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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.
This is the first developer shut down that has stunned me since Looking Glass (System Shock, the Thief series...) went under.
Why is it the good companies go under, but the crap ones live on?
All it states in the quote is that Interplay has cut the BIS team. The rest of the quote is nothing but bashing Interplay
black isle had a wonderful, hand-made game, made by gamers feel to their products, reminiscent of early origin and sierra. sadly those type of developers are becoming rarer. this sucks. i wish them all good luck.
NOOOOOoooooooo.........
The middle mind speaks!
Planescape-Torment is one of my favorite games of all time.
"Why is it the good companies go under, but the crap ones live on?"
Because people are voting with their dollars, and crap is king.
What a fucking waste of technology.
At least the absolute derth of quality PC games cuts short all of the asshole anti-Mac arguments.
You know, with all the cries of "noooooooooo" and complaints about "shoddy games", etc, etc. This would be the one area that cries out for open source. But of course, here we all are crying about another game down the drain.
This is the sort of thing that happens when the intrests of the developer and the publisher diverge. Interplay wanted to make money, and probably worked its developers at a death march pace. No developer can sustain that for an extended period of time.
Interplay wanted Bioware to churn out its games faster and faster, and make them larger and larger. It also wanted to pay Bioware alot less then what they had coming. Since Bioware was not owned by Interplay, Bioware told them to f**k right off, and went to Infogrames / Atari.
I guess the same sort of crap went on at Black Isle.
Black Isle was owned, so they could not just walk away from Interplay. Their core group of experienced developers probably told their bosses to stick it where the sun doesnt shine, and took a walk. That, or they dug in and refused to work a death march. Either way, Interplay decided to shut down the studio.
Anyway, this is all guess work. But it seems plausible enough to me to explain what happened.
END COMMUNICATION
Fallout 2 and Baldur's Gate 2 were excellent games, had great stories and sense of setting, and were largely free of the type of cheesy melodrama that seems to have overtaken console RPGs. I hope their type of deep RPG experience doesn't die with Black Isle, but I fear it will.
--- "Yeah, I'm a bit stressed out. I have a research paper due tomorrow and it has to be +5, Insightful."
The loss of BIS is a pretty big one. Although they really haven't realeased a lot of great games recently, they'll be sorely missed, especially as the creators of Planescape: Torment, the first game in a long while to actually be intriguing with the whole "Woke up with no memories" bit.
It's held up for 4(or 5) long years as the best RPG of all time IMO. For using such an old bioware engine, it's actually held up quite well. While graphics were never its strong points, the story alone is worth the purchase. I don't mean to plug it or anything, but if you have yet to play it, and consider yourself an RPG fan, drop 10 bucks and pick it up at any store that sells PC games.
And remember, for all Your P:T needs, The Pit: http://torment.db-forge.com/
A sad bit of news right before I head to bed.
I believe Planescape: Torment revolutionized the world of RPG, and not enough people noticed.
I am pretty much a console gamer now, and I've yet to see any console RPG with the level of writing that PS:T possessed. Many games pose themselves as epics, yet feature nothing but shallow dialogue, psuedo-philosophical ramblings, and CGs aimed at horny high school kids.
What may change the nature of a man? This question ran the risk of cliche, but it was interwoven so tightly into the game system and writing that the premise took fantasy role-playing to unmatched heights. Morte, Annah, Nameless..you shal be missed.
Yeah, then there were those Fallout games, too.
So long, Black Isle.
I got a lot of gamer friends and they all are die hard Fallout fans. It seems a game like that just couldn't miss!
Many, many gamers think fallout/fallout2 was the best game they ever played! How could they cancel this. Was it really that crap?
Will code a sig generator for food
I think the reason why you see such a large reaction is because all of the games you listed while great, are empty. BIS made games that affected people like novels. The ending of Fallout blew me over. The story and character development (and I am not talking about levels) for Planescape: Torment was just awesome.
Doom, Halo, GTA, Warcraft, and all of those games have an entirely different sort of appeal to me. I don't look at those games like good books. To me they are like action movies. The are without a doubt fun, but I play them in a very detached manner. The ending to the original Fallout left me choking and getting watery eyed. The ending to Warcraft or Half-Life just made me shrug and wonder when the sequel was coming out. Don't get me wrong, I love those games, but for entirely different reasons.
The point certainly is valid that such companies need to make money. BIS made some great games, but they also made some real bombs. The fact that they did a poor job on the financial end doesn't invalidate the quality games they did put out. Hopefully someone will come along pick up the pieces and package it into something more financially sound. I am still going to miss BIS though, despite thier suckage when it comes to making money.
