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Black Isle Studios Shuts Down Development
Zonk writes "RPGDot has a story up right now about the closing down of development at Black Isle Studios. The information comes from an unnamed Interplay source, who says 'Any time you see the [Black Isle] logo on a future product, know that no one who was associated with BIS actually worked on it', as well as a post by BIS employee Damien Foletto on the Interplay message boards, and a Blue's News story that adds: 'The non-announced [PC] title that the division was working on, Fallout 3 [aka Van Buren], has been 'shelved', to quote management.' BIS, you will be missed." Black Isle are particularly known for work on the Fallout series, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment.
Well, some of the reasons could be the following:
-Interplay has lost at least $20 million this year
-One of BIS forthcoming products was canned because of a legal mess with WotC
-thier 2 main consol releases, schedualed for the holidays were pushed back to January (one of them BIS produced), because of another legal issue (this time with a distrobuter)
In other words, they were hurting for money.
Several of the Fallout guys left long ago, and are working in Troika Games, the studio that released the brilliant Arcanum, and is currently working on Vampire...
Black Isle is dead.
Long live Black Isle!
Wizards of the Coast, the company that made a boatload off Magic: The Gathering and took their earnings and bought up valuable properties like TSR.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The only three "true" Black Isle titles were Fallout, Fallout 2, and Planescape: Torment. All were great, of course, but the Baldur's Gate series and NWN were more Bioware titles really. And uh, they weren't of the same calibre either. Don't get me started on Lionheart. That sucked *)
Yes I know that not all console games are perfect, but the extra testing they go through from the console maker as well as from the company making them help out a lot.
It's not necessarily the testing that helps the console games (although it DOES matter). Perhaps the most important thing is that console games are targetted for one specific hardware system. The problem with PCs is that there are too many combinations and hence harder to test. Everything might be fine on the test system but when you change the video card, the fog effect all of a sudden is messed up (because some old cards do it differently). Or the sound effects are lagging because some sound cards implement echoing differently. And so on. On a console, it either works or it doesn't. If it works on your test system, it likely works on every other console. Not only does this mean that there are less issues to worry about, it also means that your QA resources can be spent testing game flaws (instead of hardware bugs).
This is not to take away from your point. Yes, companies go with the patch mentality. BUT the fact that PCs are so diverse means that they will always have more bugs. Even when consoles have hard drives and internet patching capability, they will still be FAR better than the PCs (when it comes to bugs).
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
> Looking Glass created the original Deus Ex under Warren Spector.
That's not true. Deus Ex was an Ion Storm Austin product too (and it was published by Eidos of Daikatana fame...).
> [...] Warren Spector also lead the development for Deus Ex 2 under Ion Storm and Eidos (of Daikatana fame).
No, he didn't. Harvey Smith was the lead on Invisible War.
There's a good article on the development of the title at gamespot, here. And after Jordan Mechner saw the demo to approve the game (he owns the rights to the PoP name) he told the all-new deveelopment team "Guys, what I've just seen has reawakened the joy of making video games to me." So, yeah, good point but you couldn't have picked a more inappropriate example.
--is not to be confused with user #672982 - Bame Flait
Don't forget about Sierra's reillustrated line. They only did it with their earliest games (e.g. King's Quest 1, Space Quest 1, Hero's Quest 1 and a few others).
They basically took some of their old adventure games done with ega graphics only and updated them to full 256 color vga and better sound. The story was exactly the same but sometimes with a few extras and minor changes.
I can't think of any games off the top of my head that have been remakes quite at that level.