Agreed. To me, it's all about playing the game as closely as possible to the original experience, within reasonable bounds. Disabling the companion completely removes a core element that has been present in the original, so not an option for me.

Having them in, but immortal felt a bit too exploity to me and also made for a drastically different experience.

Thus I stopped playing before even finishing the first act, because at the time, I wasn't aware of the option to restore the original behavior through command in the console. I did not want to experience the game in a way it was not played back then.

I have a real love/hate relationship with this game. The game is attractive, and pure classic quake 2 engine, I like the aesthetics and the will to push the engine ahead in the IDTech3 era.

A Traditional 3D Shooter that tried to make things in a different way without being revolutionary, like the companions and
the pseudoRPG system but I am not sure if due to engine limitations or rushing (LOL) or unfinished/defective features, they failed in every point IMHO.

The difficulty is weird. The enemies are stupid, your companios are stupid.They are glitched, you can be even killed by buggy doors.

I tried the fan patch but honestly except the tech features it does not make things better in a radical way.

But I do not know why I like the game. In fact I reinstalled the game once I saw this Topic :) It is one of those bad/good games. Love/Hate :)

I created the guide for the "Setup for vanilla Daikatana experience with patch 1.3" thread on GOG.

I shared my impressions with Frank Sapone back when I finished the game, here they are:-

As a whole, Daikatana 1.3 is actually somewhere between good and very good - and closer to very good (or between 75 and 80 percent if I must rate it like this), which is to say just a small step behind Unreal (1998), and really the one easily identifiable thing that keeps it from being very good overall is the enemy AI which really is sub-par in general (it is merely acceptable in Episodes 2 & 3, where enemies can usually navigate beyond their starting area to track you down, but in Episodes 1 & 4 that ability is severely restricted to the point where it constitutes the exception; also enemies are almost always just standing guard in places until they spot you; in Mishima Labs levels 2 & 3, some enemies are even brain dead and will only react once they receive damage - when not destroyed in one strike). Sidekick AI is now good: I usually had my sidekick(s) follow me and they are fairly useful (especially for quickly dispatching small, hard-to-hit targets, or during the occasional big battle - it's like having another weapon, an automatic one - and this is true for the original sidekick AI settings let me remind you (100HP, no health regeneration, taking friendly fire into account and the necessity to have them by your side when leaving a level), so yeah they are vulnerable like you before you level up but on the Samurai (normal difficulty) setting, they very rarely get killed, like about half a dozen times in total - and it always felt fair, except that one time in Crematorium when Superfly died under the closing hangar door LOL - not the only time a sidekick got caught in a closing door, but on the few other occasions the doors didn't crush him/her; by the way I also died once under a closing blast door, that was in Sewer System :) sidekicks never fell to their deaths on a first playthrough, I just saw it happen on two separate occasions when I was testing things in tricky platforming circumstances, to see how careless one could get). Friendly fire means I sometimes took hits from my allies but it was again rare - think coop and you flank your enemies in order to give your sidekicks room to shoot - and only once was it actually significant given the damage over HP/armor ratio (that was in Mishima Labs level 3), but I was able to continue nonetheless (they rarely shot each other too, and rarely got shot by me but in both cases it never was a big deal except once when I accidentally hacked Mikiko with the Daikatana and killed her LOL). So sidekicks are fine, but not as impactful as they were clearly meant to be as while they are useful in general, they really are just another weapon option and I can't say there was a single level that would have been harder in any significant way had my sidekick(s) not been with me (again, on the Normal difficulty setting), and rarely (see those two problematic moments with Mikiko - one in level 1 of Vault and the other in level 2 of Mishima Labs, or when Superfly is just carrying Mikiko and you're escorting them) their presence actually made things a bit more difficult (thanks 1.3 for this being rare apparently!) - but there is one notable exception: the best mission of the game, Acropolis, has one mandatory puzzle which actually requires cooperating with your sidekick (I take it you changed the way this puzzle originally works for those who use the 1.3 feature allowing to play without sidekicks right?), making the sidekick actually indispensable to the gameplay as it should be (and not just indispensable to the story). This is the kind of thing I was hoping to see, and I am so happy it happened at least ONCE because frankly, after all that marketing around the AI sidekick feature, the funny thing is that the game actually underutilises the gameplay possibilities offered by the sidekicks: now I know this is probably due to how much trouble they ran into when trying to implement this feature within the Quake 2 engine, but honestly it's not hard to imagine various cool scenarios where your allies are indispensable - from puzzle solving as in the aforementioned case, to the defence of a MacGuffin for example where your allies hold off waves of enemies while you go round a perimeter activating stuff, occasionally throwing down a weapon/ammo/healthpack picked up from your perched position to them so they can keep defending the spot until you're done, etc.!
Graphically, the game overall looks somewhere between good and very good (and closer to very good, just like Unreal generally, definitely better than Quake 2) but while we all know that the character models were behind the times for the year 2000 (in terms of modelling finesse and animation-wise - no facial animations!), the environments themselves - at their best, such as in Icelab, most Greek and Norse levels, and places like Mishima Labs - can actually look very good (like in Unreal Tournament or indeed Deus Ex). Music is generally very good! (Loconto did a great job, he should have been credited even if he left the team before the end.) Variety (weapons, textures, enemies, sounds, art assets in general including sky boxes) and level design (style, art direction) are the game's greatest strengths! Story is average: it had a lot of (unintentionally) silly moments but the ending is actually good (smart and emotional) and saves the story!

