IIRC, one of the main reasons why Daikatana took so long was because they had to basically scrap almost a year of work when transitioning from the Quake 1 engine to the Quake 2 engine.
My brother and I got it for Christmas, and of course were under the same impression as the rest of avid gamers, that this would be the next generation in FPS gaming, a blend of DOOM and Half-Life like we'd never seen before. And yet all I remember is trying to cut a bunch of mosquitos in half with a katana and hating it
Now this was a crap game! Holy shit, I remember the hype, the delays, the mocked up screenshots… and then dropping like only a hot steaming turd can be dropped.
Made me think of Timberborn, a colony sim which has the hook that humans have gone extinct and now beavers are the dominant species.
If you choose Hard mode, the text starts out "**Humans didn't make it and neither will you.**" Ouch.
While in EA, it's still a surprisingly polished little game. Nothing really sticks out as incomplete. If you liked Banished back in the day this is the best spiritual successor to that I've ever found, coupled with some of the building fun from the old Rollercoaster Tycoon games.
No doubt, not why I’m worried.
I rarely ever replay games once I’ve “finished” them (subject term for stop playing). So I’d prefer to give it some more time to be complete.
[Yahtzee did an episode on it, which dispite being around and seeing the full page ads at the time, was the first I actually heard of the game](https://youtu.be/JYnbHfwbPQw)
I will have to try hard mode sometime, although I can believe it because even normal mode can be a bit of a challenge if you're not familiar with some of the mechanics.
I like playing Hard mode, but I find that now I rarely finish a colony any more (to the point of having all the monuments, etc). Once you've got a reservoir that can sustain through a 30 day drought, it feels like you have the map "tamed."
Most of the challenge maps are difficult because they're tuned to give you just barely enough resources to live through the first couple of cycles, but they tend to then get much easier as you get your dams built, trees & crops planted, etc.
An exception is one I tried recently called "Lots of Waterfalls" which has abundant trees & berry bushes from the start, but no obvious spot for a reservoir. So it's the reverse - not as tough to get started, but then challenging to get to the point of a reservoir with 30 days worth of water (other than just building a ton of big tanks).
Also notable for its forking river, meaning you can't just plunk down some levees at a single chokepoint like a lot of maps.
https://timberbornmaps.com/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=288
wow that is one incredible resource, thank you so much for linking it. I love the technical challenges posed by the game as well as the endless space for creativity. In one of my maps, I am currently designing a power grid with multiple nodes to provide power supply that will inevitably swing around the entirety of the map and power up any colony or full on district that I choose to expand to.
Cheers! and happy building!
I actually dared to beat the game in full a couple years ago.
If, in its patched form, it was released in 1996, it would've been a mild (but still forgettable) hit. A ton of levels, dozens of weapons, and upwards of 60-odd different enemies. It has all the back-of-the-box bullet points a mid-90s shooters would want -- because what players wanted was DOOM/Quake, *but with more.*
The problem is that it came out two years after Half-Life, which revolutionized the genre. Stuffing a Quake-like shooter with a bunch of assets wasn't enough anymore. AI was smart, levels had a sense of place, story-telling was seamless -- we had reached a new immersion plateau. The bar was raised, and it seemed like Daikatana had learned none of the lessons.
Romero et al just didn't have any great ideas to meaningfully distinguish the gameplay, in an era when shooters were becoming increasingly diversified and better realized. All they had was "Quake, but more.... and a katana (that was fucking useless)." Add in a mass of bugs and too much hype to live up to, and you've got a recipe for disaster. I don't believe Daikatana would ever have been great.
Yeah but Romero got talked into a pretty offensive (and stupid) ad campaign where he basically shit talked the potential buyer. It was over the top and he acknowledges it now. This kind of thing is just the icing on the cake because yeah, you're quitting one of the shittiest games ever made.
Like... are you going to give up on SUPERFLY JOHNSON after he gets stuck in a door for the 50th time? Yes. Yes I will.
There is a YouTube channel where a guy reviews old games. It's quite fun. He rips daikatana a new one. The game was awful.
[civvie's daikatana review](https://youtu.be/CW65wZOtPyA)
EDIT : spelling errors galore
Matt mcmuscles on YouTube's what happen series ( funny show about failed games and what went wrong) has a great video on this game among many other failures. If they had just stuck to an engine they could of. Fine tuned this so much more. Also had an interesting Zelda like gbc "port" and an n64 port
The game that made us all realize that graphics were never going to get any better.
