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Daikatana - Delayed Again?
emoon writes, "There's a story at CNet about Eidos's financial troubles. Towards the end of the article, it mentions that Eidos is considering pushing the release of several games, including Daikatana, to first quarter of 2001." Update: 03/25 06:10 by E : This is the first fiscal quarter, which starts in April. I'm just tired of waiting! :)
loki should buy them out, this would be a wonderful investment for linux games and make game development faster.
hehehe. I love slashdot.
That was a pitiful speling flame. Just pitiful. Words are insufficient to describe how badly your flame sucked.
Really!!! :D
Nope. The strategy guide is though. Good to see they've got their priorities straight.
THIS will be a vary good game and i know it because i am teh GAME EXPART. Mistar John Romeo made some excallent games in teh past, like Doom 2, SiNE, advanced Scrabbel Pro Edition, and WAGES OF WAR OVER EUROPE WAR THEATER WORLD WARE 2 EDITION WARPLANE PRO and Diekaatino will be anothar smash hit. and he is nice enough to hire many ppl to work at ION storm (his companey) includeing Killcrick who is a vary hot woman if yuo are asking me. AND ALSO I MEAN LOOK AT TEH FGAME DOHKATINA - THEY HAEV SUPERFLY JOHNSON!!!! and also they might be bettar than id softwarez... look at id softwarez compared to ION STORM:: ION STORM: Killcrick is vary pretty and in magazines which I CAN GET MY MOM TO BUY SOMETIMES BECAUSE SHE DOESNT KNOW THERE SI KILCRICK PORN INSIDE HAHAHA MOM, YUOR FAIRLY STUPID and sometimes i lick teh pictares of Killcreek but the staple cuts my tongueue. id softwarez - they haev Paul Steve. i dont want too see his pictare in a magazine, because i dont beleive I am a fAGOT and although hes probly got biggest man breasts than killcrick I DONT THINK I WANT TO SEE THEM THANK YOU PAUL. paul is a weight lifter and can benchpress a bus full of ninjas so his boobs are strongar. I will maybe make a benchmark later, but i cant get PAINT SHOP PRO working now (maybe it needs more crackz).. -Jeff K.
Then one day they changed their name to Eidos (do either of those words mean anything? I don't know.)
IIRC, 'Eidos' is Greek for 'idea'. I believe that Plato used it to refer to his idea of 'forms' in the _Republic_.
Daikatana is the biggest joke in the industry since Battlecruiser 3k.
At least Romero doesn't have a degree mill 'PhD' and lie about it.
I would have bought that game had it come out during the FPS drought between Quake2's release and Unreal. DK feels really old and dated now. Just download and play that MPlayer demo. Fun? I'm going to have to read some convincing reviews for me to buy it now. I'll only be buying it for it's multiplayer play anyways. Single player games are dead in my book. I don't think I will buy or play any more single player games. I bought Half Life just for it's DM and all the mods. TFC and CS have made that purchase well worth it. If I don't see DK in atleast the top 5 on this list, no way will I buy it. http://www.gamespy.com/stats/index.shtm I'll just have my friend GIVE me his cd after he runs through the game once and realizes "Wow, that sure was an expensive "movie" ticket." I'll say "No, shit dumbass!" And John R. Will say "Thanks for buying my lame game dumbass!" I'm so funny. :)
the real reason daikatana hasn't shipped yet is here
the real reason daikatana hasn't shipped is here
ummm, isn't Daikatana already out?
I'm AC to avoid flames, but what exactly is Daikatana?
This needs to be moderated up since it makes this slashdot posting totally inappropriate(no it's not delayed, it's coming out in a couple of days when the 2001 fiscal years begins).
God damn. Go back to school, you dumb shit. Not only did you not spell "shelves" right, but you don't know how to post HTML messages correctly.
The greatest trick that John Romero ever pulled was convincing the world that Daikatana exists. -mh83
They have not gone broke and they are not going to go broke.
Step 1: Switch on first and second brain cell.
Step 2: Read article.
Step 3: Understand content of article.
Step 4: FIRST POST
Tomb Raider has been their cash cow for quite some time, but promotion of other games has been neglected. Given the falling retail prizes and the fact people waiting for new game stations things are not going as well as they used to, that is all.
At worst they are been taken over, so if you have got some money to spare, invest now. You cannot lose IMHO.
Romero is a joke. The guy never deserved what he got, and I'm happy Carmack fired his ass from Id. He certainly sounds like dead weight to me. Time to cut your losses Eidos and fire Romero too.
