The waiting game

Will John Romero's Daikatana ever hit the shelves? When it does, will first-person shooter players still care?

By Howard Wen

Feb 8, 2000 | I witnessed a blood bath in the downtown Dallas offices of game developer ION Storm -- though a virtual one: four young men blasting each other in a multiplayer shoot-out on a beta of the company's premier game, Daikatana. The guys were finalists who had beaten a slew of challengers in an online demo of Daikatana earlier in the year and had been flown in by ION on the morning of Dec. 17 to slug it out in the "big play-fortress" office built of steel, glass, wood and overhead canopies dramatically perched in a tall skyscraper.

The shootout and the extravagant party that followed were held to celebrate the long-delayed release of Daikatana. There was just one problem: ION missed its pre-Christmas target date for the game, just as it had missed a calendar's worth of scheduled launches over the previous year and a half. Since the party, talk of a mid-January launch has come and gone, and no game has been released. At this point, gamers have stopped asking when Daikatana will hit store shelves. If they think of Daikatana at all, they're more likely to ask: When ION eventually gets this terminally late game out the door, will anyone still care?

Daikatana players battle scores of monsters across four different time periods -- such as Greece 1200 B.C. and San Francisco 2030 -- in a quest to find a magical katana sword, the game's namesake. Of course, the version I saw was a beta used for the tournament -- it lacked the monsters since the tournament players were playing the role of each other's enemy -- but I got a sense of its environments, which, as any first-person shooter enthusiast knows, can be as important as the characters. While most new first-person shooters have brought attention to themselves by focusing on a single environment and presenting it "realistically" down to the smallest details, Daikatana looks rather, well, dated with its disparate settings. It has more in common with earlier titles, like Quake II, which showcased a mishmash of gloriously rendered settings and themes but paid little regard to a cohesive story line.

There was a time -- about three long years ago, when John Romero founded ION Storm -- when gamers eagerly anticipated Daikatana, the first-person shooter Romero's been building since he left Id Software, where he'd become famous as the designer of Doom and Quake. But while Daikatana inches ever more slowly toward gamers' hands, competing game-makers have released technologically sophisticated titles like Half-Life (from Sierra Studios), with its "intelligent" monsters, and Unreal (created by Epic MegaGames and Digital Extremes), with superadvanced graphics and artificial intelligence-enhanced enemies.

ION, too, is hoping that artificial intelligence (AI) programming will prove a boon to Daikatana. But rather than give the power to your enemies, Romero is handing it to you: Players will be able to issue commands to two computer-controlled sidekick characters for assistance -- for example, they'll cover you as you dash into a room filled with heavily armed monsters, or you can send in a sidekick first to do the work for you. Well, that's the idea. It sounds cool, but the logistics involved in coding even basic humanlike attack behavior into a computer-controlled character is pretty daunting -- coordinating two such characters with your own play strategy is really tough.

"Friendly AI coding is the Holy Grail of video games -- people have been trying for years but never quite hit it on the head," says Sacha Howells, who writes about video games for the entertainment site CheckOut.com. He cites Sierra's SWAT 3, in which you play the head of a SWAT team with two teams at your command, as a recent example. It's a good game, says Howells, but it has its faults. "You issue orders on the fly, and for the most part your men respond well, but their mistakes remind you that you're dealing with lines of code, not real people. If Daikatana's artificial intelligence is so good you actually believe for a moment that they're being steered by real people when the action hits, then it will be a huge leap forward."

"Nothing I've seen suggests it will actually be that good," he says, "but then again, I haven't seen anything of the [final product]."

With its rich colors and large maps, Daikatana's settings are artfully designed, but the game is similar in feel to those far-out fantasy settings seen in first-person shooters of the past. Its time travel premise is really a pretense to glue together the different architecture styles and environments; it doesn't contribute anything to actual game play. Jumping forward and back through time in a single setting, a city or neighborhood, and seeing how the environment changes by the decade, or encountering a past version of one's self, would be a far more provocative use of time travel in a first-person shooter -- and a more complex game to create.

Next Page: Millions of dollars and several years later ...

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