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Games Entertainment

Daikatana - Delayed Again? 102

Posted by emmett from the make-lara-croft-the-ceo dept.
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! :)
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Daikatana - Delayed Again? More

Daikatana - Delayed Again?

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  • Team Daikatana Should Die! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Here are two articles from Salon magazine detailing all the problems behind the Daikatana release. The first article [salon.com] talks about Romeros' early life and split with Id and the second article [salon.com] 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.
  • Uh huh. I see I insulted you. Beta 6 is perfect, except for some flaws. You are the mightiest player in the land, except for those better than you. Yes, so many people cannot aim at a non-moving target in front of their nose, but you are still mighty. And like I said, everyone claims nothing has changed. I'm just reporting my side, which is I notice differences. Modemers whine about ping because it makes a difference when facing folks with 100ms pings. I've sniped plenty of them with my impressive 300ms. But really, no need to take it personal. Well, unless you are thirteen years old still, and take my experiences with beta 6+ as "You suck at CS." That would explain a lot, my friend.

    You asked what I didn't like about it, so I complied. And b6.1 isn't an improvement on anything. Now, back to my hot grits.
  • Mostly the deal with bullets not going where the crosshairs are. In a game like this, that one little feature will ruin the entire thing. It's ok for a while, but get in some firefights at two feet standing still, and both of you go through a few magazines of ammo, it gets dull. I see they have a b6.1 now, maybe it's better. Other minor things made it annoying, but this was the deal breaker. Servers I've frequented for ages went up a good 50ms in ping. For me with a 56k modem, that is a huge difference. Of course, everyone claims they didn't do anything to either side (server admins / CS team). ;)
  • 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.
  • Engines and buzzwords are one thing (hopefully it'll have full tri-linear bilateral transmogrification though, that one's important), but what's it supposed to be about? What spin do they think they can put on these other run-get rocket launcher-shoot like crazy-die games?

    Quake 3's demo didn't impress me for the very dull gameplay. I don't get a chubby racing for a rocket launcher. I bought UT recently, figuring that would motivate me to toy with 3D in Linux. So far I've payed it quite a bit in Windows, it's cute, but more of the same. After a week, I'm better than the robots in the practice games, and nearly every (literally, I've gotton onto one server in about 30 tries) server I try to join boots me before finishing downloading it's map. I've never had more trouble downloading 1-2MB. I think I'm done with it now. Half Life has kept my attention over it's 16 months with good single player storyline, nice updates and mods like TFC, CounterStrike (but not beta6), Action HL. TFC2 is now about a year late, and I'm pretty indifferent to it as well. Half Life doesn't have the pretties graphics/lighting, but it is enjoyable, even for a modemer like me.
  • 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.
  • Unreal single player was.. bad.

    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
    ___
  • 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.

  • 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
  • The technology (graphics) maybe old, but if the game is good and unique, why sould I care about that? People still play games like Warcraft 2, Descent 2, Doom, even Nethack. If the gaming experience is good, the bad (?) graphics won't matter.

    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...
  • <sarcasm>Yeah, that's exactly what linux needs -- a series of subpar games using 4-year-old technology. Sounds like a winner to me! </sarcasm>

    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?
  • "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".

  • Okay, I see news about Game boys, Dreamcasts, PC's, etc.

    But if they really want to sell into an untapped market, how about having Loki port Tomb Raider to Linux?

  • 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..
  • I noticed it... I'm looking forward to it too.
  • 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.
  • Actually, Romero has come into IRC #doom2 (Efnet, I think) several times, and it was proven to be him. The times I've been there when he was there too, I don't remember him answering any Daikatana questions specifically. The chat logs are somewhere at www.doomworld.com, maybe he's said a thing or two. Actually, I think he comes in there more to soak up the worship from the Doom geeks than anything else, but since he helped create Doom, he still has a certain level of respect from me, I suppose.

    - bonch
  • <p>I wonder what my first impression will be of seeing Daikatana on the shelfs for the first time.</p>
    <p> Enthusiasm, fear, uncertainty, doubt, or perhaps, feeling quite ... old </p>
    <p> I can be used, beaten and bruised, to justify your state of mind (Mesh - State of mind)</p>
  • Old man murray was right. [oldmanmurray.com]

    I'm no gamer, but I know prophetic comedy when I read it.

  • "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. :-(
  • 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.

    Several gaming news sites have made the same mistake, so it's not just /. 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.
  • 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

  • but since he helped create Doom, he still has a certain level of respect from me, I suppose.

