What went so wrong? I mean it wasn't just Daikatana, it

>>3529201

I'll sum it up:

1. John Romero was only one part of the reason for ID's success. Alone he lacked the artists, programmers, etc of ID.

2. Peter Principle. Romero was a level designer and designer. He was promoted to project manager. A position he never had before. He proceeded to completely mismanage the project at every level. Blowing money on a fancy suite. Giant office with everything imaginable. And then changing engines several times forcing them to remake the entire game each time.

>>3529201
Romero hired a bunch of modders who had never made a commercial game before. That's fine if you're an experienced project manager (Gabe Newell had experience in Microsoft doing exactly that), but Romero was a Tim Schafer-tier project manager.

Doing the business or managerial side of things just wasn't part of his talents.

>>3529201
He made himself his bitch

It's not that bad. It's actually better than Half Life.

>>3529268
Didn't he hire a modder who just started the scene only because she was hot?

>>3529201
If Romero didn't make Daikatana we wouldn't have got Deus Ex nor Anachronox.

Putting a face to a game often helps it. Instead of just a faceless game, it's for example Sid Meier's game, so it gets people thinking about the guy behind it. Romero was heavily marketed at the time, his cultish personality probably helped and I guess he started believing it too much himself.

The first two words of the title spell it out: John Romero.

He's a fantastic level designer, he really is, but he was not fit to manage a project. We're talking about a guy who locked himself in his office to -play- Doom instead of actually -work- on it. John Carmack had to hack the door apart with a fucking fire axe- to get in there and get him to work.

Does that sound like the guy you want as project manager?

>>3529294
Romero is the sole reason Quake 1 is good to this day.

>>3529201

It is well known what was wrong.

For of all Romero was always overhyped. john carmack was the reason for Doom not Romero. Romero was good at level design and ideas but he needed carmack.

Romero had no clue how to manage a game. He was someone who kept wanting to add cool things to game but didnt want to listen to the PM when they say "we have a budget and a timeline," Romero left Id because they wouldnt let him delay their games indefinitely to implement impossible ideas. He was awesome at level design but he needed people to manage him, and he was the manager at Ion Storms.

Seriously there was a point where he wanted every level to have a new enemy, a new weapon, and a secret level. You know how much work that was? It wasnt enough to have 4 time periods with different weapons and enemies?

He then hired a bunch of talented people but management was an issue. Nobody managed them, everyone did what they wanted which resulted them working in silos and nothing getting done. He made piss poor decisions like bringing his girlfriend in in a high level role.

The AI concept was actually solid but implemented before its time. One of the biggest gripes about the game is the AI teammates who ruin progress. It is common in games now, very common, but back then they didnt know how to develop it. They also made stupid decisions like sharing health and ammo with AI.

To summarize though Romero was never anything special. With doom lots of people who had their names attached became popular and could get money from investors, like American McGee or John Romero, but they were never that great. They just had supporting role in great product that was really Carmack's. Ion Storms had shit management practices and while people stupidly gave them money, they had no idea how to actually operate as a business and deliver realistic requirements on time. The game also tried to do too much.

>>3529307
>john carmack was the reason for Doom not Romero

lol you're sayng a good engine is more important than a good game in the first place?

>>3529307
>Romero was always overhyped. john carmack was the reason for Doom not Romero

There's some truth in this but you're being slightly unfair.

With Carmack, no Romero, you get Quake 2 which is a technically competent but highly boring game.

With Romero, no Carmack, you get Daikatana which had plenty of great ideas, but was a technical mess that got in the way of the fun.

Quake 2 is better, but both games are flawed.

>>3529316
Q2 wasn't even technically impressive compared to Unreal.

>>3529289

Sid Meier put his name on a game for a joke. It actually caught on and Sid Meier could actually make good games running things, Romero couldnt. Romero is fine as long as he is managed but he is not a leader.

>>3529298
Carmack should get that credit. Romero came up with ideas, Carmack actually implemented them and delivered.

