Bioshock: Ken Levine Speaks @ IGN

<a href="http://pc.ign.com/articles/733/733157p1.html" target="_blank">IGN</a> editors had a chance for a Q&A session with Ken Levine of Irrational Games, developers of the upcoming Bioshock.<blockquote><em><b>IGN: Why is this considered a first-person shooter? I'm trying to be very clear about it. We're calling this a first-person RPG, not a first-person shooter, and have this need to classify, for better or for worse, the game. You're telling us it's a first-person shooter from a marketing and from a gameplay standpoint, but it's got all these other elements. Let's take Grand Theft Auto. It's primarily an action game, but it's also an adventure game because you explore, collect and follow a story. It's got RPG elements. And it's really hard to categorize because it's got a little bit of everything. But in the end, what's probably going to happen is that we're going to call this genre, or sub-genre, like, urban mayhem, or the GTA genre. So when we think of first-person shooters, we think of games in which you're seeing things from a first-person perspective and shooting things. Just to be the devil's advocate here, our argument against your intent on calling the game a first-person shooter, not a first-person RPG, is that from what we can understand, you can go through BioShock without shooting and most of the things you're doing aren't shooting. So it's confusing as to why you'd want to call it a first-person shooter. You know, when in fact, it's a first-person role-playing game. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, tell me something I don't know, but...</b><br><br>Ken Levine: The key thing in a first-person shooter, I mean if you look at pacinga ¦ BioShock provides a full suite of weapons in BioShock and not only weapons, but modifiable weaponsa ¦so you know, you have EA's Crysis, and what Crysis brings to the table as a shooter is a full suite of modifiable first-person weapons. We also allow the player to mix and match that with other things that they might want to do, like the X-men like plasma powers. Or hacking, if they want to. But at root, it has to work as a great first-person shooter. I guess the question is, and I should have asked you this before Half-Life came out, do we limit what we call a first-person shooter to these things and nothing else? You can certainly say, it doesn't have those things, then it doesn't deserve to be called a first-person shooter. But because it has more, it doesn't count as a first-person shooter? Then aren't we limiting what we consider a first-person shooter can be? Then aren't we damaging our ability to grow the genre?</em></blockquote>
Source: IGN