John Romero's New Shooter Is Built Around the Joy of Getting Sidetracked

John Romero's next game remains unnamed, unreleased, and deliberately mysterious, but the veteran designer has offered a clearer sense of the philosophy behind it. The project is a shooter made in Unreal Engine 5.8, and Romero Games is approaching it with a strong focus on exploration, surprises, and the pleasure of abandoning an intended route because something more interesting catches the player's attention.

That description may sound unusual coming from one of the figures most closely associated with the foundations of the first-person shooter. Romero co-founded id Software and helped shape landmark games including Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. Yet his latest concept is not being framed simply around weapons, combat arenas, or a chain of mission markers. Instead, Romero has pointed to the kind of freeform curiosity encouraged by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild--the feeling of setting out toward one destination and discovering that the detours become the real adventure.

It is an especially notable update because Romero Games' future appeared far less certain after a difficult 2025. The studio's previous project lost its funding amid broader cuts to Microsoft's Xbox business, forcing a major reduction in the company's size. Romero Games went from approximately 110 staff members to five. Nearly a year later, however, Romero says the studio has secured a new publishing partner, and development on its new shooter is moving forward.

A new start after a major studio setback

The loss of funding in 2025 was plainly a devastating moment for Romero Games. Romero described the situation as painful, but he has emphasized that he is focused on what comes next rather than lingering on resentment. His outlook is notably optimistic: despite the upheaval and a dramatically smaller team, he said he is doing better than he has in decades.

For useful background on this topic, read Resident Evil's Main Story Could Reach a Conclusion Within the Next Decade, Producer Says.

That optimism is grounded in a practical recovery plan. The studio now has another publisher attached to the new project, although Romero is not yet able to reveal that partner's identity. He also cannot discuss a release date, the game's title, or the broader specifics of what players will be doing. Those announcements are being held back for the publisher.

Still, the available details establish an important continuity between Romero Games' cancelled work and its current production. The new project is a shooter, it is being developed with Unreal Engine 5.8, and the team is transferring a substantial amount of material and ideas from the game that did not survive the funding collapse. That does not necessarily mean the new title is a straightforward revival of the previous project, but it does mean that the work completed before the cancellation has not been discarded.

For a five-person studio, carrying forward existing creative and technical foundations could be essential. Reusing worthwhile work is not merely efficient; it may allow the remaining team to preserve ideas that were important enough to keep pursuing even after the project's original structure fell apart. It also suggests that the new publisher saw potential in both Romero Games and the direction the studio had already begun exploring.

Exploration before rigid objectives

Romero's most substantial comments concern how he wants players to feel while moving through the game. He values exploration and dislikes being overly directed by a game. The titles that appeal to him most are those that let players look at a strange location, turn toward it, and simply see what is there.

That principle does not confirm an open-world structure, and Romero stopped short of labeling the shooter an open-world game. The distinction matters. A game can promote exploration, optional routes, and emergent distractions without presenting one enormous uninterrupted map. It could instead use large connected spaces, hub-like regions, branching missions, or other structures that give players room to follow their curiosity.

Whatever form it takes, Romero's stated goal appears to be a meaningful departure from a conventional objective-led shooter rhythm. In a more rigid design, a player receives a task, moves directly to its location, clears the obstacle, and receives the next instruction. Romero wants a journey where the line between point A and point B is full of compelling reasons to stop, investigate, fight, or change plans entirely.

"You want to go to that tower over there, but you're going to run into all kinds of stuff in between here and there and that might change everything you're doing," Romero said while describing the kind of experience he is aiming for.

The tower comparison naturally evokes the way players often navigate expansive adventure games: a distant landmark gives a loose sense of direction, but the road toward it is not a corridor. An unexpected encounter, a curious building, a hidden system, or an environmental challenge can divert attention. By the time the player remembers the original goal, they may have started a different chain of discoveries.

Romero also referenced Blue Prince when talking about the power of a player realizing there is more to a space than initially expected. The key idea is surprise through discovery. Rather than presenting every possibility immediately, the game can create moments where players reassess the world around them and recognize that an assumed boundary was not a boundary at all.

Breath of the Wild as a useful comparison

The comparison to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild should not be read as a claim that Romero Games is making a Zelda-like game with guns. There is no indication of its setting, perspective beyond its shooter identity, progression systems, or world layout. What Romero appears to be borrowing is a design sensibility: intentional distraction.

Breath of the Wild is celebrated in part because it makes incidental exploration feel worthwhile. A trip toward a main destination can turn into a search for resources, an encounter with enemies, a puzzle, an environmental experiment, or an entirely separate objective. Players often create their own stories through these deviations, and their route through the world becomes personal rather than strictly authored.

Applying that sense of improvisational adventure to a shooter could be an intriguing proposition. Shooters have frequently experimented with player freedom, whether through nonlinear levels, systemic combat spaces, optional objectives, or large-scale environments. Romero's comments suggest he wants the act of traveling through the game to be as rewarding as reaching a combat encounter or completing a mission.

That ambition could also connect with the legacy of the games Romero helped create. Early Doom levels, for example, were remembered not only for their action but for their secrets, keys, loops, hidden routes, and spatial puzzles. Players learned environments by probing them. The new project may be looking toward a far broader form of that impulse: not just finding a concealed room, but deciding to wander off because the horizon itself looks inviting.

What remains unknown

There is still a great deal that Romero Games has not announced. The game has no public title, no confirmed release window, no named publisher, and no announced platforms. Its exact scale is also unclear, as are its setting, story, multiplayer plans, combat systems, and the nature of the ideas being brought over from the cancelled project.

As a result, it is too early to define the game as open world, immersive sim, role-playing shooter, or any other familiar label. Romero's comparisons communicate an aspiration rather than a complete feature list. The safest conclusion is that the project aims to pair shooter action with a more adventurous, player-led flow than a tightly scripted campaign would normally offer.

For Romero Games, this new shooter is also a test of resilience. The studio endured the sudden loss of support for a major project, a sharp reduction in staff, and the difficult task of rebuilding around a new publishing relationship. Yet its next game is not being described as a retreat to the safest possible idea. Romero is talking about a shooter intended to surprise players, invite aimless exploration, and make detours feel valuable.

That is a compelling promise, particularly from a designer whose work has had such an enduring influence on the genre. The details needed to judge the game are still under wraps, but the direction is becoming easier to understand: Romero Games wants players to set off toward a destination, encounter something unexpected, and happily forget where they were originally going.