Am I the only one that thinks that the fiscal year starts OCTOBER 1st?? I know in the (US) government, the FY starts 10/1, not 4/1. I know at least SOME companies are the same way. I'm wondering if one of the gaming sites (Bluesnews?) got this wrong based on some fanboy, and now everyone thinks that Q1 starts in April. I may be wrong, but has anyone actually seen proof that the company considers FY01 to start on April 1st?
I saw a display for Daikatana at CompUSA in San Francisco. It was listed at the #1 selling game for that week. However the display had no games, either they sold out or never had it on the shelf in the first place.
Don't blame them, at least it means everything was finally finalized and now programmers can start coding ;)
Why is there no high score list for negative karma?
Here are two articles from Salon magazine detailing all the problems behind the Daikatana release. The first article talks about Romeros' early life and split with Id and the second article talks about the new Ion Storm team including that hot female level designer, playboy centerfold model, and purportedly John Romero's latest significant other, the notorious Stevie Case.
Without the carthisis effect that playing violent video games brings, CmdrTaco will soon find himself entertaining sinister thoughts. Walking down the street, he may see a mother and her young daughter and think If only I had a railgun, I could take them out easy. Within downtown, he will seek hidden places in which to wait for his prey. By mumbling secret words, he may attempt to bring on 'God mode', making himself invincible. With no fear of being hurt, and with Quad Damage, Rob Malda bursts onto the streets of Holland. Gunning down all opposition, the grinning geek leaves a river of blood and tears behind him.
Truly, he has become King of the Fragfest that we call Life.
Look how wonderful Tiberium Sun was. They had nearly as many delays and crap, there was a trailer back on the first C&C, and when it was released, the world had long ago left the 2D RTS genre. Though I doubt the world will leave this first-person genre, unfortunately, anytime soon, expectations get raised with each day. What will this thing have over HalfLife, Unreal Tournament, or Quake 3?
And a "quarter" lasts three months. So, it could April 1, or it could be June 30. Well, unless they delay it or something. :)
Well, there is some company remaking Wolf3D. So we can once again take out nazis and german shepards, only with all the fancy 3d buzzwords.
I've been wondering for a while, but haven't seen anything posted one way or another...
Will there be a Linux port?
I guess that kinda hinges on whether they're still using the Unreal engine, which I seem to remember had some portability issues...
My mistake. I thought they had switched from the quake engine to unreal; on consideration, maybe i was thinking of Duke Nukem Forever.
I strongly disagree. I played through the game, beginning to end, and enjoyed every minute of it. It had quite a few strong points.
It seemed challenging.
I suppose the AI couldn't really be considerred brilliant or anything, but one thing it did really well was make you feel like you're having to really work for your kills, at least in most cases. The Skaarj were seemingly invincible, at times dodging flak cannon shots at very close range. Compare this to the almost-oblivious behavior of enemies in previous 3D shooters...
The levels made you feel like you really were in a crashed space-ship, an old mine, or a mercenary outpost. Almost every level was an artful masterpiece, and very rarely left you wonderring "Where do I go now?" (that is, if you paid attention to the translator...)
It could be scary.
I beleive I've lost count of the number of times that game has made me nearly jump out of my skin. Most of my friends were the same way. Something about the game seems to really get you immersed to the point where you can be startled like that. No other game I have played does that to me.
I'm not even going to mention the graphics because, while they were spectacular, they aren't what made the game good. (I could only play at 320x200@18fps anyway. Ouch..)
But enough rambling. In summary, I must say that if there was anything bad about that game that is really worthy of critisizm, it was the multi-player. Unreal's legendary bad net code turned out to be it's undoing. If you're going to critisize this game, aim your insults at the correct aspect.
speaking of which, what ever happened to Duke Nukem forever? I haven't heard of it in a loooong while. Duke Nukem 3d was a *very* awesome game 3 years ago. Way cooler then Doom 2 / Heretic / Hexen / whatever at the time. So are they still making DNF? Last I heard they licensed Q2 engine for it but then decided to switch to Unreal engine... ahh
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Actually the first financial quarter of 2001 starts in 7 days. Blues News had a good clarification of this issue in their news yesterday.
The USGovt and some other entities count Sept/Oct as the turn of the fiscal year, or they used to. Apparently it's drifted, or different industries use different measuring sticks.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
This probably isn't widely known, but Eidos began life as Domark many many years ago. They were always one of those companies that produced crappy game after crappy game after crappy game. Then one day they changed their name to Eidos (do either of those words mean anything? I don't know.) and published Tomb Raider
The reason it isn't widely known is that it's so wrong it's laughable :-)
At my old job, we worked with Eidos, and they were a video technology company, founded by the Streater brothers (this was about...er 6 years ago).
