BioShock 4 is titled 'Isolation' and will have two "flipside" cities, leaked documents claim

The next BioShock game, dubbed by media and fans as BioShock 4 due to it being the fourth game in the series, has been in development for quite a while.

This was officially confirmed by publisher 2K Games back in December of 2019. It's being developed by Cloud Chamber, a newly created studio tasked to make the next entry in the BioShock series as their first project. The studio consists of some of the key creative members from previous BioShock games, including Hoagy de la Plante, Scott Sinclair, and Jonathan Pelling.

Since that announcement, things have been strangely quiet, with no news or leaks apart from some interesting job openings spotted in 2020. 

But now, almost two years after the announcement, a new leak has revealed a slew of previously unknown details about the game.

BioShock 4 full name and setting leaked

According to a leaker named "Oops Leaks", the new BioShock game will be called Bioshock Isolation, and it will be set in "a new-to-franchise isolated dystopian city."

The main gimmick of this setting is that there are actually two cities with "radically different ideologies". These two cities are sharing a "flipside" border, with one being exactly atop of the other one and vice versa.

The first city has a "free and wealthy society", led by a "successful entrepreneur", while the other "flipped" city is an underground world ruled by an autocratic dictator who wages war against the progressive city, called "vertical war".

The leaker revealed that developers listed books such as The City and the City, We, and Shantaram as their inspiration for the plot and the setting, as well as the iconic Citizen Kane movie. Apparently, the leaked info comes from a pitch document from "no later than 2019" and the leaker states that things might have changed since then and some (or all) information revealed may be outdated.

Asides from the aforementioned personnel working on this project, the leaker revealed details about some other developers who have joined Cloud Chamber in the meantime.

"Concept artists, environment artists, modellers, VFX specialists and level designers who worked on Watch Dogs: Legion, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Mafia 3, and so on are involved in the creation of the game", Oops Leaks wrote.

Finally, Oops Leaks reports that BioShock 4 will be officially revealed in Q1 2022 (January - March 2022) and that the game has now migrated to Unreal Engine 5, in contrast to the initial development in UE4.

As always, take this with a huge grain of salt, as these are just rumours from an unverified source, though it should be noted that the leaked screenshots from a pitch document look rather believable, but we will have to wait for a few more months to find out if this leak was real or not.

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Featured image courtesy of 2K Games/Okami Games.