Doom designer: "we’ve barely scratched the surface" of shooters

John Romero, designer of Doom and Daikatana, reckons there's plenty of opportunities to innovate in the first-person shooter genre.

In a new interview with Develop, Romero suggested combining a shooter with an MMO like World of Warcraft.

“There are unbelievable amounts of new stuff to do in that genre,” he said.

“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.

Isn't that what Destiny is?

“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."

Right, okay.

“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. We’ve barely scratched the surface.”

Romero is currently working on a new FPS, apparently.

If you like Romero and his amazing hair you should check out the full interview, it's pretty good.