If you don't want a game that you have an emotional response to then clearly you are not the target audience. So what?
The point was not that the games played like a novel. They didn't. They played like games. The difference was then when you get to the end of it and all was said and done, instead of shrugging your shoulders and idly wondering when the sequal was going to come out, you could have an emotional response. That is a good thing. If you can make something that has all the perks of a game put the emotional response of a novel, you have something special on your hands. BIS did that at least twice for me.
If a developer gets done making a great game with wonderful game play, and at the end people are touched by it in some way, then that developer wold have to be an idiot to try and pull that content. No sane developer is going to go, "Wowa... hold on a second boys, that plot has people having an emotional reaction. Can we dumb this down a little?" Having great game play and a powerful story is a good thing, not something to be avoided as you seem to suggest.
I'd certainly hope so too, but I'd rather have it end at Fallout 2 than have Fallout 3 radically changed to accomodate the publisher's requirements to sell to the "unwashed masses" and remove elements that made the Fallout series good.
I've said the same thing about Deus Ex 2 ("It'd have been amazing"), and then tried playing it, but it have been a major disappointment for me, esp. the perceived bias towards the Lower Common Denominator of gamers on consoles and I don't want it to happen to Fallout 3.
Background: Looking Glass created the original Deus Ex under Warren Spector. Looking Glass was closed down, but Warren Spector also lead the development for Deus Ex 2 under Ion Storm and Eidos (of Daikatana fame)...
This is unfortunate. Reminds me of when EA shut down the Wing Commander half of Origin.
and just before Christmas... gotta love corporations.
-jp
"In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."
Nothing is safe. If it doesn't allow for multiplayer or MMO, it's not marketable.
I guess KOTOR, the Legacy of Kain series, Eternal Darkness, every Metroid game, Whiplash, and BloodRayne 2 don't count, eh? And those are just the ones I've actually played or am looking forward to.
While the multiplayer/MMO market is sizeable, I think that companies who bet on it to the detriment of all single-player games are going to lose in a big way.
There are too many types of game that don't lend themselves to anything other than single-player. The online experience so far also seems to be incredibly shallow, even if it is time consuming (e.g. Everquest).
A lot of people (including myself) are interested in playing through a story-based scenario at our own pace, not hunting up loot and levelling for 8 hours a day or playing FPS/RTS games on the same maps over and over.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
This is what happens when you have money hungry managers and shareholders that WANT their well deserved profits. I'm afraid many good businesses in the future will suffer the same fate. It is rare to see an intellectually challenging game these days. It is a shame; I think that the software industry has turned to the same marketing tactics of the music industry. Promote a song, no matter how crappy, as much as possible and make sure the public hears it at least six times a day until they are forced to buy the CD, parade the group through every merchandise avenue, then after six months make a new album or a new artist. We are getting screwed buy money hungry publishers and share holders. What ever happened to playing a game for 6 months and still having fun? Hell I still play Zues, Mechawarrior 4, and even x-com UFO defense. They are fun games! Why do I have to buy one every freaking month? If it takes that long to finish I would rather buy five or six books at the same price as the game, at least the entertainment will last longer.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
While I think that this is horrible news (I'm a huge fan of BI), I think this is taking things a little far.
You can't fault Interplay for closing the studio down. BI wasn't making money. Interplay is a business. They can't keep a studio running on merit alone.. =P
Anyhow, I'm going to go cry for Fallout 3..
It was never about the engine though, was it? It was the stories/quests, the great 2D artwork, and all the hard work that went into those. Black Isle will be missed. Now there's only BioWare left.
And yes, I count myself as one (going back to The Bards Tale on the C64). The problem with RPG games is the amount of effort that goes into the writing of the story, generation of massive areas to explore and scripting complex game events. That last one is a killer, because we all want non-linear gameplay, but what that really means is that the developer has to write extra content that only *some* people will ever see.
For all that effort, the game is placed in a channel with a very small market footprint. Sports (including racing) and (first|third) person shooter/platform console games now rule the because they are easy to communicate to the market, and there is a market waiting to buy them. Think of how many parents who have purchased consoles for the kiddies, and are responsible for buying the game. Imagine them browsing the store shelves. Only the most dumbed down concept and straight forward message is going to make it through. "Hey, lets buy Timmy a football game."
