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.