Daikatana (video and text review - your choice)

Today's game belongs to those games, a review of which can not be done, at least briefly without telling the background of its creation. But I will try to do this briefly. If you want this story in more detail - the book Masters of the Doom will help you, since it has an official Russian translation. In my opinion, not the best translation, but it is definitely better than nothing. So.
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This story began back in 1991, on the day that id Software was founded. Speaking about the success of the company, everyone usually recalls about the brilliant programmer John Carmack, but today he will not be the star of the story, but the other father, the founder of the company - John Romero. Initially, a good programmer, in the development process of the team, he also pumped other skills: the creation of game levels, graphic design, as well as the overall game design. But after the release of Doom and during the creation of the Doom 2 add-on, Romero spent less and less time creating content, and more and more - promoting himself. He traveled to all sorts of interviews, was hacked in endless deatmatchs, was engaged in sales of the Doom engine, produced the output of the game Heretic - in general, was engaged in anything, but not in development.

In principle, it cannot be said that he did something useless: PR is a rather important part of promoting anything. In addition, it was Romero who originally suggested that Carmack sell his engines - first, Wolfenstein 3D, and after Doomovsky, which also brought id Software a lot of fame and money.

The problem is that id Software was at that time a small team, and everyone was required to contribute to the development itself. Romero promised to continue making maps and play design, but he constantly postponed performing his duties, with the result that in Doom 2 only 6 levels out of 32 were made directly to them.

When it came time to create Quake, things got worse. Carmack took up the engine, but Romero offered kilotons of ideas for a new game: he wanted to add RPG elements, time travel, a weapon that would destroy the elements of the map architecture and much more. The problem is that by proposing ideas, he didn’t work them out, so by the time the engine was ready, really thought out of these ideas was absolutely nothing.

From the content, only models, textures and levels for the medieval episode were partially ready. As a result, Carmack suggested not to dodge and just make the same Doom, but on a new engine. Romero was categorically opposed, but the rest of the Karmak team supported: they knew from their own experience how much time it took to create content, and they understood that it was necessary for eternity to create everything Romero wanted.

At this point, the mutual discontent of the two John reached its climax.

Romero believed that Carmack thought narrowly, was not able to see the full potential of his creations and to do something truly great. That Carmack has forgotten what it means to be a gamer.

Carmack believed that Romero was exhausted, turned into a windbreak, incapable of any real accomplishments. That Romero has ceased to be a real developer.

They did not succeed in reaching an understanding, and at the end of the development of Quake, Carmack stated in an ultimatum that Romero had no place here, that he was not doing his job and was decomposing the team. The rest of the company took his side, realizing that Carmack's engines are the heart of id Software, recognizing that Romero has been more disturbing than helping over the last couple of years.

But Romero’s reputation suffered solely inside id Software, so after kicking out on the street, he was able to find investment without any problems and start a new company, Ion Storm. The money was provided by the publisher Eidos Interactive, which Romero promised to weaken as much as 6 games, of which Daikatana would be the main one.

It's funny that this game should in fact become what Quake was supposed to be: to have RPG elements, time travel, a spreading storyline, and so on.

Here, everything becomes completely ridiculous, because initially the idea of ​​the Daikatana sword was not invented by Romero, but by John Carmack, moreover many years ago, when the very young id Software team played D & D. Thus, Romero planned to use the idea of ​​Carmack, to buy a license for the Quake engine, to take the initial ideas for Quake as a basis ... And from all this to make a game that will wipe the nose of former colleagues. Do you see any contradictions here? Not? Okay.

Then begins a long and muddy history, undercover struggle in the company and other pranks. This whole zoo is not very interesting to me, so I will focus on listing only some facts.

Romero gained a new team from both experienced developers and newbies who practiced creating various mods. At the same time, he was not engaged in a special organization of development, being for some reason sure that everything is formed on its own, the main thing is that the team be ambitious enough and it has a cool office.

In the steep office of the new company, a lot of money was really invested, including the purchase of the throne, slot machines and other things. But there were confusions: for example, in a steep office it was difficult to work, because the light from the glass roof to the hell was blinded by the developers' monitors. I had to build such awnings that did not help much. But Ponte was above all.

At the end of 1997, an intermediate version of the game was shown at E3, but no particular furore was noticed about it, because Quake 2 was also shown at the same exhibition. Against its background, Daikatana looked miserable, outdated, so Romero decided to transfer his creation on the new engine.

