And next, all of the talent anybody cares about leaves the company?

[Great Rumbler]

And I know I've talked at length before about some of the changes that were made to the Elder Scrolls series between the second and third games, when the series went console.

And going by what you said, most of them were good changes.

System Shock 1 or 2 vs. Bioshock -- I've only played part of SS2 and not the others, but just based on what I know about Bioshock I'd have said something along the lines of what GR did -- it's much more FPS and much less RPG than SS2, and thus less deep and complex. "It's really an FPS" is what you hear about Bioshock, and that's not something people really said about the System Shock games... and the same development team made SS2 and Bioshock, so that's not the reason.

SS2 has some RPG elements, but it's still more or less a shooter. Yes, there is management of resoures [health, amunition, and weaponry], but you can get that in Resident Evil. The purpose of that is, as I said, to lift up the feeling of dread present in the game.

Also, the ability to use different types of characters doesn't really affect the game all that much. You can run-and-gun, you can hack a bunch of stuff, or you can run-and-gun but with magic. But if with the other types, you're still doing a lot of the same things.

Bioshock is different, but it's not THAT different when you get right down to it.