>>3529313
>>3529316

There is no game without Carmack. Daikatana shows how far Romero can get without Carmack. Quake 2, 3 and Doom 3 show what Carmack could do without Romero. Yeah those games arent perfect but better than Daikatanna and Quake 2,3 and Doom 3 engine had widespread use.

And the reason Romero left was because his ideas got impossible/infeasible to implement. He was a team player for awhile but he let his ego get to his head and he thought everyone was around to be his bitch and deliver what ADHD thoughts he had. They told him to fuck off, and he has been a failure ever since.

Carmack is involved in space flight now. Romero makes shitty mobile games.

>>3529323
To be fair it did come out earlier and ran at a higher framerate on contemporary PCs.

>>3529325
>Carmack should get that credit. Romero came up with ideas, Carmack actually implemented them and delivered.

That's like giving all of the credit for making a movie to the film crew since they actually went and filmed it. It's a shared effort, friend.

>>3529325
>Carmack should get that credit.
Yeah right from what people involved say it happened the programmers just delivered the engine and refused to work on anything else citing burnout. According to Romero he was literally left alone by that time with just a enigne with American McGee disappearing somewhere in the mean time.

>>3529328

Yes according to Romero.

According to everyone else Romero wouldnt even show up for work, and when he did he would just play Doom/Doom 2 deathmatch. He spent most of his time throwing big parties and taking all the credit for Doom and Doom 2.

>>3529328
i wouldn't wan't carmack or michael abrash making levels anyway.

american mcgee burned out and disappeared for the last few weeks of the project. he was a good level designer though.

>>3529307
>To summarize though Romero was never anything special.

Romero's levels are some of the best in Doom. There's a reason why Doom 1 is way better than 2.

>>3529335
his levels in doom 2 are the best as well

>>3529326
>Quake 2,3 and Doom 3 engine had widespread use.

But see, that's the thing. They were more successful as game engines than the games themselves (and really only Quake 3, Quake 2 and Doom 3 only had small amounts of licensing).

Out of that lot, only Quake 3 could be argued as a classic. And it wasn't even original! They just took old Quake deathmatch and just refined the fuck out of it.

>Carmack is involved in space flight now. Romero makes shitty mobile games.

Not really surprising, Carmack is an engineer so he's moved to another area of engineering that excites him more. Romero is a game designer and he just really loves games. Why would he move?

>>3529331
m8 it's not a secret that what Quake ended is becouse Romero was left alone with a mess to salvage. The game was supposed to be a ambitious medieval/norse action rpg. Too bad the rest of the team cared fuck all about that despite Carmack being one of the people that pushed that idea first.

>>3529335

He was a good level designer. Nothing special about that. Lots of games have good level designers, better than Romero, and you dont even know who the fuck they are because nobody cares. Level Designers dont get their name on games just like the people who design sets for movies dont get their names on movies.

Doom was just game changing for the gaming industry so someone who wouldnt normally be noticed got noticed.

>>3529338

Yes, the medieval hand to hand combat wasnt possible to implement. People spent a lot of time trying to create his vision and then when he threatened the whole company with his ego they decided to make the game actually workable.

>>3529326
>Daikatana shows how far Romero can get without Carmack
No what Daikatana showed was how limited idtech2 really was compared to the likes of Unreal. You think the AI in Daikatana was bad? It's still above all that any other bot done in the engine did. Literally every flawed mechanic in the game can be traced back to the lack of flexibility in the Id engine

>>3529326
Carmack is wasting his time with Occulus what are you talking about?

>>3529343
>He was a good level designer.
And Carmack is just a average coder when stacked besides eastern european devs then. Even his stencil shadows he tried to push in Doom3 (and even name the method after himself) turned out to already had been researched and documented by someone else. His only truly good work was on Doom and Q1 everything after that was just reactionary or failed development.

>>3529337

Quake 2 and 3, and Doom 3 were actually good games too. Maybe not Doom or Quake good but still really good. They didnt drag companies down with them and make a joke out of the people who made them like Daikatana. Samee with Rage. And the enginges were used for many more games.

Daikatana had nothing. It just serves as an example of failure in the gaming industry. Base case scenario is it is average game that tried too hard. Ion Storms had some awesome games, but none that Romero worked on. He was over. He lives off Doom nostalgia.

