"We’re not starting at ground zero"

Image credit: GDC

Romero Games, the studio founded by Doom co-creator John Romero and Brenda Romero, are marching on despite losing staff after Microsoft suddenly pulling funding for their next shooter amid mass layoffs this summer. Romero says the project isn’t living on in its previous guise, but is instead having elements pulled from it as part of a near-total redesign into a smaller game.

The veteran developer revealed this in an onstage chat at Spanish games show Salón del Videojuego de Madrid spotted by our mates over at European Videogameplayer. "So, we survived the cancellation of a huge game," Romero said when asked about what he’s currently working on.

The game’s been basically completely redesigned," he continued. "The new game has nothing to do with the previous game, but it incorporates a lot of the elements that we had in the previous game. So, we’re not starting at ground zero. We have 50 million worth of a game [that] we can take pieces out of and put [them] into a brand new indie game."

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"It’s a much smaller game," Romero added. "It’s more fun for us, because the people working on it were all directors of different departments and they didn’t actually get to code or design or whatever - do it themselves - and so now we get to actually do that do the thing that we’re really good at ourselves."

As for what this new game emerging from the old one’s ashes will be like, the dev kept his info shotgun close to his chest, outside of confirming that it’s still a shooter. "The things that you do in it will be, I’d say, probably new to people [in] the way that going through Elden Ring was a really new experience. It was a very crazy place and a different world and it was really cool to explore it and just see ‘What is that?’ That’s the idea behind what we’re doing in this game."

It’s tough to read much into that last bit in my eyes, but regardless, here’s hoping Romero and co’s revamped shooty thing can stick the landing whenever it’s ready.