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John Romero On Reinventing the Shooter
An anonymous reader writes: John Romero helped bring us Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein, but he's also known for Daikatana — an immensely-hyped followup that flopped hard. After remaining on the periphery of game development since then, Romero announced last month that he's coming back to the FPS genre with a new game in development. Today, he spoke with Develop Magazine about his thoughts on the future of shooters. Many players worry that the genre is stagnant, but Romero disagrees that this has to be the case. "Shooters have so many places to go, but people just copy the same thing over and over because they're afraid to try something new. We've barely scratched the surface."
He also thinks the technology underpinning games matters less than ever. Romero says high poly counts and new shaders are a distraction from what's important: good game design. "Look at Minecraft – it's unbelievable that it was made by one person, right? And it shows there's plenty of room for something that will innovate and change the whole industry. If some brilliant designers take the lessons of Minecraft, take the idea of creation and playing with an environment, and try to work out what the next version of that is, and then if other people start refining that, it'll take Minecraft to an area where it will become a real genre, the creation game genre."
He also thinks the technology underpinning games matters less than ever. Romero says high poly counts and new shaders are a distraction from what's important: good game design. "Look at Minecraft – it's unbelievable that it was made by one person, right? And it shows there's plenty of room for something that will innovate and change the whole industry. If some brilliant designers take the lessons of Minecraft, take the idea of creation and playing with an environment, and try to work out what the next version of that is, and then if other people start refining that, it'll take Minecraft to an area where it will become a real genre, the creation game genre."
You're probably too young to remember, but Redneck Rampage had mosquitoes as big as a man's head, and they could, given time, do enough damage to kill you.
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Not even necessary. Just do what Valve did: make all of the community created work sellable at the maker's choice on an official platform and take a cut from every transaction. The authors are happy because they get to profit from their work, the users are happy because there's a truckload of cosmetics, including some really rare and valuable ones that they can flaunt around, and obviously Valve is happy because they're basically making money by doing nothing. It's working stupidly well for them with Dota 2.
Notch's Minecraft was inspired by Zach Barth's abandoned Infiniminer, but infiniminer was just one gameplay aspect of Dwarf Fortress extracted, purified, and switched to first person graphics. (worth noting that the predecessor to Dwarf Fortress was in fact first person 3d. It was even voxel-based.)
And what was the inspiration for the mining and building in Dwarf Fortress? Roguelikes and sim games.
There are no ideas that don't build on other ideas.
It's not really fair to paint Romero as a complete failure, he brought soul to id's games, their games were just hollow without him. The success of Wolfenstein, then Doom, then Quake can't be pinned on one person, it was the culmination of talent at id with John Carmack doing great work with graphics programming advances, people like American McGee producing great maps, Romero coming up with great storylines, and Paul Steed producing great models and so on.
What Romero failed at was going it alone, he just didn't have what it took to manage a project and studio all by himself, that's where he failed. But credit where credit's due, he was responsible in no small part for breathing much of the life into id's games which is why without him, we just had these soulless graphics tech demos that id has produced ever since he left.
This guy above all else knows what makes an FPS great, what he needs is a great team to take the whole business side of things off him and a great project leader that will give him the freedom to do most of what he wants, but the common sense to reign him in where he starts pushing the boat out just a bit too much in terms of what's practical in a reasonable timeframe and with finite resources. If he finds that, I don't see why he can't breathe life into a great FPS like he's done many times before the great Daikatana fuck up.