Bioshock - Interview #2 @ TeamXbox

TeamXbox has posted the second part of the Ken Levine Bioshock interview mentioned in yesterday's roundup.  Once again, Ken is running away from the FPS/RPG label as fast as he can:

This is kind of a hybrid. How do you think this will play out—do you see certain audiences maybe shying away from it?

Ken Levine: 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. I think you can talk about shooters and the s*** that can go on and the amount of chaos that can happen in a shooter, and I don’t think there’s anything out there like it.

Before you even get into the underlying system, I think when you try to do too many things, you can get in trouble. This was going to be a shooter, first and foremost, and it’s going to be a shooter with more that you haven’t seen in other games. 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.

I view it as a shooter. It’s just that it’s a shooter that has things that, hopefully, people will now expect…like environmental simulation in a shooter. And non-scriptiness in a shooter. And AIs that have relationships with each other in a shooter. And things working with each other, interacting with each other in a shooter. That’s what we’re trying to do.