Shooters like *Gears of War *could be considered great role-playing games, says the co-founder of RPG developer BioWare.
Hmm, where have I heard that before? Oh, right: Not two days ago, Epic's Cliff Bleszinski said that "the future of shooters is RPGs." Speaking to Wired.com before the publication of that interview, BioWare's Ray Muzyka articulated similar sentiments, pointing out that many other game genres have lifted the "key pillars" of role-playing games.
"Genres are almost a vestige of the past," said Muzyka. "In a way, a lot of the best shooters are RPGs as well, because they allow you to have progression, exploration, combat or conflict, and a story."
Those key attributes of RPGs, he said, are valuable for "any kind of game."
As the leader of Electronic Arts' role-playing game division, Muzyka is to RPGs what Bleszinski and his company are to shooters. It's telling that leaders in the creation of these two seemingly disparate types of games are reaching the same conclusion.
Muzyka, speaking to press last month after a demo of the company's upcoming game Dragon Age: Origins, said that he considers the definition of RPG to be "broad."
"The possibility space is almost limitless," he said. "I see games like Grand Theft Auto headed in the same direction." Just as action games are incorporating more narrative elements, so is BioWare looking to incorporate game mechanics into its RPGs that will make them more accessible to a wider swath of gamers, he says.
For example, in Dragon Age, you'll be able to play the game by just controlling your main character, letting the other three people in your party operate on auto-pilot, he said.
All game designers are "trying to solve for the same things – allow players to be explorers, progress their characters, have conflict, story, narrative, social interaction… those are fun pillars of gameplay that everyone wants to solve," he said.
Don't worry: Halo isn't going to turn into Final Fantasy, or vice versa, anytime soon. But as games get more realistic, developers have almost been forced to add in features that, 10 or 20 years ago, would have been the exclusive domain of other genres. No one noticed that the sprite-based characters in the 8-bit shooter Contra didn't talk to each other, but how jarring would it have been if Gears of War's lifelike leading men never said a word?
After all, shooters and RPGs are simulating the same thing – fighting. But historically, they've simulated vastly different slices of the experience: the action of combat in one case, the development and story of warfare in the other. Gamers might have developed a taste for one or the other, but when contemporary technology allows games to do both, the separation seems more and more arbitrary.
If the inevitable future of games is something like the Holodeck – where you can experience anything you like, in whatever configuration you choose – then isn't the idea of "genre" in a piece of gaming software ultimately doomed, on a long enough timeline?
For the time being, there are still players who want shooters and players who want RPGs, because they prefer the particularities of each genre. And Muzyka acknowledges that other side of the argument; there are still gamers, he says, that say "Oh, I want to buy a great RPG, because there's a sort of feel that you get when you buy an RPG, or a shooter, or a (real-time strategy) game."
But with Bleszinski suggesting that his comments on RPGs should give us a clue as to the next game in the Gears series, it's clear that genre lines, so distinct in an earlier age, are becoming more and more blurred.
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