Cliff Bleszinski recently talked to Develop about everything from the id Software buyout to the reason why there are so many bald space marines. In the second part of that interview, he also shared his thoughts on the future of first-person shooters.
"When I first saw BioShock I thought, 'how is this going to sell?' As a nerd I thought it was amazing but I was worried that a fifteen year old kid would pick it up and think 'what the f*** am I looking at'?" said Bleszinski. "But it pleased me to no end that the game did so well. I had a conversation with Harvey Smith – one of the lead designers on Deus Ex – and said to him the future of shooters is RPGs. He said he completely agreed."
While Bleszinski is very proud of what he's done at Epic and with Gears of War, he still has ambitions for furthering the company. "[I'd like] to continue to make very trans-media-friendly properties, and maintain our existing ones, and see what happens with the Gears series, and create new universes, and leverage our partners at People Can Fly, and Chair Entertainment, and continue to get our properties into comic books, and novels, and film."
6 Comments
8 months ago
Could we also flip that coin and consider that "the future of RPGs is shooters?" Let's just toss Fallout 3 and Mass Effect into that fray. We may not be there yet, but we're just talking progression. The first baby steps have definitely already been taken to move RPGs in that direction as well.
8 months ago
That's a fair point Sensical.
8 months ago
At first, RPGs were all turn based due to hardware limitations and their lineage in table-top play. Now, however, that limitation is no longer present and more RPG titles will have real-time action based combat because it is often more engaging and realistic.
8 months ago
One could argue about your last point, David. Westwood's Dune 2 came out at a time where there weren't even any 3D cards invented - and it was an RTS. I do see the table top lineage, though would say that often times those games were more realistic and certainly not less engaging than the too often monotonous "research biggest unit and rush" gameplay that many RTS count on. Dawn of War 2 and Relic's games in general are notable exceptions.
8 months ago
I'm not quite sure what you're debating Roland. I'm talking about Role-Playing Games and you're mentioning Real-Time Strategy titles.
8 months ago
Hi David, you see me much sleep deprived and misreading those three letters for something they were not saying. Apologies.
On the subject of RPGs, one could argue that there's a greater level of control of one's character(s) involved in turn-based fights as compared to real-time ones. Even if all the numbers are still being crunched under the hood of a real-time RPG, many gamers, myself included, like the option of turning turn-based combat on. On the other hand, Western developed RPGs have fewer and fewer party members that would need all that attention while those coming out of Japan very often still do. They offer turn-based combat even on the latest, rather not so limited hardware.
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