They worked with us on desktop video compression/playback (we used their 'Escape' codec), and they also produced off-line pro video editing suites. (All of these were based on Acorn hardware.)
They then diversified and started buying games studios/companies like there was no tomorrow (they bought Domark - who in turn had bought Simis, if I'm not mistaken).
They formed a strong relationship with Core, possibly partly due to their Acorn heritage - Jeremy Smith (I think that was his name - one of the founders of Core) wrote the game "Exile" for the Acorn BBC micro. Eventually Eidos published Core's Tomb Raider (you got that part right).
This explains in part why you always see the Eidos Escape video compression ident on the first Tomb Raider games, and why Escape was always mentioned at the bottom of any Eidos press release - Stephen Streater was extremely keen on his video compression technology.
Eidos never 'changed their name' - they've always been Eidos - you just didn't know about them then.
Nowadays, as Eidos is now really just a publisher, Stephen Streater has left to set up his own special projects company, to do things that interest him.
Plus ca change...
Tim
by then the game engine of daikatana is going to be so outdated, that, unless they compensate with superperb storyline and gameplay, the game is going to suck.
But but but... I bought the strategy guide already! How could they do this to me?
=D
I don't buy a game because it's pretty, I buy it because it's good.
they soon returned to their roots as one of the largest purveyors of crap
Actually I do not agree...
I really liked Legacy of Kain : Soul Reaver (porte from Playstation to PC)
Both Thiefs kicked ass
Omikron : the Nomad Soul has a hell of a concept
and I had lots of fun with Commandos : Behind ennemy lines
Add to the the terrific Deus Ex project and that does not sound like a bunch of crap to me...
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
Yeah, that's exactly what linux needs -- a series of subpar games using 4-year-old technology. Sounds like a winner to me!
Seriously, though. The Tomb Raider games aren't much better than the Deer Hunter games. Why burden Linux's still-fledgling gaming abilities with crap?
Well, having not played either, my thought about "why" was pure and simple mindspace. The Tomb Raider series has quite a bit of name recogniztion, porting it to Linux would be a way of saying to the WinXX world, "hey, come on in, the water's fine".
Much as I personally dislike (read: hate hate hate) IE, for example, it did bring alot of people to the web by making Internet Access easily available via their "setup a dialup connection" wizards which did the same thing: "hey, this web thing is cool, and you don't have to be a total geek to get there..."
Secondarily, I think Eidos would have been able to generate some funds for future Linux gaming, much the same way M$ kept selling MS-DOS for years after they officially pronounced it "dead".
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
But if they really want to sell into an untapped market, how about having Loki port Tomb Raider to Linux?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Eidos really needs money. They sold all their stocks in Fast (the www.alltheweb.com thing), for about 300 mill norwegian kroner (about 35-40 million dollar). It's actually worht more, but they won't be able to drop that much into the markedplace without the price crashing.
So, they need money..
-- Thorkild
I noticed it... I'm looking forward to it too.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Romero has trivialized himself with this PR abortion. The game industry has moved on so far by this point, there's no way D can break even, much less succeed. If Romero had put a little more effort into being a first-class game producer than he did into being Mr. Computer Game Rock Star, he might still be relevant to the industry. That didn't happen....
Hey, enjoy the game if it ever ships. I don't know, though, that test version they shipped a while back looked exactly like an average Q2 mod. Maybe all the *really* good stuff is what's holding up the release! Yeah....
the first quarter of fiscal year 2001 is strangely enough in April 2000, so the game isn't really delayed at all!
Yes, spending more time on a game can make it better, but most often it doesn't. One of the biggest parts of game programming is optimizing and unless you design a very scale-able engine, a large amount of the optimizing is based on the hardware that you have to work with now. That means that anything that you wrote more than a year ago needs to be retweeked to run well. The fact of the matter is, It really doesn't look like Daikatana is going to have a new kick-ass engine like unreal was; it's main feature is billed to be the game play, and was going to have a average engine. However this was what was concidered average when they started working on the game and would be considered sucky by today's standard.
What i'm saying is that unless what you are building is an engine, than drawing out the development time will only lead to you having to do more work to keep the game up to speed, and will almost always produce a game with "last year's" technology and it won't hold up against the compitition unless the gameplay is simply amazing.
