John Romero is Planning Another First Person Shooter
That's right: John Romero of Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein fame is designing another shooter.
Ok, before we get too excited, let's just sit back and remind ourselves that John Romero was the mastermind behind Daikatana. There, we said it.
Yet before that PC gaming "bomb" annihilated our hopes and dreams, the great Romero helped put the FPS genre on the gaming map by working on classic titles at id Software including Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake. We hated to see him go when he left id to form Ion Storm, and weren’t too thrilled with his numerous projects thereafter. But maybe, just maybe, he'll re-heat those creative juices that helped make id's popular shooters so great with his own upcoming FPS.
"Yes, I'm definitely going to be making another shooter and it will be on PC first," he explained to Eurogramer. "I don't want to talk about the details but I already know what it is. I've already kind of designed the thing and it's pretty cool - though of course, I am going to say that. I think it's a neat design, I haven't seen the design anywhere else."
Currently Romero is CEO of social game studio Loot Drop, but he didn't say if the new shooter will be an official Loot Drop release, or a side project. But what he did admit was that he hasn't formally started working on the project, only that the overall design has been etched in stone. Even more, it will be "MMO-ish."
"It's a persistent game, it has persistent player data, the character grows and gets better over time," he said. "I think most gamers expect that now anyway, but this was a design I'd done a while ago. I think it's pretty valid. You will be playing the game as you would expect a shooter to feel, but the specifics of your situation, narrative wrapper and reward system are all unique. I wouldn't want to give out any specifics until I'm close to shipping it. I've learned my lesson about talking too soon about specific game features and release dates."
To date, the last shooter Romero produced was Red Faction for the N-Gage gaming phone back in 2003. And again, let's not forget Daikatana which is considered to be one of the biggest commercial failures in video game history. Still, Romero believes he has the right tools to make a shooter that fits within modern times.
"I don't think it's changed other than that the 3D graphics have to be good and there are a ton of basics in the design that have to be there for players to feel that it's a current game," he said. "But I already have a lot of that stuff designed and none of what I've done has become invalid over time based on today's shooters. So I don't think there's an issue with it feeling dated or feeling old. It's not going to be an old-school shooter - it won't be pixelated. But it will probably have some faster movement than most games have right now."
To read the full interview, head here.

It's called a shooter for a reason. If it moves you shoot it. That's like saying "I'm so sick of RPGs because I have to play a role."
What happened to proper adventure games and scifi games that spur the imagination and prompt one to use their brain?
Granted, there are a few shooters that incorporate a good story and some thinking, but those are rare.
It's called a shooter for a reason. If it moves you shoot it. That's like saying "I'm so sick of RPGs because I have to play a role."
[edit] to be clear I wasnt mocking Romero I was speaking personally. The closest Ive seen to my idea for a game was borderlands but even that was a long way off from what I wanted to do [/edit]
So... not another Daikatana. Check. Well good, wish him the best of luck. I think he's due another chance to really succeed. He's toiled in relative obscurity long enough.
So go play Mass Effect. You get a little of both. There's other games that combine the two genre's as well. Your options aren't actually that limited and those "rare" great shooters aren't so rare afterall.
And there are good shooters, and not so good shooters. Think BF3 vs MW3 (we all know BF3 is better). Or the original counter strike.
Unless he got over his arrogance, and can put together a good team to build a good game.
The time of lone wolf programmers putting out good games is long over. You need to have teams of specialized folks now to put something out that is worthy of our ATI 7k computers....
So, hopefully, this guy now has organizational/leadership skills under his belt or its gonna flop....
=D
Borderlands is an excellent example of what I'm talking about, and BL 2 (BLT as some of us like to say), coming out in September, will be even more so. BL isn't an MMO, its multiplayer is limited to 4 players, but the developers of the game are now using the term "Roleplaying Shooter" - RPS - to describe it and I think it fits.
So, I think Romero is on the right track, assuming, as some of you have said, he can put a serious and talented team together to do it.
Fallout, incorporates RPG into shooters. If they made an online version, it would've been MMO. There are also FPS real-time strategy like Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare. And for silly shooters, there's shank and Gotham City Impostors.
The FPS genre is pretty much mashed with every other type of gameplay out there. There are also vice versa scenarios like commandos (RTS-FPS).
It's filled. Now it's the battle of the physics engine and graphics and realism or creativity in the case of TF2.
John Carmack has put a great challenge upon himself. Either his idea is THAT STUNNING or it will ultimately fail.
I'm so sick of hearing about all the big name game designers that are riding on past history of sucess that is decades old. IF they were really relevant, they'd have more reccent sucessful titles instead of failures or unmentioned games. Hell carmack is also still riding on the doom series his failure to empress with Rage is a testement to that. Game design is by its very nature a TEAM endevor, I'm sick of these show pony designers slapping their names on a game that has outdated ideals and getting lauded for it , when they didn't even do most the work. It's time for individual recognition to die . because 1. It's unprofessional, 2. no one person can produce a triple A game by them selves these days. and 3. it's insulting to the other 50 or so artist,animators and coders that busted their humps working on a game.
Fallout doesnt put prg into FPS dummy , fallout 3 and NV put FPSer into an rpg and honestly you can still play the game entirely in 3rd person too so not the best example of genre mashing , the game is definitely more RPG by a long shot with a option to use a FPSer view.