Slashdot Mirror
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."
Son of a bitch, we don't need any more "reinventions" of this and "reimagining" of that and "rebooting" of franchises.
Any time anyone tries to do such things, the end product is total shit.
Look at GNOME 3. It tried to "reinvent the Linux desktop experience". It's total, utter, absolute shit in every way possible.
Look at Firefox. It has recently tried to "reimagine" itself as if it were Chrome. It's now total, utter, absolute shit in every way possible.
Look at all of the "rebooted" movie series. It's one total, utter, absolute shit Incredible Hulk reboot after another.
Going in with the reinvent/reimagine/reboot mindset just results in total, utter, absolute shit being produced. Please, if you're thinking of doing this sort of stuff, do us all a favor and DON'T FUCKING DO IT!