Ken Levine reveals why everyone hates you so much in Judas

Judas, creative director Ken Levine's follow-up to BioShock Infinite, has been in development for years, but we knew very little about it until the basics were laid out in a story trailer in January: Players will wield a mix of weapons and not-plasmid powers aboard a giant spaceship called Mayflower, while trying to stay alive in a society run by the «Big Three» that doesn't appear to be doing especially well. 

Now we've got more of idea what to look forward to thanks to an in-depth new interview with IGN, in which Levine revealed who the Big Three are, what you did to make them (and everyone else) so angry, and why you need to mend some fences if you don't want to end up dead.

(Early-game spoilers follow, so tune out if you don't want to blow the surprise.)

The Big Three, it turns out, are not Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. They're Tom, the ship's head of security; Nefertiti, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who wants to lead humanity into the future; and Hope, a counsellor, matchmaker, and «everybody's best friend,» who's caught up in a serious existential crisis of her own. They used to be a family—Tom and Nefertiti were married, Hope was their adopted daughter—but that was a long time ago, and now they really don't get along. You, the titular Judas, will have to deal with all three of them as they each vie for your sympathy and support, and do their best to undermine the other two.

Unlike previous KenShock games, where you play an amnesiac outsider inserted into a bad situation, in Judas you've been a part of the society right from the beginning. But lapsed memories will still play a role. You're not exactly alive, you see: Instead you've been «reprinted,» which sounds very much like the resurrection process enabled by the Vita-Chambers in BioShock or the Quantum Bio-Reconstruction Machines in System Shock 2. As part of that process, your memories are stored on a crystal, which you can see on Judas' hand. But when Judas begins, the crystal is damaged, so her