Besides that: Trenchbroom now supports Daikatana map making! would actually love to see modders go wild with new maps...

I played it back in the day, all the way through, and enjoyed it. I still remember I was able to beat the final boss simply by climbing a ladder and raining death down on him from above. He couldn't even fight back.

Finally, Daikatana getting a spotlight with it's own article/thread....nice :)

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Or the sidekicks falling off of some ladders and into nearby pits.

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I loved it as well...very nice sci-fi futuristic dystopian feel to it. I also liked the greek and medieval episodes as well(my least favorite was the final San Francisco one...it felt a bit generic and rushed.....especially the end boss fight).

You know, I like a few things about Daikatana, including the general idea of it.

I wish it would get "Nightdived", but in a Quake 1 way, even a bit further, with a complete reworking of the first episode and the weapons (most of which are quirky and have a tendency to hurt the player). And, of course, better companhion AI.

That could make for a definitive and even amazing Daikatana version.

Y'know what make it better, remake the whole game with modern engine and everything, then let John made a trailer where in the end he appeared and say "Now we make Daikatana actually playable... bitches!"

I don't know. I like the idea of keeping it retro looking, so, maybe something along the lines os Graven or Wrath, but with modern lighting effects perhaps.

About the ad, I imagine something along the lines of "John Romero is about to make you his... buddy. And superfly." XD

Cool, you don't come off as one of those gamers that would continue to play the game after finding exploits and complain about them, which is why I thought it is a good idea to make it clear that I wasn't singling anyone out as to avoid confusion, I'm glad you got the message!

And I find it noble in a way that you quit playing in order to keep your experience pure!

One of the worst games in existence, and you make an event for it?

So GoG now only sells trash, and stuff that the average erson will only be able to play after 10 years passed?

Where are the GOOG OLD games?

I've learned over a long period that "general consensus" sometimes isn't that important. For example, I recently played Witchaven 1 & 2 (via BuildGDX) and I thoroughly enjoyed myself and liked both games. Yet if you look online for opinions on these games, the general consensus is that they're awful (the most notable example being Civvie's YT review of Witchaven). Nowadays the only opinion on games worth anything to me is my own opinion.

In some ways this article represents what's wrong with GOG, focusing on niche titles from 20+ years ago that didn't sell then....trying to boost sales of the curious for them. Crusty old men with autistic opinions trying to gatekeep. Nothing wrong with Good old games but some people need to move on and not be stuck in the past so much.

Would be great if GOG had more games from ten years ago....2012......

Jesus, it's people like you who will destroy this place with your incessant whining about everything

The Katana, The.

This is probably one of the few games where the Game Boy Color port is literally better instead of being garbage.

Dai means emphasis, and Katana means sword, so "big sword" or "great sword" is the proper translation I guess?