Take Two has confirmed the game and little else, but now the rumor mill is disappearing.
BioShock 4 is finally coming. Publisher 2K confirmed it's in development in 2019, but said a little more than it will be in a few years. The chief creators are known: design director Jonathan Pelling, creative director Hoagy de la Plante, and art director Scott Sinclair, all of whom have extensive experience with the series right down to the original game.
Now Youtuber Colin Moriarty has made the first significant contribution to what will undoubtedly become an ongoing rumor mill. Speaking about the podcast Sacred Symbols, Moriarty said, “This is set in an Antarctic city called Borealis in the 1960s. [The game's] codename is 'Parkside'… I was told the development team had an incredible amount of freedom to get it right.”
The codename 'Parkside' has come up before: Specifically, in this 13 report on Hangar 2018 and this 4 report on a canceled version of Bioshock 2019. Isn't the whole meaning of a codename something that no one knows?
“Inside, the game is top secret and apparently completely locked,” Moriarty added. “They seem to understand very well that this game will be compared to what Ken Levine is doing. Meanwhile, [2K] is also releasing Levine's next game.”
As with any rumor, take it all with a big pinch of salt (except for the little bit about Levine's next game, which is obvious – his studio Ghost Story Games is also part of Take-Two Interactive). If you want to believe it, both Eurogamer and VGC He says it fits with what he's heard. 1960s Antartica immediately got me thinking of The Thing (this time period, by the way, indicates it happened at the same time as Bioshock 1 and 2).
Bioshock 4, which other rumors suggest could be called Bioshock: Isolation, is being developed at Cloud Chamber Games and has been the subject of many more rumors than I will reproduce here. Some are more or less verifiable thanks to job listings – for example, the game was said to be open world, and Cloud Chamber advertised for writers who could “weave effective, character-driven stories in an open world setting. “
