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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! :)
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
I've been wondering for a while, but haven't seen anything posted one way or another...
/. who claims that they know someone who talks to Romero. Anyway, I don't have much hope.
Will there be a Linux port?
It uses DirectX instead of OpenGL, but Loki does have those porting libraries.
My brother talks to John Romero fairly regularly (yes, that sounds like bullshit but I've read email from him that my brother has gotten and the headers looked legit), and when he asked about a Linux port of Daikatana, Romero refused to answer.
That, of course, is a very speculative, almost-on-the-edge-of-pure-rumor kind of answer, and personally I wouldn't put much faith in someone on
And I'm still going to buy it, a lot of the ideas behind it are (IMHO), damn cool.
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
Actually it's John ROMERO's baby It's been in developpemnt for 3 years (at least) They first developped it using id Software's (John Carmack and al.) Quake(1) engine. The game was in schedule for Xmas 1997, when Romero decided to start everything over again cause he juged the result would have been something like pulling up to the Indy 500 in skates, technology-speaking. So then they started everything from scratch using the Quake II engine... It was supposed to make it for Xmas 1999, but they blew it. So thats the way the story goes. They are supposedly in QA bug fixing at the moment (not an official word though) more info : http://www.daikatana.com/
Daikatana is a game that was supposed to come out earlier and kick Quake 2s but. A switch from the unreal engine to the quake engine, and a couple of E3s later it is still in development.
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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