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BioShock: The Shooter

[Apr 30, 2007, 10:02 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

The BioShock Q&A on IGN.AU talks with Jon Chey about Irrational's upcoming action/RPG, um, no wait, it's a shooter: "Actually, this is pretty simple: BioShock is a shooter. It's true that it is doing things that no other shooter has done before, and that gets people confused about what genre it is. It's funny how genres work. They certainly help people figure out what games are and help them decide whether or not to pick something up and try it out. But at the same time, they often act like straightjackets. Developers get lazy and just follow conventions. I mean, why does every shooter have to go in a straight line from where you enter the level to where you leave? GTA asked questions about what it means to be a driving game ("why do you have to go round and round a closed track?") and that turned the genre on its head. We're trying to do the same thing for the shooter genre by adding non-linear exploration, choice of tools, deeper interactions with AIs and so on. But at the end of the day, you've got to be able to aim and pull the trigger. This is a shooter."

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45.

Re: Not so well said!

May 1, 2007, 08:40

Ecthelion

Hrm, actually, I'd say that X3 was an RPG. A space-sim RPG, yeah, but an RPG nonetheless. You could play practically any role you wanted. You could be a mercenary, a pirate, a cop, you could align yourself with different factions, build a business empire, etc. Many, many choices, most of them high-level. You stole the words right out of my mouth. X3 is definitely what I'd call an RPG. It doesn't have stats-based character advancement in terms of the standard Strength, Constitution, etc, but your stats do change based on your actions. Aren't money, number of kills, size of empire, etc. all stats? In terms of choices, there are a lot of high and low-level ones. You don't even have to fight if you don't want to. Even Deus Ex gave you some choices, not just about ending but you could choose to save your brother and then see him again, or you could let him die and he'd be gone. I liked that part of the game too (although keeping him alive can be damn hard sometimes). But we know from the sequel that JC's brother lived. While there were many things I didn't like about the sequel, it's cool that they chose an optional minor outcome (that most people probably didn't see) from Deus Ex as the foundation of the game. The conversations were pretty good too. It's just the rest of the game that wasn't that great. This comment was edited on May 1, 08:41.

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