>>3529346
Plenty of people were able to get the AI to work. Romero couldnt. He always relied on others to actually do the work.

I wouldnt be surprised if Romero post here and he is arguing on his behalf, that is what he does in his free time. Talks about how great he is. Carmack is building space ships and VR.

>>3529353

Romero should have gotten them then, because Carmack had and still has success without Romero. Not so much the other way around. Turns out making a revolutionary game engine is slightly more impressive than being good at level design.

>>3529354
>Plenty of people were able to get the AI to work.
Well then name idtech2 implementations of AI bots that work alongside the player instead of just moving forward and cycling between waypoints like on a arena map? Because you know a MP bot wont work in SP.

>>3529364
>Turns out making a revolutionary game engine is slightly more impressive
Can you name then the people behind the truly revolutionary engines like Unreal or CryEngine? Because unlike MEGATEXTURES MAKE ME SO HARD HURR DURR they actually revolutionized game graphics.

>>3529354
I dunno if I'd call Quake 2 or Doom 3 really good games cause I found them really boring, but I can't deny that they were competently produced. There's definitely nothing "embarrassing" about them like there was with Daikatana.

But at the same time I can't help but think of that old saying where the #1 crime when trying to produce a creative work is to be boring.

>>3529201
Too big. Original pitch had ridiculous promises that the game could never live up to.
Second, I think it was Romero's ego. I'm not sure about that, but if you play the game, you will clearly see it's devs unwillingness too cut corners and stray from 'vision' that fucks everything up. At the same time, anything that didn't fit, got forcibly crammed in, even when it no longer made sense.
Like, AI buddies are worst part of the game, and game actually becomes halfway playable if you mod them out - but they didn't cut them. RPG elements are basically useless - but they stayed. There is a black character called "Superfly" which sounds ridiculous - except originally he was supposed to come from post-apocalyptic future where people worshipped moden popculture.

Like.
Wolf 3D was a great game, because id was willing to cut anything that didn't work. Originally game was supposed to be transplant of Catle Wolfenstein games (early stealth games that clearly inspired Metal Gear series) into 3D - but stealth didn't work well in 3D in first person, so it was scrapped. Result? Groundbreaking game.
Doom was originally supposed to be episodic, multiplayer story-driven coop horror experience inspired by Aliens - basically, Left4Dead in the 90's. However, it turned out that banking on mulitplayer was a bad idea, and story messed with the pacing, so game got revampled into more focused shooting and exploration experience. Result? Timeless classic.

Quake was originally supposed to be a giant, sprawling gothic dark fantasy action-RPG with complex moral choices - something like Morrowind, but in 96. But again, too many pieces didn't fit, so it got cut, chopped, hacked and streamlined to a FPS formula - and result changed the industry and made full 3D a de facto graphics standard.

Daikatana was originally supposed to be a huge, sprawling action-RPG with AI companions, and a story sprawling centuries due to time travel. And it kind of is actually all of these things!
Badly.

>>3529374

Yes, I can. It is well known. Do you need me to name them?

>>3529376

Thats your opinion man and I respect them. However, metacritic wise they did good. They were well enough received. They werent failures lije Daikatana. I dont care for them either but I dont like pure FPS games that much, IMO Warren Spector is the best.

Being creative is not hard. Implementing creativity is hard.

>>3529368
Paintball 2. Dont blame the technology for Romero's inability to use it. And if they couldnt make it work they should have dropped it. Development 101. Get the AI to work before making a whole game around it, fucking idiots.

>>3529384
>Dont blame the technology for Romero's inability to use it
Nice denial here. Too bad Carmack in his infinite wisdom concluded that all the AI needed in a game is enemies running straight at the player.

>>3529384
You know how Deus Ex accomplished so much? Because it steered clear out of using any engine made by Carmack.

>>3529384
>Being creative is not hard. Implementing creativity is hard.

From a pure engineering perspective it isn't necessarily so that implementing a creative game concept will actually have substantially more difficult challenges than implementing a non-creative game idea. Obviously engineering has its own form of creativity but it's not necessarily linked to creativity in game design. It's a separate kind of creativity.

