We’re going to add a new thing that can’t negate anything that came before. That was a critical design characteristic. “For Doom, it was really important that every time you got a new weapon, it never made any previous weapons useless. Romero contrasts this to the sparing design of the original Doom, which launched in 1993 with a grand total of eight guns. “The more weapons you throw in there, the more you’re playing an inventory game.” It encourages you to think of each gun as essentially disposable, like an obsolete make of smartphone.
This abundance of loot – which reflects how blockbuster games generally have become Netflix-style services, defined by an unrelenting roll-out of “content” – means you spend as much time comparing guns in menus as savouring their capabilities. Modern shooters are too close to fantasy role-playing games in how they shower you with new weapons from battle to battle, Romero suggests. His eyes brighten when I start talking about demons and power-ups. When I meet Romero after a media showing of Empire of Sin, his partner Brenda Romero’s Prohibition-era gangster game (hence the speakeasy), I’m eager for his thoughts on how today’s shooters differ from the pixelated provocateurs of the 1990s. unashamedly abstract and filled with secrets. But he’s made headlines recently by creating a couple of surprise expansions for Doom, and his forthcoming sci-fi blaster, Blackroom, is an object of much interest among patrons of the old school.ĭoom. Romero himself has been somewhat estranged from shooters since releasing the widely panned Daikatana in 2000.
Doom’s grungy hellscapes have given way to the authentic militarised killing of Call of Duty and the Pixar stylings of Overwatch. Over two decades since Romero, John Carmack and the other founders of id Software inaugurated the first-person shooter with Wolfenstein 3D, the genre has changed beyond recognition. “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.” “I would rather have fewer things with more meaning, than a million things you don’t identify with,” he says, sitting in a Berlin bar mocked up to resemble a 1920s Chicago speakeasy. Doom co-creator John Romero has a rather different opinion. “Give us more guns!” is a common battle-cry among players of first-person shooters, the videogame industry’s bloodiest genre.
0 kommentar(er)
