Highlights
- John Romero considers Half-Life 2 to be one of the best-designed shooters ever, a blueprint for perfection that exemplifies the best qualities of the genre.
- He believes that a great shooter should offer a variety of scenarios, keeping players surprised and engaged while avoiding predictability.
- Romero emphasizes the importance of tight controls and varied gameplay, with fluid movement and snappy aiming, as well as offering new experiences and evolving narratives to keep players immersed and engaged.
If anyone knows a great first-person shooter when they see one, it's John Romero. As one of the early pioneers of first-person shooters during a time when game development was seeing many of its most significant innovations, Romero and his contemporaries essentially wrote the book on shooting games. Romero has also quite literally written his own book recently, entitled Doom Guy: Life in First Person. Leveraging his incredible memory due to a rare condition known as hyperthymesia, Romero's book is a shockingly detailed recounting of his perspective as someone at the cutting edge of game development.
Game ZXC sat down with John Romero for an interview about his new book and all things gaming, and he spent some time weighing in on what he felt made a great first-person shooter. In particular, he cited Valve's Half-Life 2 as a "blueprint for perfection," a sentiment that is shared by practically anyone who has played it. He felt that Half-Life 2 exemplified all of the best qualities of shooters, and much of its design is aligned with how he believes shooters should be approached by developers.
Half-Life 2 Did Everything Right
Considered one of the best first-person shooters of all time, Half-Life 2 took players on an incredible adventure through a variety of sprawling levels full of hidden secrets, physics-based puzzles, challenging encounters, and novel mechanics that gave each section a distinct identity. In one mission, players are racing through canals in an airboat to evade a pursuing Hunter-Chopper. In others, Gordon Freeman breaks into a prison alongside a horde of antlions. The variety in the game's scenarios is part of why Romero holds Half-Life 2 in such high regard.
"Half-Life 2 has got to be one of the best-designed shooters ever. They did so much perfectly and that game is a blueprint for perfection. That's what you want to feel like when you play a shooter. You want a lot of capability, you want the player to feel some fear, a lot of curiosity, allow them to have a lot of exploration, and then some arena moments, but you don't want those arena moments to feel formulaic or predictable. As soon as your game becomes predictable, you start losing the player. So keeping the player surprised is really exciting and critical to keeping people in your game."
Half-Life 2 evoked a number of strong emotions throughout the game, at times coming across as a terrifying horror first-person shooter and later on as an uplifting character-driven drama about humanity overcoming an extradimensional alien oppressor. For a first-time player, there's simply no way to predict what kinds of encounters may be around the corner, or what tools will become available later on. To Romero, this is exactly what a shooter experience should be like.
First-Person Shooters Need Tight Controls and Varied Gameplay
Romero also spoke about what he feels is important in general for a shooter to be fun and successful. Responsive controls are critical in his opinion, and players need to feel truly in control of their character so that they can be properly immersed. The first thing any player notices is the fluidity of movement and the snappiness of aiming, and that's why games like Titanfall with freeform parkour movement were so well-received among players.
"First of all, your controls need to feel really good. You have to have super responsive control, but you also need to give the player something new all the time. Every time you get to a new level, you should have not just one thing new, but a lot of things that are new so that you feel like you're on a real adventure and it's not like, 'Oh, it's those five monsters in a different level.' It's got to be an evolution and the narration should follow the movement through these levels, like you want to feel like the story is evolving and you're an important part of it."
He also felt that it's important for new experiences to be offered to the player frequently. Games like Halo are perfect examples of this: some missions are corridor shooters in spaceship interiors, others are vehicular onslaughts with tanks, and later on, the Flood is introduced and demands a completely different approach to combat. The evolving narrative drives both the story and the gameplay forward into unexpected places and Romero believes that's the key to a truly great shooter.