Renowned FPS developer MachineGames de-emphasized guns for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle because the fedora-wearer is mostly just “a somewhat clumsy archeologist”

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle might be first-person, but that doesn’t mean MachineGames is making it an outright shooter.

MachineGames is pretty well known for its first-person shooters – in fact, it’s even lauded for them, in particular its affinity towards games that let you absolutely wreck Nazis (i.e., Wolfenstein), something Indiana Jones does a lot as well. But something Indy doesn’t do all that much is use guns (apart from that one famous scene). He’s more of a whip and fists kind of guy, and recently the game’s creative director Axel Torvenius spoke with Edge magazine (via GamesRadar) about not relying on gunplay too much, which the team views more of a “fallback solution” than anything else.

“We do not encourage gunplay. It’s not being pushed as the primary way forward,” Torvenius explains. “The primary way forward is always trying to use your wits and your whip.” Those that know the films also know that Indiana Jones is the kind of character who uses his smarts to beat someone else rather than just gunning them down, because he’s mostly just a regular archeologist (if you ignore all those adventures he goes on constantly).

“Indy doesn’t have superpowers,” Torvenius continues. “Very often, you can tell that it’s not easy for him to be in a fight. At the end of the day, he’s a teacher and a somewhat clumsy archeologist. He just happens to have this passion that puts him in these weird situations constantly with enemies and traps.

“It wouldn’t be true to the character to have him constantly shooting camps for all enemies constantly, and the team at MachineGames wants to emphasize the danger level. We’ve been trying to capture that sense that, if you need to engage in combat, it’s very dangerous to be shot at. It’s also very dangerous to shoot at enemies, because they will have an alarm system and reinforcements coming in.”

That honestly sounds quite reassuring, considering most of the memorable sequences from the original films weren’t about big shoot outs or the like.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle finally got a release date at Gamescom, which was obviously great news for Xbox and PC fans – but PlayStation fans also will have been happy to see that they get to play it too (even if it is coming a bit later).