Rumors about BioShock 4 have been circulating since shortly after the release of BioShock Infinite in 2013. The once-ubiquitous retrofuturistic first-person shooter series has effectively fallen off the face of the earth since then, but alleged leaks and unconfirmed reports have popped up periodically. BioShock 4 rumors began just prior to the release of Infinite‘s second DLC, Burial at Sea: Episode Two, when series creator Ken Levine announced that it would be the last BioShock game developed by his studio, Irrational Games. Now called Ghost Story Games, it’s currently working on a BioShock-inspired title called Judas.
Publisher 2K soon took up the BioShock mantle, promising another title coming soon. This iteration of BioShock 4 was initially to be developed by in-house studio 2K Marin, but was later outsourced to third-party studio Certain Affinity, then brought back under the 2K umbrella with the help of a new internal developer. It’s hard to separate rumor from fact in the case of BioShock 4, and 2K’s restraint in revealing information about it doesn’t help. However, by comparing a laundry list of unconfirmed speculations with the cold, hard facts, it’s possible to get a picture of what’s going on.
BioShock 4 Leaks & Rumors
What We Don’t Know About BioShock 4
After five years of radio silence, the issue of BioShock 4 was raised again in 2018. A Kotaku article that year on the 2K development studio Hangar 13 revealed that some of its employees had been hard at work on a highly secretive project given the working title Parkside. Rumors spread, first internally, and then via the resulting Kotaku profile, that Parkside was actually a codename for BioShock 4. This was, of course, never confirmed by anyone at 2K or Hangar 13. If this version of Parkside really was BioShock 4 in disguise, it appears to have since been rebooted.
Later, in 2023, leaks emerged claiming BioShock 4 was in development hell. This revealed a new purported title – BioShock: Isolation. It also corroborated earlier leaks from the same source claiming that the sequel had an Antarctic setting. These leaks further claimed that the COVID-19 pandemic and high staff turnover had stalled BioShock 4‘s production, but that it was still technically an active project. None of this was ever officially confirmed, but it would seem the leaks got at least one thing right: despite a dearth of news, BioShock 4 is still technically in development.
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What followed was another year of silence, until an image purported to be the first screenshot of BioShock 4 leaked online in July 2024. The image is generic enough that it certainly could be from BioShock 4, but could equally be from any game with a slightly retrofuturistic slant in which players use guns and elemental powers against enemies. The main focus of the screnshot is on a sort of beacon, set atop an arched, Space Needle-esque pedestal against a cloudy sky.
The player holds a ricochet shotgun, and in the lower left corner, three abilities appear in a small hotbar: one with a magnet for an icon, one with a stopwatch, and one with a lightning bolt. Again, these could certainly be the next evolution of BioShock‘s plasmids, but are generic enough that they could be almost any game’s abilities. The most obvious piece of evidence is the fact that the caption “Parkside demo” appears at the bottom of the screenshot. That’s certainly compelling, but could also easily have been edited in.
Confirmed News On BioShock 4
What We Do Know About BioShock 4
In December 2019, following the emergence of the Parkside rumors, 2K did confirm that BioShock 4 was in development. It would be the responsibility of a new internal studio, Cloud Chamber. Several BioShock alumni had signed on, including BioShock and BioShock Infinite‘s art director Scott Sinclair, and series veteran Hogarth de la Plante.
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Little else has been announced by 2K or Cloud Chamber on the matter. As of July 2024, the BioShock 4 team apparently began “ramping up” development, according to a spate of job listings that suddenly appeared on the Cloud Chamber website. These listings made it abundantly clear that they were for open positions on the BioShock development team, but were pretty vague on details, making it difficult to infer anything about the actual content of BioShock 4 based on the job listings alone.
When BioShock 4 Might Release
BioShock 4’s Potential Release Date
Frankly, there’s absolutely no way of knowing when BioShock 4 might come out. Nothing in any of the leaks or official confirmations has revealed anything even close to resembling a release window. It’s almost certainly not coming out in 2024, given that it’s October at the time of writing and no announcements have been made. It may not come out in 2025, or even 2026 for that matter. With all the reboots it’s undergone, and development only “ramping up” as recently as July, BioShock 4 could easily still be several years away.
In fact, there’s no guarantee that BioShock 4 is even coming out during the current console generation. If the PS6 and next Xbox don’t come out until 2027 or 2028, as they’re rumored to do, BioShock 4 could easily be a launch title for one or both of those consoles.
So, despite a ton of rumors and a handful of official confirmations, little more is known about the current state of the next BioShock than it was when 2K first announced its intentions to develop one. It could be several years before any further information on BioShock 4 is revealed, and its release date is still likely to be far in the future – for now, fans will just have to wait.
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BioShock 4 is an upcoming first-person shooter and the next installment in the Bioshock series. Not much is known about the project outside of its connection to developer Cloud Chamber studios.
