John Romero tells us what’s wrong with modern first-person shooter games in a new interview.
As much as we should respect our elders, John Romero hasn’t made a good shooter since Quake. So maybe we should take the words he utters with a bit of a grain of salt. That said, there may be some wisdom shared in a recent interview with The Guardian where Romero discusses just what’s wrong with today’s shooters.
To start, Romero says we’re all a little too focused on the looter-shooter phenomenon. He points out — rightly — that having tons of loot is great but only when it doesn’t take away from the action.
“I would rather have fewer things with more meaning, than a million things you don’t identify with,” he said. “I would rather spend more time with a gun and make sure the gun’s design is really deep – that there’s a lot of cool stuff you learn about it.”
He compared today’s shooters with the classic Doom where the design characteristics were vastly different. “For Doom, it was really important that every time you got a new weapon, it never made any previous weapons useless. That was a critical design characteristic. We’re going to add a new thing that can’t negate anything that came before.”
Looter shooters, by comparison, are the exact opposite. Players are constantly comparing newly acquired guns to see which one is better, and then tossing away older weapons as they become obsolete.
Another aspect of modern games that Romero laments is the death of the “secret room.” Doom was always filled with secret rooms and compartments to find hidden gear, ammo, and armor. Because modern games cost far more to create (both in terms of manpower and dollars), developers are inclined to only include the bare essentials when it comes to level design. The first thing to get cut is often that neat secret room.
You can read the whole thing over on The Guardian, where they also discuss Romero’s new gangster strategy game, Empire of Sin, where you play as a 1920s mob boss creating a criminal empire in the age of prohibition.
Source: The Guardian