But I think people need to get away from this idea that game design is synonymous with "ideas guys". There's a lot more to it, like level design, game balance, mechanical design, challenge design, etc.

Romero is very good at these things. But with Daikatana he spent all of his time being a bad project manager than actually designing the fucking game.

>>3529279
He hired his girlfriend as a level designer IIRC.

>>3529298
Didn't he only work on a chapter and a half?

>>3529408
He's credited for ~10 levels. But so was everyone else except for sandy petersen

>>3529410
I feel Petersen's level are a mixed bag here, but they're different enough to be enjoyed.

>>3529396

Worked fine for him and the people he licensed it to. Maybe Romero's fault for not being able to use it for his purposes, he had other options.

>>3529403

There are technical challenges but coming up with original, creative, and fun gameplay can be hard. You dont need a good engine for this, although combined they can be awesome.

Romero was an ideas guy and a game designer but he had other people actually implement them. He cant do it without the right people.

I have ideas too. Why dont we make an open world game where it has entire world in it. You can destroy anything you want. Each person is unique in looks, personality, and dialogue. Eahc person can have hours of discussion. That is awesome idea, I am genius. Any any point you can time travel, so if you are in London you can go back to London in 1300 AD and it is different. Even between 1300 and 1301 things are different with new NPCs, plant life, animal life, buildings, etc. Laws of Physics apply so buildings atrophy and rain can wear them down. Floods can naturally occur and if a family loses their child I want them to suffer from depression. I also want butterfly effect where you program an algorithm where small changes constantly lead to big outcomes. You now make this game, I want it photorealistic. You fail your fault. If you want I can get you a map of some cities, countries, etc for you to incorporate into the game.

When game is complete you deserve some credit, but I get 90% because it was my idea.

>>3529425
>Worked fine for him and the people he licensed it to
You better double check that list of games made on the q2 engine just don't surprised when all of them are a piece of shit - like the engine itself. Romero was stupid he trusted Carmack on the technical side and licensed the engine before it show what it could really do. If he waited some time and went for the perfectly modular Unreal engine he would have saved himself a lot of trouble.

>>3529434

Yeah lets double check idiot

Quake II (1997) by id Software

Quake II Mission Pack: The Reckoning (1998) by Xatrix Entertainment
Quake II Mission Pack: Ground Zero (1998) by Rogue Entertainment

Heretic II (1998) by Raven Software
SiN (1998) by Ritual Entertainment

SiN: Wages of Sin (1999) by Ritual Entertainment

Kingpin: Life of Crime (1999) by Xatrix Entertainment
Soldier of Fortune (2000) by Raven Software
Daikatana (2000) by Ion Storm
Anachronox (2001) by Ion Storm

With the exception of Daikatana they are all fucking good. Nothing ground breaking but solid stuff. I cant speak to the Quake II mission packs.

>>3529437
Yeah truly, genre defining good like daikatana. All of the games had the same average score on release as it too. I just can't get enough of those average shooters man!

>>3529443

They all had good reviews, for the most part. Soldiers of Fortune, Quake II, Sin, etc. were well regarded. As was Anarchronox. Heretic II and Kingpin were considered good but had some flaws.

Only Daikatana sucked.

>>3529201
JOHN FUCKING ROMERO wasn't a developer, wasn't a particularly good designer, had no experience running a company or leading a team, and didn't have terribly good ideas to boot (letting design dictate his games, instead of technology, the polar opposite to Ids approach)

Poor management is what caused Daikatana's problems.

*Romero decided to switch to the Q2 engine to catch up with Carmack, when he should've just modded the Q1 engine like Valve did.

*Level design started long before the AI partners were stable, so mappers had no idea how to make maps with them until fairly late in development.

*Trying to make Episode 1, the game's intro, into a Half Life clone, which failed miserably because of how awful the maps were. The mid 1998 Episode 1 maps are pretty good.

*Poor map-making scheduling that had the team working on a handful of maps out of many to the exclusion of the others for many months. For example, E2M3 was constnatly being worked on from July 1997, while E2M1 and E2M2 were left to rot from Feb 1998 to late 1998. Several key areas weren't worked on for over a year, like E4M5.