Fortunately, the contract with id Software allowed using the new engine, but only after Quake 2 was released. As a result, Romero decided to continue to cut the game based on the Quake engine, and after receiving the new engine, he quickly transferred all the developments to id Tech 2 The idea, as you probably guess, was so-so, especially given the fact that the team had enough newcomers. As a result, a considerable part of the work had to be redone almost from scratch.

As a result, originally scheduled for the end of 1997, the game did come out in the middle of 2000 and received devastating ratings from the press and players.

But the question is: was the game rated very low because of high expectations and hype around it - or because it really turned out bad?

To find out, I took the digital version from GOG, since it costs a penny, but if you like, you can also find the game on the site Old-Games.RU.

In addition, I put a fan patch on it up to version 1.3, which adds a widescreen resolution and a ruling pack of bugs, but I did not use the improved textures from this patch. This patch fixes problems, because of which I, in principle, would not have played the game, or would have threatened it 2 times longer. Take at least the same load locations: in the original, they last 5 times longer.

And so - in the fan patch. The difference in speed - at times.

The game begins with a 10 minute screen saver on the engine. The essence of the plot is as follows. There lived in the past two Japanese clans: evil and good. For many years they fought, but no one could prevail. Then the head of the evil clan ordered the mega-smith to make the epic-magic sword of Daikatan. The blacksmith made his sword, but then he saw that evil was bad, well done?

Therefore, the blacksmith gave the sword to the head of the good clan. He with the help of the Daikatan freed Japan from the yoke of evil, and then destroyed the sword, throwing it into the mouth of the volcano.

Many years later, the descendant of the blacksmith sent an expedition in search of the sword - and what is characteristic, he found it. But as a result, something went wrong and the sword was stolen by a descendant of the evil lord. With the help of sword magic, he went into the past, changed history, created a mega-corporation, and of course captured the world.

We play for the descendant of the great warrior who defeated evil in the past, and we must do the same - steal the dikatan back and fix everything.
As you can see, it took me a little less than 10 minutes to recite the plot.

The game will have a lot of commercials on the engine, but most of them are long and fairly boring. If the dialogues were good, they could be tolerated, but alas, there is a cliche on the cliché sitting and the cliché chases. I didn’t notice any particularly funny jokes either. Sometimes there is no action, but in the overwhelming majority of cases - they are just no.

In addition, due to the limitations of the engine, the characters have no animation of faces, in particular, lip movements. This is not something that would be a problem, the year after Max Payne came out was the same garbage. But on the other hand, Half-Life came out almost two years earlier, used a modified Quake engine, not the second one, but the basic animation of the faces was very much present.
However, if you do not get to the bottom of the smallest detail, the idea of ​​time travel sounds quite promising. The game will have 4 episodes, each of which will take place in a different time and space, so that the weapons, monsters and traps in each of them will be unique.

We will begin our journey in Japan 2455 years. In principle, from the very first minutes the game will begin to demonstrate its inconsistency, giving us a blaster and forcing us to hunt mechanical frogs and dragonflies. It is very difficult to feel the savior of mankind, when you have to fight with some small creatures for most of the time. Of course, you can argue that this is a fairly normal situation for many games, where at first the small things are sent to the player for slaughter, and then everything is settled ... Yeah, settled ...

In almost every level of each episode, you will have some little thing under your feet. Frogs, rats, worms, something else gadskoe and petty. Moreover, sometimes all this devilry will go interspersed with ordinary enemies, again making it difficult to shoot normally. I do not understand, I just do not understand how you can love first-person shooters - and at the same time stuff them with uninteresting and annoying enemies. They do not add special complexity, but irritations - dofig and more.

He adds fuel to the fire and the first gun. The fact is that her shot can bounce off the walls, and this is pretty cool, because it allows you to kill some enemies without going around the corner. But on the other hand, as a result, some of the shots can fly back to the player, especially in the narrow corridors. In general, a considerable number of guns in this game can cause damage to the player himself, and in places this is clearly enraged.

A full-fledged hell begins after the appearance of a mortar - the radius of the explosion is immense for him, hurt yourself - as a nefig do. In addition, he shoots mines precisely, and if she didn’t hit anyone, then he wouldn’t explode until someone approached her. For example, you yourself. However, here is a life hacking: such minutes can be undermined remotely by pressing the select button of this gun on the keyboard. I did not immediately realize this fact, and undermined unexploded mines with a blaster.

And do not use a grenade launcher, because after getting it, they start throwing quite fat enemies at you. Of course, they can also be destroyed by the first blaster, occasionally dodging ricochets, but this takes a little longer.

