While most people believe that there is little room left for innovation in First Person Shooters, John Romero – the man who defined the whole genre – believes that this couldn't be further from the truth.
"There are unbelievable amounts of new stuff to do in that genre," he told Develop. "The idea of a shooter is running around with weapons, in first-person, blowing things away. But what are you really doing? What is the world like? Who are you, and what do you care about? What are you doing in the world that’s different?"
"Take something like World of Warcraft – what if that was a shooter? You have a giant world full of quests, and tons of people with PvP already in the game. If World of Warcraft was a shooter, that would be brand new – nobody would have seen something that big and that cool," he added.
"And it wouldn’t be anything like WoW because of the nature of being a shooter – it would probably concentrate on a lot of areas that were similar to Team Fortress 2. Perhaps villages would become like TF2 levels, where you would try to score as much as you could before deciding to move on. Or that area would have specific goals, like taking out five snipers and two demo guys to retrieve some key items. Perhaps once you’ve exhausted that village, you could go to another one down the road. And maybe the planet’s full of them – nobody’s played a game like that."
Romero is well known for designing some of the FPS genre-defining titles including Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. Following the success of Quake, Romero tried to outshine it with Daikatana but it ended up being one of the biggest gaming letdowns in history. Released in 1997, Daikatana was Romero's last FPS until he revealed during Gamescom that he is working on a new First Person Shooter.
"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," asserted Romero. "We’ve barely scratched the surface."