So something like Planescape Torment, which is one of the great RPGs of the modern PC era, is completely beyond most of the market. It offends parts of the market simply by context (a game played in the realm of the gods? Pagans!) and it has an appropriately ugly box cover of the Unnamed One. You can't install Torment as a "demo" in the store, because most people would see a static isomorphic view with no action, and walk on past.
Console RPG makers learned long ago that you have to sacrifice integrity to move product. Thus console RPGs have "over the top" limit break moves, FMV of sexy anime babes and leveling treadmills that makes the D&D system look tame.
Thoughtful storylines probably should take refuge in books. The era of the gaming geek being the majority gamer is over, and so the market follows the money. All I can hope is that a few publishers will weather the storm and be willing to sell to the niche. Of course, if you want worse, you should check the health of my other favorite type of game: the turn base strategy game. Thank goodness for game boy SP: without it, that style would be extinct.
Sig under construction since 1998.
It seems to be a reoccuring trend in the industry that a game company that produces good, solid - but very genre specific - games will get bought out after one or two relatively good titles. Then the developers get stuck working at a faster pace on projects which less of their vision is able to go into, and the predicament snowballs.
I've seen way too many good studios go downhill after a large, kickass release, only to disappoint with sequels because their better employees have left. Activision's Mechwarrior series is a good example of this: after Mechwarrior 2's line of games, MS bought 'em out. Now, Mechwarrior isn't even entertaining. Currently, Mech3 and Mech4 are sad mimics. While they have better graphics, their gameplay is stunted due to poor insight into how the game dynamics work, and other things of that nature. Story isn't even there, and the in-game audio is anything but satisfactory. Mech2's stuff, on the other hand, had the opposite of all that I complain about.
Off the top of my head, two more developer studios that snowballed after a couple great runs were Westwood, Blizzard and Interplay.
Blizzard kicked ass with Warcraft through Starcraft, and with Diablo 1 and 2 (so I hear, I'd rather not waste my time with such impersonal RPGs - the real thing is better. I hear single player was good, though.). Now, look at them. Their latest release, War3, sucked major goat scrotum. I hear it's because it wasn't developed by the same folks as the previous RTS releases.
Westwood came out swinging fairly strong... and then did nothing. Command and Conquer was a great game, and Red Alert was pretty fun too. But their games have done nothing but improve since then - in graphic quality. And that's about it. They've got nearly the same units, and the same AI, in almost every single game. Don't even start talking about Renegade. Urg.
Interplay created a cult following with Descent and Descent II. Descent III wasn't much of anything special - it didn't improve upon II at all, and didn't offer much in terms of real gameplay value. Sequels can only go so far without new concepts and gameplay-types interjected. A better multiplayer existence would have helped.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I am sure you are getting a lot of email about your recent cutting of the Black Isle team, and I doubt one more voice will make any difference, but I couldn't stay quiet. This is going to hurt your bottom line because all of the gamers out here who like in-depth 'brain required' games are now seeing Interplay as just another twitch-game console exclusive company who is simply no longer worth our time. I own all of the great Black Isle titles, every single one and all the expansions, and now they have been eliminated for no apparent reason. The PC market may not be the lucrative cash-cow that the console market is, but we have very few developers left that demand a purchase of their games on name alone. Black Isle was one, Bioware is another, and you have alienated yourself from this market on both counts. Interplay no longer holds anything of interest for me and many others like me. When your company folds, we will remember these decisions you have made and say 'no wonder'. For a company with your legacy, this is hardly the way I imagined I would feel five or ten years ago. It was fun while it lasted.
The type of game created by Black Isle had the quality where they would draw you in and make you want to keep playing indefinitely. This is a great thing for a game, because many are just behavior mods designed to keep you at your computers.
These days though, people want games that you can play for a short time and stop. Maybe pick it up again later, but not one that engrosses you to the point where you don't notice the sun coming up. I would say the money is definitely in the former type of game. People's schedules don't accommodate time sinks the way they used to. That could be a little false nostalgia.
Occasionally you'll find great titles that function for both the marathon and the casual player (e.g. Tetris or KOTOR, or certain massive online games) but it doesn't happen that much, at least in my experience.
So in addition to Interplay's troubles as a company, BIS' demise is a sign of the times.
Ravi
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
No, they were no id Software. They were Black Isle Studios.
Stanley Kubrick was no Quentin Tarantino. Kids like yourself probably think the latter is the better filmmaker. Enjoy your consensus. May you continue to run your life by it.
Death and danger are my various breads and various butters.