In a candid interview with Team Xbox, Irrational Games co-founder and creative lead Ken Levine said the highly-anticipated upcoming title Bioshock is fundamentally a shooter, not an RPG.
“I don’t really view it as a hybrid, and here’s my thinking on it: A lot of people when they first saw it said, ‘Oh, it’s an RPG.’ To me it’s a shooter, and it had to work as a shooter to do that. And we’ve done a lot of work to make sure this is just a great shooter-and things blow up great and the weapons are fun and the powers are great,” Levine said.
He added, however, that in his estimation the term had come to encompass too much and should not be indicative of a game’s expectations.
“I think that people are very comfortable when they see a crappy shooter. Like, if you go play a shooter that doesn’t have good AI and doesn’t have good weapons, you still call it a shooter even though it has less than other shooters, but when people see a shooter that has a lot more, people don’t know what to make of it,” he said.
Bioshock, set for an August release, is widely seen as the spiritual successor to the acclaimed System Shock and its sequel. Both those games possess a heavy role-playing game orientation.
During the interview, Levine went on to say in rather colorful language that there will be no multiplayer – “You only have so many hours in the day” – and hinted that a sequel may be unlikely given the uniqueness of the game’s setting and story.
