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John Romero Back In The Game
Gamespot reports that John Romero, the well known former id software designer, has opened his own development studio for the first time in several years. From the article: "Romero and Midway parted ways after just two years. He had been hired, along with former Ion Storm colleague Tom Hall, in October, 2003. His departure in July of this year was amicable on the surface, but chatter among industry wags suggested the Midway brass weren't entirely impressed with the work Romero and his team produced. At the time of his departure, Romero and Hall were working on the still-unreleased action role-playing game Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows."
There was a time I thought Romero was interesting: before I actually learned anything about him and just knew he was part of ID. Talk about letting a little success go to your head... he's like a warning label for the entire concept of ego overtaking your rational thought processes.
No kidding! I just finished reading Masters of Doom and didn't realize until then how much of a prick John Romero really was. For those who haven't read the book - it's a "rise and fall of Id Software" book. It's interesting that after DOOM was released, Romero clearly became more interested in playing games than writing them. He pretty much left all the game-writing to John Carmack. The book spells out how Romero was a better programmer in the beginning, but Carmack quickly surpassed him and left Romero behind. Pretty much because Romero lost focus.
These days, Romero is a big hype machine. Diakatana, anyone? Ha ha ha ha!
Am I the only one who thinks "Commander Keen: 3D" would make a good comeback title?
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Gamespot had a great article about the development of Daikatana, and pretty much resumes why the game ended being as bad as it was. Great read.
There were three things wring with Daikatana that earned it the reputation it has today.
First off, you know how they poke fun at Duke Nukem Forever? Well before Duke, there was Daikatana.
Next, the game was incredibly hyped. Everybody had high hopes for all the whiz-bang new features that it was going to have, and how great it was going to look. It only underdelivered slightly, but there was much too much hype for it to ever live up to, which was compounded by the last point:
It was so late that it was behind the times both technologically and game concept wise by the time it finally hit the shelves. It looked and played like Hexen, except it came out two years after that in the middle of the first GPU boom.
Yeah that book definitely sealed Romero's fate in the minds of most id fans, IMO. If you didn't know Romero before the book, you definitely knew after that his games were to be avoided. There's a reason why this guy is getting his first studio in "several years." When John enters a room, another whole person enters behind him. Between him and Carmack, the lesson to learn is that the best gamers definitely do not make the best developers. When asked by PC Gamer if he were stranded on a deserted island what one game would he want with him, Carmack's response was, "actually I'd just like a compiler."
Daikatana wasn't a bad game, as much as it was trying to do stuff far ahead of it's time, and then over hyped it to the point where it had to reinvent everything about the genre, or it would get blasted by everyone. This is what Duke Nukem Forever is going to be up against. DNF could be a great game if it comes out. DNF could be very fun and compelling, but it's going to get blasted by reviewers because it took so long to make, and should be absolutely flawless for the amount of time it took to make.
Back to Daikatana. The biggest problem was the Bot characters. The AI for them was completely stupid, and suffered many problems.
1) They suffered from "Natalia Syndrome" and would tend to run off on their own and get killed (which was bad, since you'd die when they did.)
2) They also had friendly fire on the bots, so when they would lag behind you and they saw something move, they would almost always shoot you in the back.
3) You never could "leave your buddy superfly" or Keiko when it came to the next part of the stage. This was just a pain. especially when half of the time they couldn't navigate the complex world.
Nowadays, you see much more complex AI work seamlessly with the player, and in many cases, you see what Daikatana was trying to do in more modern games (HL2 and the freedom fighter squads you can control is a good example), although still not as extreme to the point that one person dies and it's game over time.
Graphically, it's wasn't so bad. It looked ok, but it was no Half Life or Quake II, which came out around the same time or earlier. It however took a bold move and did all of the cut scenes as real time rendered scenes; something that You really didn't see much at that time, but see almost all the time today.
Storyline, wasn't bad. It could have been better, especially in the naming dept.
gameplay bucked a lot of the FPS norms. Weapons were interesting, especially the Daikatana, which leveled and got more powerful as you killed stuff with it. Kinda like the soulcube in doom III but more complex. You actually got levels and could apply them to attributes like speed, vitality, ETC.
Price was the best thing about this game. I think I paid $0.99 for the thing. It was definitely worth that price.
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