I was just thinking about Romero. I was watching the "Wha Happun?" episode about the System Shock remake, and I realized... back in the day we made fun of Romero for his mismanagement of the Daikatana kerfuffle: schedule slip after schedule slip, changing engines twice, the staff quitting and needing to almost be completely replaced, it's no wonder the game turned out crap. But so many of today's games have most or all of these problems. System Shock (2023) changed engines, had massive staff churn, and considerable schedule slips (taking seven years to Daikatana's four), especially when COVID-19 hit. But by paring back the ambition and focusing on delivering an experience faithful to the original, they got it out the door despite doubts from the fan base and it was a hit. So today, some games do turn out good despite mouldering in development hell for the better part of a decade. Of course you still get your fair share of buggy messes (which may be rehabilitated with a post-release patch) and complete misses like Mighty No. 9.
So it seems like maybe we've hit a complexity threshold beyond which it stretches human feasibility to turn out a good to great AAA game within a reasonable time frame. And maybe Romero was just one of the first people to "go big" with Daikatana, and he hit that threshold before everyone else. His ambition (and ego) exceeded his actual reach, but... few if any had attempted such a large scale project before, aspiring to reinvent the FPS and add RPG and story elements to it. Granted, Half-Life made everybody else look like chumps when it came to embedding story into an FPS -- but Daikatana was announced long before Half-Life congealed.
The man deserves full credit for learning from his most famous boondoggle, and focusing on smaller games rather than epic genre-busters that he doesn't quite have the ability to manage the development of.
If you slip 4 or 5 years around now the tech barely changes. You can't really tell much the difference between a game delivered in 2018 and 2023, especially if some polish is later added.
Whereas back in 1998, there is absolute night and day between 1994 tech (DOOM) and 1998 tech (Quake 2), to the point where the latter makes the former look ancient and almost unplayable in comparison.
Keeping in mind also that tech moved so fast that "serious" PC gamers would look to upgrade their PC on a much quicker cycle, every couple of years was a game-changing upgrade such as Pentium chips or DDR RAM, or some other new tech that just blew away the previous PC generation.
Games companies didn't have the luxury to slip years and still deliver on what they started, and any "engine change" would have been far more impactful against that background, and also keep in mind that "changing engine" back then meant from scratch engines not swapping, say, between Unity and Unreal or some other off the shelf stuff.
I hadn't thought about it like this, but you're right. I entered PC gaming as a teenager around the time of Quake, and the constant hardware refreshes were expensive but fun. I can imagine the tense race to the finish line to get a game out (and close to bug-free; very little internet) before the engine you probably built from scratch for that game became old hat!
I used to make fun/hate the guy, but nowadays I can tell her really cares about games, he just bit more then he could chew and was too inexperienced to properly deal with it.
The bit about being non-confrontational (and this being a hindrance during the Ion Storm days) also hits home. I would have spiraled out of control myself in that position I'm sure.
So it seems like maybe we've hit a complexity threshold beyond which it stretches human feasibility to turn out a good to great AAA game within a reasonable time frame. And maybe Romero was just one of the first people to "go big" with Daikatana, and he hit that threshold before everyone else. His ambition (and ego) exceeded his actual reach, but... few if any had attempted such a large scale project before, aspiring to reinvent the FPS and add RPG and story elements to it. Granted, Half-Life made everybody else look like chumps when it came to embedding story into an FPS -- but Daikatana was announced long before Half-Life congealed.
The man deserves full credit for learning from his most famous boondoggle, and focusing on smaller games rather than epic genre-busters that he doesn't quite have the ability to manage the development of.