/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.8391497]

What happened?
>nb4bitch

[Anonymous No.8391503]

Romero

[Anonymous No.8391504]

>>8391497
Romero's day is over.

[Anonymous No.8391517]

Romero - Carmack = Uh oh, Spaghetti Os!

Also, Romero was kind of the rockstar of the gaming industry at the time, and this proved to be another story about the downfalls of pride and ego.

[Anonymous No.8391538]

it's already been /threaded but pretty much Romero thought he was a golden goose.
>moved from one engine to another during development
>stupid NPC AI
>visual direction was crap
Without the ego stroking and gaudy presentation, this would've been remembered as a solid B or B- game and that would be that.

[Anonymous No.8391540]

>>8391497
Too much money, too much hubris, no execution

[Anonymous No.8391542]

>>8391497
>EOP makes a game based on glorious NIPPON
Wtf did he think was going to happen? Even the kanji on the cover look like trash.

[Anonymous No.8391556]

who cares
at least they had a great office on the top of a skyscraper

[Anonymous No.8391570]

>>8391497
Game isn’t even that bad. Its primary flaw is the original save system with the which was unfair to the point of feeling cheap, paired with the dogshit companion AI. Even after you remove those issues, you’re still left with amateur level design and copy paste enemies that have the same attack patterns. Play through it once for the novelty but that’s all I can recommend.

[Anonymous No.8391574]

>>8391556
They spent 2 million dollars renovating their penthouse office. They could keep that cash had they chosen a regular office instead.

[Anonymous No.8391581]

I would make fun of Quake 2's starting warehouse levels being boring, but the start of this is so nightmarish it's almost impressive.

[Anonymous No.8391603]

>>8391574
why though? they were sure they were going to make the greatest FPS ever, Eidos were sure Romero was going to bring them tons of money
I'm surprised they didn't build their own skyscraper for the office

[Anonymous No.8391757]

At least Ion Storm finished Deus Ex with that Eidos money

[Anonymous No.8391835]

>>8391757
Deus Ex was developed in Austin by Warren Spector's branch of the company, while back in Dallas John Romero's branch was engaging in their bacchanalia.

[Anonymous No.8391883]

>>8391497
Worst selection of weapons in any somewhat big budget shooter ever made.

[Anonymous No.8391903]

>>8391835
I think anons point was that the money for deus ex wouldn't have been there if not for Romero. Anachronox too, but fewer people remember that gem.

Romero clinched an absurd deal from Eidos, and while he may have fucked it up in the end, good did come of it.

[Anonymous No.8391917]

>>8391581
the game looks really good at times, I have no idea why they frontloaded the game with some of the worst looking areas.

[Anonymous No.8391921]

>>8391917

[Anonymous No.8391960]

>>8391574
>>8391603
The office was a shit hole, actually. I mean, yeah, it was expensive and nicely furnished, but it had a huge window in the roof, and it was in Texas, so when the sun was overhead at the middle of the day, they could not work in the office at all because it was like having a magnifying glass pointing sun at an ant.

Right from the start, their plans were thwarted by the universe and by short-sightedness.

[Anonymous No.8391975]

Classic case of overpromise/underdeliver, with John Romero's hubris as the icing on the cake.

Romero thought he didn't need Carmack any more, and Tom Hall (And Eidos) were stupid enough to believe it.

The marketing for the game tried to use Romero's rock star reputation to sell the game, but by 2000, Romero's last game, Quake, was already old, old news. Id had released two more wildly successful sequels in the time it had taken Ion Storm to come up with Daikatana.

Joe public knew Romero was a has-been, so trying to sell the game on Romero's name alone predictably blew up in their faces.

The saddest thing is that it completely tarnished the reputation of Ion Storm, and Tom Hall's game, Anachronox, never got the fair appraisal it deserved.

Still, at least we got Deus Ex out of it.

