from both outside 2K and from sister studios like Hangar 13 to work on the project.
This all has been going on while Hangar 13 endured its own share of difficulties. According to the Kotaku story, the team has been struggling to find its next project since the release of Mafia III in 2016, resulting in a rough music game prototype and multiple rounds of layoffs. The low morale brought about by those internal struggles, notes a developer, has been exacerbated by the knowledge that a new game in such a prestigious series was being developed just down the hall.
“The issue is that Parkside’s not ready for lots of people,” one anonymous developer told Kotaku. “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.”
