John Romero’s Blackroom FPS Is Probably Going to Suck

BEACON TRANSCRIPT – I want to start with a disclaimer for this one article, as my opinion may offend a lot of people. That is not my intention; I’m just stating my personal opinions that are based on my previous experience with gaming. If those opinions are unpopular and might offend someone, I take full responsibility and promise to explain them in detail if needed.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s start talking about how John Romero’s Blackroom FPS is probably going to suck. Yeah, despite the fact that it’s a highly anticipated shooter coming from one of the fathers of gaming, as well as from some of the members of the original DOOM team, it’s probably going to be just another shooter that will end up mediocre at best.

But I’m not just going to let such an unpopular opinion drift around pointlessly and without a source. No, I’m going to tell you exactly why I think the game will fail miserably, as much as I wish I were wrong. Because hey, if you’re into gaming, you very likely started off with DOOM or Quake.

I’m going to start by taking you back all the way to the year 2000. According to Wikipedia, that is the year when the Pyrenean Ibex went extinct, when Putin was first elected President of Russia, when Sydney hosted the Olympic games and when PCs finally broke the 1GHz barrier. Oh, and a little game called Daikatana came out.

In case you’re too young, too old, or just too lucky to remember, John Romero decided he’d made the game he always wanted to make. He was so obsessed with making a “developer-centric” game, as he put it, that the final product ended up being one of the most notoriously bad games in video game history.

And boy, oh boy, does history seem to be repeating itself. Not only does the upcoming Blackroom have the bad luck of being a very important project for Romero (meaning that he won’t be willing to sacrifice too many of his ideas in exchange for quality), but it also features the same idea behind Daikatana.

While Daikatana had you traveling around four different time periods attempting to slash all enemies in sight without accidentally killing yourself because of mystical reasons, Blackroom will have you going around multiple time periods attempting to shoot all enemies in sight because of holographic reasons.

Plus we already know that the plot will be full of holes and most likely quite poorly explained, seeing as Romero said that the game will have a focus on the narrative, but that he expects the players to be smart and to assume that they already know what is going on… which is pretty much the opposite of good storytelling, where you actually have to explain the story without assuming that the audience will get it.

But I digress. I really, really wish that Blackroom will be as awesome as John Romero imagines it to be, but so far it only sounds like it’s planned to be his redemption. Sure, he’s worked on plenty of decent, or even good games since Daikatana, but I can’t help but feel like Blackroom is meant to show that he can, in fact, make developer-centric games and be good at it.

But seeing as the few images we got from the game look just like any other shooter these days, where the player character is given a holographic guide and in-game holographic technology to follow around the map, it sadly look like it will end up being a generic, by-the-dozen shooter at best. I, for one, am hoping for at least a game as bad as Daikatana, as even that would be better than mediocrity.

Image source: Twitter