Interview With John Romero

spensdawg writes "Here is an interesting interview with John Romero on Games.net. He gets into the original design philosophy for the first Doom games, what he would have done differently, and his plans for the future. Worth watching if you want to know a little more about the mad scientist behind Doom." A warning: this is a video interview

Comments

Re:I'm sorry, the genius behind Doom?

[91degrees]

Perhaps, but none of ID's games have been so much fun since he left. Perhaps someone else was responsible or perhaps it was just a good team.

On level design & Romero

[Zhe Mappel]

I don't think John understands why Doom worked. Asked what he'd change about it, his reply is he'd hire better level designers (and even takes an unnecessary dig at Sandy Petersen). They didn't know any better back then, he says. Huh?! Do you hear anyone complaining about the original Doom?

In fact, fans are still recreating Doom levels for other games as homages, which isn't to say those levels were stunningly brilliant. No, they were all they had to be--because the gameplay was so great. And the great fun rubbed off on the levels.

By contrast, Daikatana's levels were built and rebuilt, polished and repolished. Fat lot of good it did. Design is law, of course, as the Ion Storm mantra went; but Daikatana is $0.99 in the bargain bin, too.

Romero's on better ground when knocking Doom 3 for being dark, repetitive and predictable. Although he doesn't realize it, this argument bears on his earlier misguided comment. D3 is a masterpiece of level design, or at least of a certain highly-detailed future-industrial style. And that's all anyone takes away from it: how it looked. Having stood in line to get a copy the day it came out, I'm still trying to forget how mind-numbingly poorly it played.

Bottom line: level design is vastly overrated. Sure, it can be an art form (see, for instance, old custom Quake levels built by geniuses such as Headshot or Mr. Fribbles). But most games look alike today; no matter how technically sound their appearance, few do more than go for realism or ape genre cliches. This even as hyper-realistic design means longer development times and higher costs. And nobody thinks games are more fun than their blockier predecessors--no, quite the opposite.

So where Romero talks about level design as a virtue and even dreams about going back in time to revisualize Doom, the truth is something different. Level design is becoming little more than a clonable commodity.

The solution is to outsource it. Set up companies that do nothing but build cities, dungeons, jungles, etc. to some standard, scriptable world-building spec. Devs can then buy chunks of these "places" and build their games in them--for much less than the cost of paying salaries for asset creation. This would liberate game companies to pour their energies into gameplay before it becomes a lost art.

inappropriate videos?

[arm000]

Did anyone find it strange that the interview was mixed with videos of doom3 and half-life2? Two games that he had nothing to do with?

Re:I'm sorry, the genius behind Doom?

[AlexMax2742]

Maybe the problem is that the gameplay behind id's games hasn't changed in any significant way. Doom was great back in the day, but as a modern game, it would be torn apart for being nothing more than a run-and-gun. Games like Half-Life 2 have done so well because of NON-combat elements, like story development and physics-based puzzles, in addition to some great action. id's games have remained focused on action, and many have found that to become stale, after all these years.

Incorrect. I can say with a great deal of certainty that there have been very few games like Quake and the classic Doom series in recent years. Run and gun is not stale at all, just as long as it's done right. Being story driven does not necissarily make a game better, and being run and gun does not necissarily make a game worse. I still play Doom all the time, but whats more, I've introduced Doom to other relatively new gamers, and once they get past the graphics they have a lot of fun with it too.

In my opinion, John Romero and John Carmack made a great team. Romero had the nuts ideas and awesome level designs, and Carmack had the engine and the smarts and the work ethic. Without Carmack, Romero didin't have the tech or the reigns to keep him on target with Daikatana. Without Romero, Carmack and the rest of ID couldn't figure out how to make a fun FPS.