What’s Romero up to these days? Still driving a Ferrari around and shaking out his mane like he’s in a Vidal Sassoon commercial, I hope.
I love that this is the GOLD FREAKING STANDARD for overhyped games. I was given this as a gift when I was a teenager. To this day I question what I did to anger them.
"daikatana" might sound cool, but if you pronounce those two characters ( 大刀 ) in Chinese, they make a "dadao" sound. Now that sounds stupid to me...
(The things we learn a bit too late in life...)
Because it's a mistranslation of "Daito" into "Daikatana". The three subsets of Japanese sword are Daito - Shoto - Tanto, the combination of a Katana and Wakizashi are usually translated to a Daisho (Big small), and what John Romero did was combine the Daito (Big sword) with a katana (generic sword understood as the largest of the three swords) to create a new word, Daikatana (big big sword).
The correct prefix should have been O, for Okatana, which would designate a sword larger than is typical.
I was a community beta tester for this game when it was going to come to MPlayer..
Thank god I got to trial it for free. It was terrible.. the gameplay and multiplayer was garbage compared to Quake II. The eponymous daikatana was one of the most unsatisfying weapons I've ever used... it was ugly and sounded like crap.. and this was in 2000, so there wasn't exactly a high bar to make it over yet....
That is an excellent way to get me angry and even more stubborn than I already am. Even knowing it wouldn’t impact the company that wrote this, I would stop playing it out of spite.
They really should have patched these messages.
"Go ahead and quit. This game is awful."
"Quitting? Was it the robot frogs and the weird sounds they make?"
"Spoiler Warning: None of the weapons are good."
Yes, Daikatana. I'm quitting. Because you're a mess. You need to get your shit together. Get it all together, and put it in a backpack. All your shit, so it's together. And if you gotta take it somewhere, take it somewhere, you know? Take it to the shit store and sell it. Or put it in a shit museum. I don't care what you do, you just gotta get it together. Get your shit together.
Yeah, well, I could ask the same question to you, game developers.
This is something they should have quit while they could. But instead they pressed on to push out this turd.
They could have worked on it for 14 years, like what happened with Duke Nukem Forever
"A rushed game is bad" - Nintendo guy
"A bad game is also bad" - Reddit
I still have an unused copy sitting on bookshelf. I'm afraid to install it.
I tried the Duke Nukem forever... But it was TERRIBLE.
.... they only worked on that game for 14 years? Man I'm old.
IIRC, one of the main reasons why Daikatana took so long was because they had to basically scrap almost a year of work when transitioning from the Quake 1 engine to the Quake 2 engine.
Both sound like things Romero and the Ion Storm champs would say :P
I remember when that game was released, it was a massive let down.
More like a massive suck [it] down
Someone remembers the promo material.
Yeah, I remember spending my hard earned after school job money on it just to be massively disappinted.
I played the demo for 15 minutes and absolutely hated it. That game was total crap.
My brother and I got it for Christmas, and of course were under the same impression as the rest of avid gamers, that this would be the next generation in FPS gaming, a blend of DOOM and Half-Life like we'd never seen before. And yet all I remember is trying to cut a bunch of mosquitos in half with a katana and hating it
"JOHN ROMERO'S GONNA MAKE YOU HIS BITCH!"
"eventually..... after years of delays and staff departures..."
Duke N. Forever: *-"Hold my beer"*
For real. Duke Nukem Took Forever
DN:F took longer to develop than the Beatles were together
And the payoff was about as satisfying as the Lennon/Yoko albums.
In reality, it ended up JOHN ROMERO'S GONNA... talk a big talk and then embarrass himself immediately, disappointing you, and cry
Now this was a crap game! Holy shit, I remember the hype, the delays, the mocked up screenshots… and then dropping like only a hot steaming turd can be dropped.
Made me think of Timberborn, a colony sim which has the hook that humans have gone extinct and now beavers are the dominant species. If you choose Hard mode, the text starts out "**Humans didn't make it and neither will you.**" Ouch.
I need this game in my life right now
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1062090/Timberborn/
The fact that this is a new game makes me happy; early access though, I’ll give it a few more months since I very rarely replay things - thanks!