[Anonymous No.8391978]

>>8391497
Daikatana is a good game that’s weighed down by technical limitations and bad ideas. If you play the fan patch that fixes the AI/lets you turn them off, it’s actually a fucking really fun game. Unfortunately they put the worst part of the entire game as the first section, but once you get to Ancient Rome and are bunny hopping around at mach speeds throwing blades frizbees at skeletons or using a hammer to boost jump 15 feet in the air; it becomes amazingly fun. Daikatana failed because it was comically outdated on release, the hype was too high and the technology wasn’t there yet.

[Anonymous No.8391992]

>>8391917
>I have no idea why they frontloaded the game with some of the worst looking areas.
Small frog and mosquito enemies with obnoxious noises, having to fight them with a projectile based starting weapon with awkward particle effects, nearly uncomfortably green, first boss is a horde of mosquitos and a mosquito queen - it's shockingly bad, like the goal is to make the player never want to play an FPS again.
It started to pick up once I leveled "attack" some, and I do like the look of some of it.

[Anonymous No.8391994]

>>8391975
Tom Hall has his own game to worry about.

[Anonymous No.8391998]

>>8391917
>the game looks really good at times

It looks worse than Unreal, a then two year old game with an already released, even better looking multiplayer spinoff, on the same engine.

I'd say it also looks worse the Anachronox, and in many ways, Deus Ex, too. It might be the ugliest Unreal Engine game.

Compared to Quake 3, it's hideous.

[Anonymous No.8392005]

>>8391994
I meant to elaborate on this, bitninhabe a headache. Tom Hall wasn't stupid for going to Ion Storm. He wasn't going to get a chance to spearhead a game otherwise.

Also the marketing on Romero's name bit, that all happened well before 2000. The infamous magazine ad was in 1997.

[Anonymous No.8392008]

>>8391998
Funny, considering it uses the Quake 2 engine.

[Anonymous No.8392010]

>>8391998
>It might be the ugliest Unreal Engine game.
Anon...

[Anonymous No.8392020]

Romero wanted to make a more challenging game, but he didn't know the difference between difficulty that's fun to deal with and difficulty that isn't.

[Anonymous No.8392079]

>>8392020
I would be very surprised if Romero had any hand in design outside of the overall scenario. I mean clearly he barely even playtested this shit.

[Anonymous No.8392097]

>>8391497
Bad AI who can't operate stairs, most of the weapons are too gimmicky, the limited save system, and nice fuckin' models.

[Anonymous No.8392175]

>>8391960

Sounds like ingenious design really

[Anonymous No.8392224]

They hired modders who had no idea how to develop a game

[Anonymous No.8392280]

>>8391538
The biggest and most immediate problem is that he didn't hire programmers. He hired Quake modders and map makers but not an experienced program team. He expected that he could just licensed Carmack's engine and that's it. turns out porting from Q1 to Q2 engine was really hard work and not as easy as he though.

[Anonymous No.8392314]

>>8392175
There’s a video of them making the game and you can see that several of the cubicles have been converted into sort of tents with what are basically drapes layered over the work space to offer some shade from the sun. They’re using black materials though so that would’ve only made things worse

[Anonymous No.8392318]

>John Romero's
Why do westerners do this?
Is there any japanese developer who did shit like this? I can only think of Kojima placing his name at the beginning of the games as if they were movies, but that's because he's a hollywoodfag.

[Anonymous No.8392321]

Daikatana is actually a good game. People had the wrong mindset going into it.

>The first level sucks. All you do is shoot bugs! It's one of the worst beginning levels ever, just skip it!

Okay, so I played the game recently and had no problems with the opening levels. You know what it reminded me of? Metroid Prime. You spend half the game shooting tiny bugs in that too. People expected a Doom or Quake where it's all big fast paced action right off the bat. Daikatana gets a while to get going.

>graphics

It is a good looking game, especially in modern high resolutions with a very strong art style. It's much better looking than Q2 which was a brown game.

>gameplay

Nice weapon selection, and much more fun than Q2.