IANAFC (I am not a financial consultant), but I guess it's because of April being the tax month? I know taxes are charged on a year starting/ending basis (Jan 1 to Dec 31), but it's probably easier for businesses to say that April is a good time to start counting their fiscal year again (do taxes, then 1 year of not having to do it). Makes it easier to calculate after-tax profits after you pay taxes, no?
This is only a guess.
I wonder what my first impression will be of seeing Daikatana on the shelfs for the first time.
<p> Enthusiasm, fear, uncertainty, doubt, or perhaps, feeling quite
<p> I can be used, beaten and bruised, to justify your state of mind (Mesh - State of mind)</p>
//stalle
I'm no gamer, but I know prophetic comedy when I read it.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
"Due to the current lower level of consumer demand, which had led to congestion in the retail channel, Eidos said it would now delay the release of certain products, including Nomad Soul for Dreamcast, F1 World Grand Prix for PC, Tomb Raider for Game Boy Color and Daikatana for PC until the first quarter of 2001."
:-(
They're not just considering delaying Daikatana - they already have.
And for once, I was actually going to buy the game.
-- BlueCalx | http://nickd.org/
If you read the press release carefully--and it's obvious no one at /. did--Eidos plans to release Daikatana in Q1 of its fiscal year 2001. For Eidos, FY 2001 begins 1 April. Like another week or two is going to make any difference for the Game Whose Hype Will Not Die.
/. But it would be nice if you at least tried to check facts for stories, instead of just throwing shit to the wall in the hope that it might stick.
Several gaming news sites have made the same mistake, so it's not just
Can anyone give a quick answer as to why the fiscal year of year X starts in Q2 of year (X - 1)? Is this a holdover from when business was primarily done on paper?
"...and they're coming into the home straight now, it's Amiga in front with Daikatana close behind, Daikatana is pulling ahead but Amiga fights back and..."
- Jan 21, 2003
I still care about daikatana. The game looks pretty decent if you've seen any video of it, and if nothing else there is the stevie case pullout in the middle of the manual.
--Have a Johsonville brat.
Actually... I never played multiplayer over a modem. I prefer LAN parties. :) Yeah, I guess for modem play Q2 was a lot better for awhile...
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How could the company who brought us the Tomb Raider games be going broke?
Did they spend to much on virtual silicone?
And, the worst part is, I have a hard time imagining that it is in fact going to be better esp. given the fact that it was initially started SO long ago! Isn't it just going to be out-dated as soon as its released?
Then again, isn't their big thing the single player game as opposed to the multiplayer?...as opposed to Q3A and UT. Hmmm....
Last time I checked the motto of every successful game company was publish or perish. You can't make money with something until its on store shelves.
Now how long has diakatana been in development? I could see Unreal taking 4 years, they had to develop their own engine (and wait for hardware to be good enough to run it). Half-life was similar. They did a ton of work on the quake engine, running characters off bone structure, adding AI, etc. What's Daikatana doing to justify the long wait? Its hard for me to believe that its graphics are going to beat QIII since it has to be using an older engine. Its hard for me to believe its gameplay is going to beat Half-life, or Valve's upcoming TF game for multiplayer. So in short its most likely going to come out too little too late.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "a lot more fun to play" (gawd, I sound like Clinton). Singleplayer Unreal did have a more compelling story line, so if that's what you care about, I agree.
At release, multiplayer Unreal was Unplayable, except on a T1 or better. The game required far more bandwidth than a modem could supply. Q2 kicked Unreal's ass for months w.r.t. multplayer.
Epic has finally fix the multiplayer problems. I'd say that Unreal and Q2 are now even when it comes to deathmatch play.
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
A couple weeks ago every ad in the sunday paper had Daikatana in it for 30-40$. I thought it had finally been released, told everyone I knew, submitted the story to slashdot, but never actually saw it in the store. Guess it never was released..pretty wierd.
What's ironic, was the game was 'done' in december, but they decided to keep workign on it anyway, and just recently they finally said "hey, we're done, and we're going to be gold very soon!" and then it gets delayed due to FINANCIAL troubles.
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Don't underestimate the power of peanut brittle
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
They never were using the unreal engine. Daikatana is based on the q1/q2 codebase. It was originaly hyped as the game that would kick q2's ass. Quake3 is out now however, and no daikatan in sight.
Executives are currently discussing if the game should be ported to Linux or not. The only thing they are saying for sure is that the Linux port has been delayed.
