FPS Genre Is About More than the Military, Says Dishonored Developer

Dishonored was one of the big video game announcements made between E3 2011 and the currently in-progress Gamescom trade events, with the developers promising a new sort of first person experience that blends exploration, choices and a universe that reacts to the player.

Now the developers at Arkane Studios are saying that Dishonored is aiming to show gamers that the first person shooter space is about more than the simple military simulation that is dominating it at the moment, via titles like Call of Duty from Activision Blizzard and Battlefield from Electronic Arts.

Rapahel Colantonio, who is the co-founder of Arkane Studios, has told AusGamers that, “For years, if you wanted to make a game like BioShock or Dishonored or Fallout — I’m talking about the new incarnation of Fallout — it would have been impossible.”

He added, “You would always get the same answer from publishers ‘nah, those games will never sell. Those games are too complicated. They are between two genres. Nobody wants to buy them’, etc, etc. Because they are very hardcore or whatever. And for us as gamers well we started to believe it ourselves ‘maybe we’re screwed, from now on we’ll never play those cool games anymore’.”

The two executives are saying that there's space on the market for both the military shooter and for games that explore more complex worlds with more of an emphasis on consequences and on high level concepts.

Dishonored will see the gamer take on the role of a disgraced assassin who is free to explore a complex world, a mix between fantasy and real world technology.

The game world will be directly affected by the player's actions and by his moral choices.

Dishonored will be published by Bethesda on the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 and the PC with the launch date set for the second quarter of 2012 at the moment.