>AI

Yeah, this is a limit. That's why the fan-patch massively improves things. Romero was attempting to do an AI partner which was ground-breaking but the programming wasn't really there yet. The 1.3 fan mod really improves the partner AI and makes it much smoother.

>story

Oh boy this is such hit and miss. There's real good premise and ideas but bad execution. So the idea of being in the future of a bad ending and the player doesn't know it, and they have to travel through time to correct the timeline that the bad guy already broke is really neat. Weird ideas though is that supposedly seemingly any random jackass can make a Daikatana? It should have been the sword of the Time gods or something and a priest of the Time gods requests the hero to fix it because in the original timeline he was actually a great hero or something.

And the intro is very weird. An old man just infodumps everything on the hero who doesnt' really have a real reason to believe it. As I said, it's neat ideas bad execution.

[Anonymous No.8392325]

>>8392318
>Is there any japanese developer who did shit like this?

[Anonymous No.8392342]

>>8391975
No one needed Carmack at that point. They should have stuck with Q1 as the engine and dropt the game at it's original release date. You would be talking about how revolutionary it was today if it happened.

[Anonymous No.8392349]

>>8392318
Sid Meier, a few flight sims in the late 80s and early 90s, Richard Garriot

[Anonymous No.8392351]

>>8392325
Can you even read?

[Anonymous No.8392352]

Daikatana has the best air control.

[Anonymous No.8392406]

>>8392224

Didn't Gaben hire a bunch of modders to make Half Life?

[Anonymous No.8392438]

>>8392349
He said japanese but now I'm imagining a jap version of Richard Garriot who larps as a samurai named Lord Nippon

[Anonymous No.8392538]

>>8392318
Takeshi "Beat" Kitano. He was technically the game dev (and also an actor (and also a director (and also a comedian (and also an author))) of Takeshi's Challenge. Does it count?

[Anonymous No.8392552]

>>8392318
Itoi's #1 Fishing or whatever the fuck the whole name is on N64.

[Anonymous No.8392621]

>>8392224
So did Valve, and that's how we got Half-Life.

[Anonymous No.8392656]

>>8391497
Overambitious game with unfocused development, making it delayed yet also rushed.
That said, if you patch out the bugs and remove the companions, what you end up with is actually a decent game. The deathmatch is the best part. The game promised quite a lot more than just decent, however.

>>8392318
Only a few westerners did this, and over time it was gradually reduced to basically only happening with sports titles. It's not common in the east nor the west.

[Anonymous No.8392665]

>>8392438

[Anonymous No.8392716]

>>8392314

pure genius

How about having the toilet paper dispensers only outside of the stalls for the next brilliant idea?...

[Anonymous No.8392725]

>>8391497
I'm glad Romero ended up becoming the botch in the end. He got humbled REAL fucking quick and he acknowledges how badly him and his team fucked up the release even to this day. I know the GBC version is surprising good

[Anonymous No.8393118]

>>8392314
At that point they should have just gotten a ladder and blocked the skylight, unless the skylight was the whole ceiling.

[Anonymous No.8393150]

Romero's FPS design mentality had also become (because it didn't start like this) about catering who he considered to be FPS masters. So frustrating design decisions would have been met with "git gud" instead of thoughtful solutions most likely. Nobody likes to admit this but the genre is popular because it's initially incredibly accessible and simple, while being limitlessly deep after that entry point, and people obsessed with FPS culture can completely miss the first part of the reason it attracts and keeps people.

[Anonymous No.8393167]

>>8392538
>>8392552
The difference is that Kitano and Itoi were actual celebrities already.
The Kitano game has himself as the main playable character, and Itoi's No. 1 Bass Fishing game also features him, not playable, but he pops up on the menu and gives you advice, etc.
It would be similar to Romero's case if it was "Shigesato Itoi's MOTHER", which to be fair, has his name at the beginning of the game as if it was a movie intro, and I'm almost sure his name also popped up in the japanese commercials and ads. However his name is not in the actual title of the game.
And again, Itoi was already a celebrity, he's not really a game dev full time, Mother and the fishing games were temporary projects for him.

