John Romero's Next Shooter Survived the Microsoft Purge, Now He's Taking Inspiration From The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

John Romero, the legendary game designer who co-founded id Software has had a career spanning five decades. During that time he’s enjoyed the highest of highs, such as his seminal work on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, and the lowest of lows, most recently when his current studio Romero Games had its funding pulled by Microsoft amid the ongoing cuts across the Xbox business that began last year.

Speaking with IGN during Gamescom Asia x Thailand Game Show 2026 this week, where he delivered an opening keynote address titled, ‘Why We Still Make Games,’ Romero seemed upbeat about the direction of his latest project despite 2025’s devastating setback. In fact, almost a year on from the loss in funding and the resulting reduction of his studio from 110 members of staff down to just five, Romero claimed that he was “doing better than [he’d] done in decades.”

“It really sucked,” said Romero of the brutal blindsiding by Microsoft in 2025. “[But] I don't have bitterness because that's not who I am, really. I always move forward. So it's like, that happened. Now we have to figure out where to go from here.”

While Romero remained tight-lipped on the specifics, he was happy to confirm that Romero Games’ latest project has secured a new publishing partner and that development is proceeding well despite the substantial reduction in resources at the studio.

“I can't talk about the publisher, the release date, you know, anything that we're doing, what it is, it's up to them,” said Romero. The only details he could confirm was that “it’s a shooter, it uses Unreal Engine 5.8, and we’re bringing a lot of stuff from the [cancelled] game over.”

In an interview with Salón del Videojuego de Madrid last December, Romero said of his newest project that he’d “never played a game like it,” and claimed that although it’s a shooter, “the things that you do in it will be new to people [in the same] way that going through Elden Ring was a really new experience.” Speaking to IGN this week, he stopped short of describing the new game as being an open-world, but certainly implied that it would feature a lot more freedom than your average objective-based first-person shooter.

“Exploration is really a big deal for me when I play a game,” said Romero. “I don't like to be told how to play [it], you know? The games I like the most are the ones that just let me go, ‘Okay, what is this? This place is crazy or this place looks really interesting and just like turn around and go that way, you know? Like, do whatever you want.”

“It’s like when you play Blue Prince,” continued Romero. “After a while you decide to turn around from that first room, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god! There’s an outside too?’”

Romero also compared his shooter to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, in terms of how it’s very easy to become sidetracked along the way to a certain location or objective. By the sounds of it, Romero’s next game should feature plenty of fun distractions amid all the gun-based destruction.

“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,” explained Romero. “You totally forget that you were on your way to the tower, right?”

“And so, that's the kind of gameplay that I like, and that’s what [we’re] injecting into [the new game],” continued Romero. “The feeling that I want is for people to feel like they're just going to have an adventure and just have fun.”

Of course, Romero was speaking in abstract terms, and with precious little concrete information we can only speculate as to what exactly his studio’s yet-to-be-named shooter will be like. But certainly a freeform first-person shooter from an industry legend who helped birth the genre sounds very enticing. Here’s hoping that Romero and his team can deliver on that promise.

Tristan Ogilvie is a senior video editor at IGN based in Sydney, Australia. He has 25 years of experience covering video games, having served as Deputy Editor on Official PlayStation 2 Magazine Australia and as Editor of Official Xbox 360 Magazine Australia, before joining IGN in 2009. You can find him on Bluesky @tristanogilvie.bsky.social