    The Commander Keen series still has a small but hard-core fanbase as well. :) I'm actually dissapointed that the commanderkeen.com domain is taken (I just looked), but I suppose it's just as well.
  • 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.
  • 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...
    ------
  • How could the company who brought us the Tomb Raider games be going broke?
    Did they spend to much on virtual silicone?
  • Although it's not really being delayed all that much (now) after all, it still has already been pushed back so much, I don't understand how Daikatana expects to compete? Quake3 and UT are already out and have their market share. Now, they are entering, and if to gain any of that market share, they have to be better on some front than Q3 and UT, not just as good as, or what's the incentive to play?

    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.

  • Whats wrong with beta 6?
  • John Romero has stated in a few interviews that if there is a Linux port, it would only be server side. I guess there is still the possibility that Loki could do a full port for ION Storm..?

  • 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.

    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.

  • 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.
  • I have one question? Why?
    I haven't heard much good about Daikatana myself. And from what I've seen it looks like.. well.. crap. It's even the right colour for it.

    Half-Life... now there's a good game.
    ----
    Don't underestimate the power of peanut brittle
  • 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.
    ----
    Don't underestimate the power of peanut brittle
  • 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.
  • Funny...the bullets always go where I put the crosshairs. If you and your friends are emptying entire clips at each other without hitting anything, perhaps its time to come to terms with the fact that you suck. And no, none of the network code was changed, so the added lag is either on your end, a coincidence, or just your imagination. Then again most modem players like to whine about their ping as an excuse for sucking so bad...I don't blame them...I wouldn't want to play like that either.

    -W.W.
  • 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.

  • Eidos (Score:1)

    by rwade ( 131726 )
    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.
  • I think this response exactly proves the point of what this delay has caused!

  • 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.


    ----------

  • Just like the game itself. LOL. Maybe there will be a slip in the space-time continum and the Linux port will come out before the Windows version does.


    ----------

  • ... MACOS X IS THE WINNER! Congratulations, MacOS X!
  • Well, I would hope most Linux gamers would be able to recognize a crap game and a far-overused license when they see one.

    --

  • 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.
    ----------------
  • who cares if its canceled again- D is going to suck bad- id rather play tribes 2, TF 2 and unreal 2-

  • Eidos history (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.
    ---
  • *ZZZAP*

    Hi, this is CausticPuppy from the future. I have written a game review of the sequel to Daikatana.
    It's right here. [mindspring.com]

  • I've been wondering for a while, but haven't seen anything posted one way or another...

    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 /. who claims that they know someone who talks to Romero. Anyway, I don't have much hope.

    And I'm still going to buy it, a lot of the ideas behind it are (IMHO), damn cool.
  • they are referring to the fiscal year, which starts in a month or two if memory serves.


    B1ood

  • The Financial Times (UK Financial Paper ) ran this today also, (page 14 , 25 March), also go to http://www.ft.com [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 then :-)

    Me, 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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  • Here's the review my roomate put up of the Daikatana demo...a little more than a full year ago.

    Gameplayer.com [gameplayer.com]

    Think about that for a second...remember how long it took even the demo to come out? And from what I saw in the demo, UT and Q3 both kick the crap out of this game. I don't see how anyone could be a diehard fan of this game after playing the other 2 alternatives. The ONE feature that Daikatana had that I DID like, was that it told you how dead you were. If you had 3 health and someone shot you with a rocket launcher, before you clicked to respawn, your health would be -110 or something.

    BTW, games are never really in development for "only a year", if they're good. When I was working at Squaresoft, it took a year to port FF7 over to the PC. From the time you first hear about a game, to the time it gets released may be a year, but they've have designers, artists, and others going at it for probably 2-3. Just as a point of reference, while we were working on finishing 7 PC, the lead programmer was getting calls from the lead programmer on FF 9...before FF 8 was released in Japan.

  • 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 [opticomasas.com] for about 170$ million. (About 10% below current valuation of the Opticom stock.)

    The Norwegian article about the sale can be found here [www.digi.no].

  • 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.

  • Deus Ex (Score:3)

    by Alternity ( 16492 ) on Saturday March 25, 2000 @08:19AM (#1172776)
    As long as they do not delay Deus Ex everything is ok for me. Am I the only one who noticed this game?

  • Keep In Mind (Score:3)

    by n3rd ( 111397 ) on Saturday March 25, 2000 @07:33AM (#1172777)
    As you can see here [shugashack.com] on sCary's Shuga Shack [shugashack.com] it may be delayed to 2001, but that's the 2001 fiscal year which begins April 1, 2000. Just a small correction.

  • remember Unreal? (Score:4)

    by Temporal ( 96070 ) on Saturday March 25, 2000 @09:40AM (#1172778) Journal

    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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