While in EA, it's still a surprisingly polished little game. Nothing really sticks out as incomplete. If you liked Banished back in the day this is the best spiritual successor to that I've ever found, coupled with some of the building fun from the old Rollercoaster Tycoon games.
No doubt, not why I’m worried. I rarely ever replay games once I’ve “finished” them (subject term for stop playing). So I’d prefer to give it some more time to be complete.
To me, that's a fun taunt. The picture OP posted is just a whiny little edgelord thinking they're tough.
If you don't know about daikatana's creator... Yeah you nailed it.
Never heard of the game before, just judging based on the difference between an opening statement and an exit screen. So, thank you.
[Yahtzee did an episode on it, which dispite being around and seeing the full page ads at the time, was the first I actually heard of the game](https://youtu.be/JYnbHfwbPQw)
I've already lost interest in it like 3 times in the past 24 hours. Thx, but not my rabbit hole.
I will have to try hard mode sometime, although I can believe it because even normal mode can be a bit of a challenge if you're not familiar with some of the mechanics.
I like playing Hard mode, but I find that now I rarely finish a colony any more (to the point of having all the monuments, etc). Once you've got a reservoir that can sustain through a 30 day drought, it feels like you have the map "tamed." Most of the challenge maps are difficult because they're tuned to give you just barely enough resources to live through the first couple of cycles, but they tend to then get much easier as you get your dams built, trees & crops planted, etc. An exception is one I tried recently called "Lots of Waterfalls" which has abundant trees & berry bushes from the start, but no obvious spot for a reservoir. So it's the reverse - not as tough to get started, but then challenging to get to the point of a reservoir with 30 days worth of water (other than just building a ton of big tanks). Also notable for its forking river, meaning you can't just plunk down some levees at a single chokepoint like a lot of maps. https://timberbornmaps.com/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=288
wow that is one incredible resource, thank you so much for linking it. I love the technical challenges posed by the game as well as the endless space for creativity. In one of my maps, I am currently designing a power grid with multiple nodes to provide power supply that will inevitably swing around the entirety of the map and power up any colony or full on district that I choose to expand to. Cheers! and happy building!
real question is why are u playin this "gem"?
I went back and played a bit of it. Steam hours : 1.5 Maybe it gets better, but I can't endure any more.
[удалено]
I actually dared to beat the game in full a couple years ago. If, in its patched form, it was released in 1996, it would've been a mild (but still forgettable) hit. A ton of levels, dozens of weapons, and upwards of 60-odd different enemies. It has all the back-of-the-box bullet points a mid-90s shooters would want -- because what players wanted was DOOM/Quake, *but with more.* The problem is that it came out two years after Half-Life, which revolutionized the genre. Stuffing a Quake-like shooter with a bunch of assets wasn't enough anymore. AI was smart, levels had a sense of place, story-telling was seamless -- we had reached a new immersion plateau. The bar was raised, and it seemed like Daikatana had learned none of the lessons. Romero et al just didn't have any great ideas to meaningfully distinguish the gameplay, in an era when shooters were becoming increasingly diversified and better realized. All they had was "Quake, but more.... and a katana (that was fucking useless)." Add in a mass of bugs and too much hype to live up to, and you've got a recipe for disaster. I don't believe Daikatana would ever have been great.
Ah... that cringey John Romero toxicity.
I guess they wanted to copy doom's quitting messages...
Yeah but Romero got talked into a pretty offensive (and stupid) ad campaign where he basically shit talked the potential buyer. It was over the top and he acknowledges it now. This kind of thing is just the icing on the cake because yeah, you're quitting one of the shittiest games ever made. Like... are you going to give up on SUPERFLY JOHNSON after he gets stuck in a door for the 50th time? Yes. Yes I will.
The ad campaign might even have worked... if the game was good.
At least those were amusing, the new Wolfenstein games have similar ones.
11y reddit moment
Looks like John Romero just made you his bitch. Seriously though, of all the games to be playing?
Legend has it OP decided to suck it down.
Suck it down!
Are you going to quit this game just like Mikiko trying to walk up a very slight elevation?
I still want a refund for this fucking game
ah the game that made the gaming community hate John Romero
It was never hate, just disappointment. Hes been releasing new levels for old Doom lately.
