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John Romero is one of the designers of games such as Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Commander Keen, and Daikatana. He, along with others at id like John Carmack, was one of the pioneers in creating the First Person Shooter. Recently, Romero spoke with Valve programer Rick Johnson at Gamesauce Conference in Seattle about the evolution of the genre.
The Q and A opened with the topic of development cycles back when Romero started working at Softdisk. Working at Softdisk enabled him to double the ammount of time it took to release a game. "It was really awesome to have two months to put a game out," he said. "We could put a lot of games out in two months back then. That was probably around 1991."
The more ambitious the projects got, however, the longer it took to release a game. Commander Keen took 3 months to make and Wolf 3D took twice as long. "Doom took a year - which was like crazy-time ... and then Quake took a year and a half." Today games can take up to three years to develop."
On the topic of team sizes, Romero spoke about his preference for small groups. "I've always liked really small teams and I think that if your going to make a game that is really big and really ambitious, you need to break your team up into small pieces." He then complemented the Cabal system Valve uses. "I really think that Half-Life 2 really nailed development in a way that you can really concentrate people in a small piece." He did not note that Half-Life 2: Episode 3 is still unannounced. Get on that, Valve!
The host of the event later asked about story in FPS games, asking if story trumps gameplay. Romero brought up Valve's Left 4 Dead as an example of a gameplay-driven product with a great amount of story blended in. "A zombie apocalypse story is nice and small, but the experience you have in the game is much bigger than that." He also compliments the game's speed and resolution. "The experience was the reason for playing it."
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Romero said that he was surprised that nobody imitated the narrative approach created in the first Half-Life. "The cinematics were natural. They didn't take the control away from the player." Romero's Daikatana was created with cutscenes and was released two years after Half-Life.
As a man who has developed games for cell phones and other mobile devices, Romero sees that other portables like the Apple iPad aren't going anywhere. He believes that it is important to create unique stories for mobile games about ongoing franchises. he says that people will play the mobile games if they feature new stories with new characters instead of plots being ported from previous games. "It will expand your IP"
After complimenting Chrono Trigger's soundtrack, Romero stated that "Chrono Trigger is my favorite game, pretty much". He also said that Half-Life 2 is probably his favorite FPS and his current favorite developer is Valve Software. It was a toss-up whether Doom 1 or 2 was his favorite FPS that he worked on; with Quake a close second.
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