hindsight, it’s still somewhat strange to look back on an era where Wolfenstein 3D could have been considered too violent and shocking, a game that could almost be considered wholesome family-friendly
fun today were it not for all the portraits of Hitler. “I don’t think it’s an issue anymore, but back in the
day it was a shock. It’s just like heavy metal, D&D, and comic books. If it’s a cultural thing that kids jump into, then everyone thinks it’s bad. And then it just becomes normalised, and you wait for the next big thing that you’re gonna get upset about. “I think games are past that point. You have really great
quality games like The Last of Us and Uncharted, there’s so many good games with extremely well told stories. The rise of the narrative game is just amazing to watch. What Remains of Edith Finch is a high watermark for games like that. That’s what shooters are looking for, an Edith Finch that can really show where we can go, something exciting and new and not like what we’ve been doing for 30 years. Like the way Minecraft came out and showed a whole new way of making games, that you can create and have gameplay at the same time. How do we do that without making it look like we’re copying it?” Back to that (excellent) anecdote about FormGen’s
concerns about the game’s violence, though. While we admire the punk rock attitude of rejecting your publisher’s input, is this a freedom that’s afforded to developers today, as budgets (particularly in the triple-A space) spiral out of control? After all, id only had the creative freedom that they did because they were funding the project themselves, which hardly seems like an option for many developers today. At least, so we thought. “That still happens every day, all over the
place,” says Romero. “There’s so many indies. Maybe you’re doing it independently, you’re not being paid to do it, it’s your own time and your own idea. You can make a shooter in Unreal 5 way easier than you could have in the past. So you’re going to see more indie shooters that look incredible, and they’re doing what they want.
68 | MCV/DEVELOP June2022
“I’ve been playing shooters that people have made
exactly how they want. It’s massively violent, it’s super fast, it’s exactly what they wanted to do. And those things are coming out, and if they’re adopted by players during early access, then it shows that they’re on the right track and they can hire more people and up the production value, because they’re getting some income. “The early access stuff is great for indies to validate their
new design ideas, and to get the money to actually make them come out in a really good state. Subnautica did an amazing job going from that early access to a full release, with so much support from the community. People wanted to play that game because it was really unique, and it’s a kind of thing that happens in shooters now. Get it on Steam, get it on Early Access, try out new ideas. And if it doesn’t do really well, at least they made something and they’re going to do it better next time.” I think it’s fair to say that even three decades on,
Romero has retained his optimism and excitement for the future of shooters, and the future of games in general. While we can’t exactly predict what the shooter landscape will look like over the next 30 years, we can be sure there’s plenty of exciting new ideas coming to the genre. Which, for a staff writer burnt out on a genre so often overloaded with grim military shooters, is a breath of fresh air. “The fact that you might not see it happening doesn’t
mean people aren’t trying,” says Romero. “More games are shut down than are ever published, and that’s just a pile of death. A pile of dead things, and the people who were making them stacking them on top and moving forward. It’s non-stop, it happens every day and there’s so many of them. “You could say that the genre is saturated but when you
have people with new ideas coming into it, people who have belief that the genre still has tonnes of room to grow, then there’s somewhere to go in here. That’s why the genre keeps moving forward.”
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