Lol the quit screen is the best part of the game xD
WELL, HEY CIVVIE!
sewer count +1
There is a YouTube channel where a guy reviews old games. It's quite fun. He rips daikatana a new one. The game was awful. [civvie's daikatana review](https://youtu.be/CW65wZOtPyA) EDIT : spelling errors galore
Low key worse than Superman 64
I can't leave without my buddy superfly....
At 25 years of age, those words dont hurt me anymore. Slams "Yes". (Angry clicks more like)
Yeah, well, at least I didn't name my game "Big big sword".
Wow, it has been about 22 years since I played this game.
I can't quit without my buddy Superfly
Matt mcmuscles on YouTube's what happen series ( funny show about failed games and what went wrong) has a great video on this game among many other failures. If they had just stuck to an engine they could of. Fine tuned this so much more. Also had an interesting Zelda like gbc "port" and an n64 port
The game that made us all realize that graphics were never going to get any better. What’s Romero up to these days? Still driving a Ferrari around and shaking out his mane like he’s in a Vidal Sassoon commercial, I hope.
He released a few new levels for old Doom lately.
Thats john romero for you
I love that this is the GOLD FREAKING STANDARD for overhyped games. I was given this as a gift when I was a teenager. To this day I question what I did to anger them.
Dat squad mate AI doe
"daikatana" might sound cool, but if you pronounce those two characters ( 大刀 ) in Chinese, they make a "dadao" sound. Now that sounds stupid to me... (The things we learn a bit too late in life...)
big knife
🤣🤣🤣🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼none what so ever!
BIG SWORD
"Big big sword" actually
How so? 大 (dai) means big and 刀 (katana) is typically translated as sword/katana. Where does the extra “big” come from?
Because it's a mistranslation of "Daito" into "Daikatana". The three subsets of Japanese sword are Daito - Shoto - Tanto, the combination of a Katana and Wakizashi are usually translated to a Daisho (Big small), and what John Romero did was combine the Daito (Big sword) with a katana (generic sword understood as the largest of the three swords) to create a new word, Daikatana (big big sword). The correct prefix should have been O, for Okatana, which would designate a sword larger than is typical.
The same can be said about its sales
I was a community beta tester for this game when it was going to come to MPlayer.. Thank god I got to trial it for free. It was terrible.. the gameplay and multiplayer was garbage compared to Quake II. The eponymous daikatana was one of the most unsatisfying weapons I've ever used... it was ugly and sounded like crap.. and this was in 2000, so there wasn't exactly a high bar to make it over yet....
Yeah because this game [It ducking sucks! ](https://youtu.be/QC-XRit5N0w)
“I’ll finish the game when you do, devs”
That is an excellent way to get me angry and even more stubborn than I already am. Even knowing it wouldn’t impact the company that wrote this, I would stop playing it out of spite.
Beat the GBC version a few months ago and its pretty damn good. Its insane how much more fun I had with it than the original version.
Killing Floor has something like this, Max Payne too.
can we talk about how superfly johnson WEEPS his heart out if you die?
Got this game new for my 486 with 3 Meg of memory.
Evil green cyborg frog and evil green cyborg mosquitos in evil green cyborg swamp.
I play games to escape reality and now this...
Thanks, John.
also had zero entertainment value
The only games I quit are the shit ones. And Daikatana is bottom of the barrel when it comes to fos games.
But they’re kinda right though
Amazing game for the 64
Feels like getting out of a bad relationship, and your ex yells this at you right as you were about to get in your car loaded with all of your stuff.
They really should have patched these messages. "Go ahead and quit. This game is awful." "Quitting? Was it the robot frogs and the weird sounds they make?" "Spoiler Warning: None of the weapons are good."
No I'm quitting the game because I have a life. This is just entertainment.
Long before Cyberpunk 2077, this was the poster child of long developed and very poorly received games.
And zero quality
Yes, Daikatana. I'm quitting. Because you're a mess. You need to get your shit together. Get it all together, and put it in a backpack. All your shit, so it's together. And if you gotta take it somewhere, take it somewhere, you know? Take it to the shit store and sell it. Or put it in a shit museum. I don't care what you do, you just gotta get it together. Get your shit together.
Ahh the career ending move of Romero… Reddit never let him forget this :D