The apotheosis of the “harm yourself” rule is the most powerful weapon in the episode, which also can bounce a little and has a fantastic range. As a result - I did not use it from the word “absolutely”; even the final boss of the episode was easier to destroy with another weapon.

But we'll talk about the bosses later.

Just as ridiculous is the shotgun. Here it is six-barrel, and after one push of the trigger, the gun shoots all 6 rounds, and then reloads rather slowly. As a result, it is extremely wasteful to use on medium opponents who fly apart after the first or second hit, because so much of the ammo will be wasted. It infuriates.

There is a chainsaw glove in the game, which sounds and acts cool, but alas, is a temporary bonus. In addition, the appearance of her is not particularly spectacular.

Enemies are superimposed on all this garbage, many of whom either use grenades or firearms, and in the second case they shoot almost immediately after they see you. In especially gadish moments, it happens that at the time of opening the door to the player, 2-3 shots fly by without any warning, taking away half the life, or even more.

In general, as a result, somewhere in the entire last third of the episode, I ran with a rocket launcher. Yes, she can also hurt herself, but she blows almost all enemies off from one hit, while the other cannons often need several shots for which you can answer more than once or twice. The mere fact that it is much more convenient and pleasant to use a rocket launcher in a battle with average enemies is alarming.

In order to somehow compensate for this imbalance, the developers added not only first-aid kits to the game, but also regeneration stations. They are not unlimited, but they allow you to fully replenish your health supply several times, unlike the Half-Life, where the supply of wall-mounted kits was quite frail. True with good pumping the treatment process will take considerable time, but what can you do. At such moments, I remember modern-day shooters with health regeneration with love: in them, at least, this process happens quickly.

In the adequacy of game design games in general and level design in particular, in some places you want not only to doubt, but to doubt very much.

Let's say the first level. You leave on a clearing and meet a gun. The gun shoots at you, so it will be quite logical first response to shoot back. Alas, this method does not work, and the gun kills you very quickly.

Okay, for the second or third time, I did notice that there was a certain control unit next to the gun. Probably need to use it and turn off the gun? No, the block is not used ... and, it was necessary to shoot! OK, that's logical. It would seem, what's the problem, except that this block is not very noticeable against the background of the wall?

The humor of the situation is that it is almost the only gun destroyed that way. In most cases, they will be destroyed by banal direct hits. In addition, some of the turrets will be hung in such a way that you are guaranteed not to immediately notice them and come under sudden fire. I really do not like this approach, with sudden surprises that the player cannot properly control or reliably predict.

After some time, it becomes clear that almost all the riddles of this episode will be based on the destruction of these very control units or other objects. If you are stuck and do not know where to go - look out for these blocks, look for wires going to hell where the wires are, at their end there will surely be what you need. Especially local builders like to place such objects under the ceiling.

If there is no block, start searching the most distant corners and shoot at everything! Sooner or later there will be an object to be destroyed, which will help to move on.

To finish off, sometimes active objects will be hidden so that it starts to seem like I'm looking for secrets, and not the most necessary things to go through. And judging by the reviews on the Internet, I'm not alone in the process of passing constantly suffered from such intricate level design. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if pixel-hunting fans in shooters are happy.

Everything else, some important for the passage of the door does not open because you have to go to them with partners, and no hints about this game probably will not. Moreover, if you go back by mistake and your partner remains behind the door - everything, your song is sung, the game is now impassable. Load one of the last saved, and hope that it is not broken. Of course, in my entire game literally two saves broke down, but nevertheless, as we can see, this is possible.

Oh yeah, I still haven't told you about my partners ... This is still a headache, and at the same time - this is another one of the reasons why you need to install a fan patch. You will have two partners altogether; sometimes you will run only with one of them, sometimes with three of you. The first, Superfly Johnson, is a local security chief who at one point fell into disgrace because he decided that an evil corporation was using too cruel methods. Suddenly, right?

The second character is Mikiko, the daughter of that old woman, that the first 10 minutes of the game tormented us with his plaintive storyline.

And of course, both characters are not completely remembered, despite the rather adequate voice acting, because their dialogues and participation in the story are nothing interesting. In addition, how can you fall in love with characters who are constantly blunt?

The player has several teams that can be given to them, but in reality the only team that is always executed the first time is an order to stand still. The “follow me” command is already performed correctly only in two cases out of three, while the chance of executing other commands, such as picking up a weapon or an attack, is pure.

But even if the bots accepted the order to follow you, it is not a fact that they will not lag behind or become entangled in the two pines. We must pay tribute, the situation does not always occur, but when there are - negative emotions about this will be enough for a long time.

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