My other
Who ever remembers Eidos? The only _decent_ thing they did was Tomb Raider, and that sucks now, are they ever going to put a decent engine in there. Of course, most people originally bought tomb raider because it had Lara on the cover... *cough*Rob*cough*
Hopefully Rob or someone else will update the story to clarify everything. The fiscal year actually starts in a couple of days so we may see Daikatana out pretty soon.
This game is gonna turn the same way Wolfenstein would have turned out had it been released LAST YEAR! I will laugh REALLY hard if it sucks.
Everytime I pick up one of the mainstream computer game magazines, they always have at least one joke about Daikatana.
I have yet to see anything good about the game. I probably wouldn't have bought it if it came out two years ago, and I'm certianly not going to buy it now.
Or maybe Edios' plan is to dealy the game, thus creating major press (bad press, but press just the same), and when it finaly comes out, people can't help but to buy it, just to see what took them so long. It works for Microsoft, after all.
Chances are that Office 2005 will come out before this game does. And Office 2005 won't be here unitl 2007.
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Not a typewriter
I noticed - looks like it'll be released well before Daikatana (which is IMHO looking like little more than a very expensive lesson in game making for Romero), if only because it has a better development team behind it. Various gaming magazines are picking up on it now, and it looks like it just might live up to the hype.
Sounds like the game will be obsolete before they even have a screen shot. If this games takes much longer I think people might lose interest. This game's release date sounds a lot like Duke Nukem Forever (named after how long it takes for it to come out).
As usual, they are waiting for Christmas. Or maybe it's not technically ready (aka 'debugged'). :-(
As usual with windows-based programs 'wait just a little more, it's already finished', every month
Linux community rules are a bit different. They assume programers are proud of their work, and usually a program is released only when finished. (or in alpha/beta release with an user warning).
I think thoses companies (Eidos is NOT the only one making such mistakes) must change their way of thinking in order to sell programs to linuxers.
Linuxers are working hard. And if the companies seems to work in anarchy, they will gradually lose their customers, as Linuxers are waiting for a good program, not a patchwork several pre-built commercial engines.
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If Internet is Freedom, Linux is Democraty
who cares if its canceled again- D is going to suck bad- id rather play tribes 2, TF 2 and unreal 2-
This probably isn't widely known, but Eidos began life as Domark many many years ago. They were always one of those companies that produced crappy game after crappy game after crappy game. Then one day they changed their name to Eidos (do either of those words mean anything? I don't know.) and published Tomb Raider, which was in fact seriously good, not just seriously large breasted.
Unfortunately, they soon returned to their roots as one of the largest purveyors of crap and published 3 more Tomb Raiders with NOTHING new at all, and many other crappy little games with big marketing hype. It feels like they've always been more about marketing than making good games. While they're certainly not the only company like that in the industry, their success with Tomb Raider and the sleazy Lara Croft ads makes them highly visible.
With Daikatana and Romero, Eidos found themselves a nearly perfect match. All talk, no walk. Daikatana is the biggest joke in the industry since Battlecruiser 3k.
Now, having said that, I think Thief was the finest game to come along in many years, and Eidos did publish it. I'm pretty sure it must have been a fluke that they picked it up. I hope Looking Glass finds a new publisher, I really hated having to give Eidos money again yesterday to buy Thief 2.
Does anyone still care about Daikatana? I mean, we have Soldier Of Fortune, where you can spend a pleasant afternoon knee-capping miscreants; Quake 3 itself, run-run-run-kill-kill-die-shit!-respawn-repeat, if thats your thing. Half-Life already has its first expansion out (which I didn't like as much but hey, its Half Life, so it was pretty good, even if it was bad). I just keep asking myself, even if its a decent game, will anyone even care anymore? So many good games have already captured attention, people want HomeWorld 2 more than Daikatana.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Well, I am one of the many who are very glad to see this game coming out. Its one of those games thats been promised, but has not made the shelves.
Two other games that are like this are Tribes 2 (Which should be out in the summer and looks HOT!) and Team Fortress 2: Brothers in Arms (When it will be released is anyones guess). Both of which I wish would come out in linux, but I dont think are. In any case, I am buying all three.
Linux O Muerte!
They must have coded exceptionally badly,
and have to rewrite most about everything.
It has been in development almost longer
than Win2k, and is now almost forgotten, by
all but the most die-hard-fans.
It should have been out two years ago, and
now it's delayed "yet again".
This will be a serious fiasco, as games being
in development for only a year will be released
before this one.
This slashdotposting is totally inappropriate then...