*Constantly shuffling storyline and gameplay objects, despite having multiple design docs. Episode 4's maps got moved around like crazy. Even the damn HUD got a random change late in development, when it was fine before.

*Long development schedule and constant team changes meant that there were too many cooks in the kitchen, from programming to art.

*Bad programming oversight. Things were changed willy-nilly, which caused a lot of unexpected issues.

My favorite bit of info from DK's development that shows how poorly it was managed is that the programmers only remembered saving and loading save files during the latter bits of 1999 and had to scramble to add proper saving and loading support to the game (this is why the game has a game-crashing bug and a few smaller ones related to saving and loading).

>>3529447
Contrary what people like others to believe Daikatana didn't score below 7 on average in the press I read at the time.

>>3529272
This is chum.

>>3529287
Come on now.
>>3529335
Yeah doom 2's level design is rubbish.

>>3529451

It was a 6-7

The other games are 8-9.

But yeah totally the engines fault and not Romero's for designing a game around a concept that he couldnt pull off. If only Carmack was around to save him.

BTW Romero still makes shitty mobile games, I guess the engine was so bad it is makes him suck.

>>3529453
>Come on now.
If he didn't use his star power to fund Ion Storm you wouldn't have Deus Ex and that's a FACT even Spector admits. Only Romero was crazy enough to give a Origin designer that worked on 2d rpg games cash for a overly ambitious rpg/fps hybrid.

>>3529460
>Romero still makes shitty mobile games
And Carmack makes a facebook spying platform with oculus oh and scams people by lying about what it could do. Pick your poison.

>>3529463

Deus Ex is masterpiece, but Romero had nothing to do with the game other than funding it. Ill give Ion storms credit but not Romero.

>>3529294
>We're talking about a guy who locked himself in his office to -play- Doom instead of actually -work- on it. John Carmack had to hack the door apart with a fucking fire axe- to get in there and get him to work.
That's not how that happened.

The lock on the door broke, and he called up Carmack on the intercom (which they had installed for communicating when developing, testing netplay, then testing it some more), I think his phrasing was something along the line of "I'm locked in here because of this shitty door" and how he should help him.

Carmack tries the lock, then goes and gets his custom made battle axe off the wall in his office (whereupon the rest of the guys are chanting BATTLE-AXE! BATTLE-AXE! BATTLE-AXE!), he tells Romero to stand back or take cover or something, and he starts hacking up the door with the battle axe, violently sending huge splinters of wood all over Romero's office (keep in mind that John Carmack is a seriously meaty and muscular nerd).
After breaking up a big enough hole, Romero could get out (and then run to take a piss), they then posed for a picture with the smashed door.

>>3529468

It is called big data mining. Data science. Genius type stuff to get unstructured data and find information from him. He also works on space ships and VR.

Romero makes shitty mobile games and is forgotten except for being the guy who was made a bitch by how bad Daikatana. You arent Romero are you?

>>3529469
>but not Romero
Yeah no credit for the guy that believed in the project in the first place. And as you probably know Specter already toured other publishers and dev studios with it and only Romero saw promise in it.

>>3529463
Spector wasn't a designer, he was a producer. And he had worked on 3D games like Ultima Underworld, System Shock or Thief.

>>3529474
>He also works on space ships
No he participates in open rocket contest which have dozens of participants. He dosen't work for NASA or any space related industry. He also has nothing to do with data mining.

>>3529476
So if had so much talent and experience why was he laughed out by his own company when proposing deus ex?

>>3529434
You need to work within the limitations of your technology. Romero had a policy of letting design dictate their direction instead of technology, which is a terrible fucking idea in gaming because you are 100% constrained to what your engine can do.

>>3529460
>shitty mobile games
They're the kind of games he used to make as a kid on his Apple II, the ones he'd sell to magazines and other distributors.

I don't think he's that bad off.

>>3529453
I've always felt that Doom 2 could be reasonably divided in three, 1/3rd good levels (mostly in the beginning), 1/3rd mediocre levels (mostly at the end), and 1/3rd bad levels (mainly in the middle).