[Anonymous No.8393202]

>>8392321
>Okay, so I played the game recently and had no problems with the opening levels.
Great work but a bit beside the point.

[Anonymous No.8393731]

>>8393150
As an FPS fanatic, I think that this is actually pretty readily apparent. Looking at Doom, that's REAL easy to get into, but there's a number of small nuances, along with an infinite font of usermade content, which makes the skill ceiling outright theoretical (barring some sort of Kaizo tier .wads)

[Anonymous No.8393752]

>>8393150
>>8393731
Expanding on that point, Romero being like that also means Daikatana's difficulty has no curve to it. The developers saw no problem when the game starts off frustrating, which is one of the most amateurish things you can do.

[Anonymous No.8393789]

>>8391538
>stupid NPC AI

I still don't understand how they invested so heavily in *multiple* Ai sidekicks when it should have become apparent very quickly that they weren't able to work the kinks out and they would quickly become liabilities. The fact that one of the ports left them out of the gameplay completely and just used them in cutscenes is hilarious because it just demonstrates that the answer was staring them in the face the entire time.

[Anonymous No.8393906]

>>8391538
>>visual direction was crap
I still wonder why they decided to change into an ugly greenbrown futuristic theme.

[Anonymous No.8393969]

[Anonymous No.8393972]

>>8393969
This was in reply to >>8392318

[Anonymous No.8394129]

>>8392621
>numerous design changes late(ish) in development
>major story changes
>tons of wasted development time
>sequel did this tenfold before coming out
yeah sounds about right for the work of modders. at least half-life had good voice acting

[Anonymous No.8394404]

>>8391497
https://web.archive.org/web/20000619155817/http://www.gamespot.com/features/btg-daikatana/index.html

[Anonymous No.8394409]

>>8393906
It's just how it was at the time. Everything had to look like shit in order to 'prove' you and the game you made were 'hardcore' so that idiots would buy it.
It was important for business because there are far more idiots to sell to than there are people with taste.

[Anonymous No.8395276]

>>8392538
>hates video games
>drunkenly designs a game full of absolute bullshit difficulty and insane time wasting puzzles
>game stars himself murdering his family, quitting his job, getting hammered in pachinko bars and hunting for gold in Africa
>game ends with him directly telling the player they’re an idiot

Is there a man more based than he?

[Anonymous No.8396175]

Romero put huge effort into Dominion 3 and was scared by its failure. Releasing Q1 subpar Daikatana would have just got him fired 2 years earlier, the only way for him to survive was to release a big hit.

[Anonymous No.8396195]

>wasted money on renting a "cool" office, buying arcade cabinets and other bullshit instead of hiring competent devs
>everyone was more interested in playing deathmatch or hanging out instead of working
>no actual idea of what the final game should look like, they even changed engines halfway through development, which broke a lot of things
They were the opposite of Id, which was more boring and strict but they actually finished their games on time.

[Anonymous No.8396649]

>>8396195
The outcome of thid was that ID games became engine techno-demos immediately after all the doom ports. There were no really competent (read experienced) devs at the time, the first wave of doom inspired games (all build ones) just passed and nobody knew how to do full-3d FPS properly.

[Anonymous No.8396660]

he'd tried to make us his bitch but instead we made him ours

[Anonymous No.8396680]

>>8392321
>The first level sucks. All you do is shoot bugs! It's one of the worst beginning levels ever, just skip it!
Said no one in this thread, it's very pivotal to the experience. Why are you stirring things up or misinterpreting what I said?

[Anonymous No.8396807]

>>8392321
Oh boy, here comes the contrarian attention whore.

[Anonymous No.8396818]

>>8392321
The opening level sucks. It will never not suck to 95% of the population.

[Anonymous No.8396873]

>>8392406
>>8392621
what probably saved HL1 is that they had actual engine programmers and didn't throw away their engine when Q2 came out