It seemed like a BIG deal, but really wasn't.
I just came back from CompUSA and I wandered in the section where they have magazines and books. What did I see there -- A Prima book giving hints and tips on Daikatana. The first thing that popped in my head was I wasn't even aware that it had been released. I guess it still hasn't. I flipped through the book to get a glimpse of the graphics and it wasn't very impressive. It sort of looked like a mutant Unreal.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
Unreal single player was.. bad. Why? While it did offer nice image quality, and had a story line that was good, the weapons felt .. like toys. The "pew-pew" of the laser gun did not compare to the throaty "whooomp" of a rocket launcher. It also ran fairly slowly compared to anything at the time. Half-Life, OTOH, had less graphics quality, but a better story line, better feeling weapons, and faster performance on many machines.
One of the other things that put me off of Unreal was that the game itself was sold -- but it was beta code. They didn't exactly go out of their way to mention it was beta before you spent money on the game.
Architecture wise, the Unreal engine is not designed as well as it should've been. Why? Once you get past 400Mhz/128mb of ram with a TNT2, frame rates in Unreal just do not scale very well, if at all. On equivalent hardware, Quake 3: Arena scales very well, and even has hooks for SMP implementation. Why? Likely because JC + company carefull designed it, whereas the Unreal engine "evolved" and now faces a bottleneck problem because of it.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
*ZZZAP*
Hi, this is CausticPuppy from the future. I have written a game review of the sequel to Daikatana.
It's right here.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
B1ood
Note to self: pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours. -- John Carmack
The Financial Times (UK Financial Paper ) ran this today also, (page 14 , 25 March), also go to http://www.ft.com and do a search for Eidos for the whole story and a newer one on the same theme.
Won't bore you with the whole article but the drop in Eidos share prices appears to have been a result of Eidos themselves warning that games players were holding back on purchases in order to await the launch of the new generation of games consules.
Nitty gritty details "..Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, the broker, cut this year's pre-tax profit forecast of 23.6 million (pounds sterling) to losses of 17.3 million (pounds sterling). But Eidos will remain in the black following n 84 million (pounds sterling) gain from the sale of a 77 per cent stake in Opticom, a Norwegian technology company...."
Phew! all you market trading sharedealing big players are safe thenMe, I *live* right next to the City (financial heart of London) but our little (web and information) company gets around on bicycles and the nearest I get to market trading is buying my veggies from the same fruit and veg market as the high flying city dealers down the road ;-)
Ahem... methinks Quake was the engine that has been evolving whereas Unreal was designed. I am writing a 3D game engine myself, so I do understand what I am talking about. If you have ever tried to write modifications for the two games, well... The game logic code for Q1 and Q2 was a horrible mess (JC admits this himself). Unreal, however, is quite clean, and very object-oriented, which makes sense when you are describing the actions of a group of objects in a 3d world. Furthermore, the Unreal engine itself is very modular. And ever notice how Unreal had those *huge* open spaced that no Quake engine could ever handle? Yep.
Basically, Q3 is better at framerate and graphics quality, but Unreal is more flexible and easier to extend, and it is a lot cleaner. Personally, I like the Unreal engine better.
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It isn't mentioned in the article, but it reached the headlines here in Norway yesterday when Eidos announced the sale of 1.14 million shares in Opticom for about 170$ million. (About 10% below current valuation of the Opticom stock.)
The Norwegian article about the sale can be found here .
-- Einar
As long as they do not delay Deus Ex everything is ok for me. Am I the only one who noticed this game?
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
As you can see here on sCary's Shuga Shack it may be delayed to 2001, but that's the 2001 fiscal year which begins April 1, 2000. Just a small correction.
Not to say that I am eagerly anticipating Daikatana or anything (I'm not), but I would like to point something out. Unreal (the original, not UT) was in development for four years. It just kept being delayed and delayed and delayed, and everyone thought it was going to suck. There was even an interesting war of words between some of the id software guys and one of the Unreal developers. Basically, the id guys acted like a bunch of juveniles and tried to claim that Unreal was obviously going to suck since it had taken so long to create. (note that JC denounced this behavior)
Getting to the point, Unreal was released, and it kicked Quake 2's ass. Hard. The engine was far superior to the Q2 engine (sorry John) and the game was just a hell of a lot more fun to play. It was also a lot more flexible and easier to work with for mod makers. Unfortunately, not many people noticed. *sigh*
So, I guess my point is that more development time really can mean better game. We'll just have to wait and see.
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