Romero really was workshy though and he really should have done much more levels for Doom 2.
He made a couple of levels just recently for Doom and they were pretty good, so it's not like it's a touch he lost.

>>3529481
Because he was dealing with EA.

>>3529484
The argument was that Carmack is such a godly programmer he can do nothing wrong when in fact his engines were lacking compared to other available on the market. Q2 engine was a inflexible mess and it's a undeniable fact evident by just looking on the list of games running on it.

>>3529485

Maybe that worked in early 80s. Nobody wants Apple II style games now.

>>3529476
Spector is awesome no doubt about it.

>>3529475
Maybe Romero should stick to investing in games rather than making them then since he is shit at it, he is an ok level designer if Carmack has him on leash.

>>3529470
> John Carmack is a seriously meaty and muscular nerd
Uh, no. No he isn't. Stop peddling your BS stories.

>>3529491
that's because carmack's engine's were heavily purpose built.

look at the source code reviews for them. they're not badly made at all.

>>3529501
Unreal>Q2 engine

Fight me.

>>3529491
Carmacks engines outperformed all those other engines, and the games list of Q2 engine games is actually pretty fucking solid, but nice try Romero.

>>3529505
i never said anything about unreal

>>3529506
>outperformed
What does that even mean in light of the fact that other engines supported more effects, better lighting and textures? Go ahead install Unreal and compare it the the best looking Q2 running game. There is no comparison.
>>3529507
This whole discussion about carmack engines is them compared to unreal.

>>3529512
> Outperformed
> What does that even mean
Q2 FPS > Unreal FPS on identical hardware

>>3529516
Wolfenstein fps>Doom fps>Q2 fps on identical hardware

Makes me wonder why we ever stopped using those engines.

>>3529512
>This whole discussion about carmack engines is them compared to unreal.

I only responded to this.

>Q2 engine was a inflexible mess and it's a undeniable fact evident by just looking on the list of games running on it.

>>3529505
lel. Last I remember, the list of derivatives off of Quake engines is 100 times the size of Unreal. Source alone is a list in itself.

>>3529527
>the list of derivatives off of Quake engines is 100 times the size of Unreal.
Maybe becouse of the open source status of the engine and the fact that Unreal in itself is heavy moddable without much work thanks to it's natural modular nature by design.

>>3529523
That's like comparing a NES, SNES, and N64 game

>>3529493
> Nobody wants Apple II style games now.
Those games have some very fundamental similarities to the kinds of games you see on Facebook and mobile phones today.

>>3529497
For a nerd he's pretty built, he could probably take every poster here in an unarmed fight, this is a guy who, as a kid in junior high, started lifting and training martial arts because he figured it would be a good thing if he beat up some of the bullies at his school.

>>3529530
> It's easier to mod Unreal and that's why there are fewer mods for it
Seriously, what?

>>3529531
No it isn't you said a engine that lacked many features offered by Unreal runs better ergo taking away more features will make the engine run faster thus we ended with wolfenstein becouse who needs 3d anyway? That's just a needless feature hampering performance anyway.

>>3529540
I never said anything about features. Just that one engine and another engine both from the same generation of engine technology outperformed the other. I did nothing to invite your intergenerational shitposting.

>>3529537
There's more mods to unreal than quake. Ever heard of mutators? That's how easy unreal modding is without delving into the engine itself and forking it.

>>3529546
And how many GAMES are built on it?

Right.

>>3529542
But a engine is defined by features it's those features that define engine generations.

>>3529550
Did you have to drink bleach or something to get this retarded?

I'm really hoping your next post will be:
> Hurrr I troll u

>>3529548
26 for unreal engine 1 and this >>3529437
anon posted the list for q2 engine

>>3529554
Tell me how do you define engine generation? By year? Because that's just silly.

>>3529563
Engine generations are defined by the authors intent at their time of writing. Unreal was not intended to upstage Q2, but to compete with it.

>>3529404
Yes, Chasey Lain. He hired her as a level designer because she beat him in a Quake duel.