At Gamesom, Biomutant was shown to us by Stefan Ljungqvist who previously worked at Avalanche Studios on the Just Cause series and Mad Max and who has now founded Experiment 101. He mentioned this to make clear that there is an experience with creating open world games, which is what Biomutant is.
In the announcement of the game before Gamescom the words open world, post-apocalyptic, kung-fu and fabled were used. Fabled relates to the story telling through an animal, which is what this game does as it features only animals, but it was emphasized that they don't take themselves too serious in doing that. Kung-Fu relates to the player being able to make various moves and during those moves make use of weapons or other skills, while still being able to switch between them smoothly. My observation is that the relation with Kung-Fu is not about being able to use martial arts in hand-to-hand combat, but in the ability to use your weapons or skills in mid-air or while you are rolling or dodging. The post-apocalyptic part is not about a nuclear bomb or a terrible war that took place. In Biomutant it is about an ecological disaster, where dead oil is seeping through to the surface contaminating the world and everything that lives on it.
But animals dressed up as humans and doing kung fu doesn't appeal to me for RPG characters.
