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.

Comments

Nasty

[Goldberg's Pants]

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?

Re:Nasty

[frankthechicken]

The good companies innovate, the bad ones copy success. Guess which one is more likely to succeed. Innovation is a risky business.

On a slightly related note, has there been a good business project management set-up in relation to the development of games? From everything I've seen and read about, the development seems so hodge-podge, it's remarkable any games succeed.

Re:Nasty

[tero]

Mostly because quality costs money. Putting a game through that one extra QA run probably means delaying the shipping date. Unfortunately the trend seems to be just that.. moving away from quality, towards 'assembly line' products (hopefully already licensed, so studios don't have to spend that much $$ on marketing). There are of course execptions (like the Baldurs Gate series and the Knights of the old Republic which do not fall into the 'license-and-ship' trap).
The gaming industry is more and more starting to feel like just another Hollywood branch. I wonder how long it takes before they'll start redoing old games, like they're doing with all old classic movies now?

Re:Nasty

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

I have a pirated copy of System Shock 2 and Fallout 2 on my shelf, that's why.

Individually it's not my fault but if enough people did it...

Needless to say, I've never felt worse about having pirated games and I would gladly dish out the price for both the old and the new game if I'd just get the sequels for the games I truly loved.

For what it's worth. Looking Glass, Black Isle Studios, I'm sorry.

Re:Nasty

[morganjharvey]

You ever notice how the companies that produce crappy products and survive are the ones who play dirty?
Unfortunately, the creative sorts who have fairly robust morals and ethics tend not to survive too often in today's business world. How many companies with crappy products can you name that have succeded primarily because they've flexed their muscles? I can name five in under 15 seconds, and I'm tired.
Unfortunately, "normal" business practise now seems to include fighting dirty, and it's usually at the expense of the final product. As much as I know people would hate to hear it, every big company does it. Look at Apple, Microsoft, IBM, SCO... Yes, some of them have released quality products, but none of them would really be where they are today without a little bullying. Apple used to be extremely litigious, IBM has done more than their share of strong arming, and I'm pretty sure that you can fill in the blanks for SCO and Microsoft.
But some of the "favorite" companies fight just as dirty. Perhaps a company should be expected to be able to heft its weight around in order to gain a respectable place in the market. It's not something that I necessarily agree with, but it seems like you can't really survive with out it.
There's my rant for the evening. I've officially been pointed me down the road towards depression thinking about this. :( -mo

Re:Nasty

[smithwis]

Apparently you don't own a gameboy advance.

Nintendo has managed to repackage all the old mario games for the snes and nes and sell them for new(almost identical to the originals). This time, they weren't cool about releasing all the games in one cartridge(ala Super Mario Allstars).

And Nintendo is not the only one doing things like this on the Gameboy.

Re:Nasty

[0x0d0a]

Why is it the good companies go under, but the crap ones live on?

My guess is that this is not the case (in particular). Game development houses tend to have awfully short lifetimes. They're often small. If developer Jones and Smith decide to move on to bigger and better things, there may not be much company left worth continuing with.

My guess is that you just notice when the good ones go out of business.

Try this. Dig out a bunch of old DOS games and try to locate the development houses that produced them. Some are still around -- id is still happily making games, for instance. A lot of them, however, are long, long gone.

Re:Nasty

[instanto]

You cant pin the demise of Black Isle on piracy.

Poor Management, Xbox, Greed, Suits and Deadlines are probably the more likely reason.

And maybe because crappy games sell - while stellar games - for a smaller audience - do not sell as much, why should'nt they make a hack'n slash that will sell a million titles, instead of a RPG that will sell 100,000.

Re:Nasty

[BlameFate]

Bad example. PoP: Sands of Time is a stunning game, it has some of the most polished gameplay I've come across, and jaw-droppingly good visuals.

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.

Re:Nasty

[calethix]

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.

Re:Nasty

[the_mad_poster]

Too true, unfortunately.

Planescape: Torment was an incredible game. The whole thing revolved around story, not combat, and you didn't directly interact in combat unless you were casting spell or using an item. You were lucky if you got to Level 15 with the Nameless One by the end of the game. While it was important to level up and boost traits, it was not your driving motivation.

Compare this to Diablo 2. Diablo 2 has one objective - go kill monsters. There's a hair-thin storyline to move you from wilderness to wilderness, but the whole point was to get more gold, new stuff, and higher levels. It was certainly fun, but it was far less satisfying to get another level up because you had killed yet another wraith of some sort than the P:T way of doing things where you could get huge exp through intelligent (and sometimes very bizarre) discussions. The game was so beautfully imaginative that it almost seemed like combat wasn't even necessary at times.

Incidentally, to see some pretty cool fireworks in P:T, launch Level 1 magic missiles, Ignus's tongues of flame, and Dak'kon's reign of anger all at the same time. That'll take down almost any normal enemy without resistances in a heartbeat (it's great against the Carceri guards), plus it looks really cool.

This is terrible

[obeythefist]

BIS made some really excellent games, games that are remembered long after their day. Much like the old gold box games that were released way back when by TSR.

I lost many hours of my life playing through Planescape:Torment and all the other games delivered to us from Black Isle.

One wonders if Interplay have decided that money is no longer a desireable outcome of the game production money? Have they lost all inclination to produce new classics, as I'm sure Fallout 3 would have become?

Perhaps Interplay simply doesn't percieve a value in role-playing games like Fallout and Baldurs Gate and the likes on the consoles of the future. Games with writing are to be frowned upon in console-land, as you can't read text quite as nicely on a TV set. This falls nicely into my growing theory that consoles are causing the end of the brain era of gaming, and sending us back into pac-man twitch land.

A huge loss with death of Fallout

[agent oranje]

Fallout was one of the finest RPGs I've ever played. Storyline was fantastic, gameplay was excellent... graphics weren't spectacular, but that wasn't the game's selling feature. Fallout 2 came along, rehashing the same old graphics, and same old gameplay, into an absolutely amazing game, superior to the original. The story is excellent, blending along with the first quite nicely, and with much more depth...

Fallout 3 would have been amazing. I have no doubt about this. The only thing which could be better would be Fallout Online.

Re:A huge loss with death of Fallout

[szap]

Fallout 3 would have been amazing.

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)...

Re:A huge loss with death of Fallout

[poulbailey]

> 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.

Re:And, where the reason?

[Drakin]

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.

Nasty-The "cap" in capitalism.

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Several of the Fallout guys left long ago..

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Interplay wants to make money, not games

[LordZardoz]

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

Re:And, where the reason?

[afidel]

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.

Quite a loss

[Chapparal]

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/

Black Isle been on the ropes for awhile

[DrMrLordX]

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 *)

Re:Wow

[Maestro4k]

• Are we at a point where the gaming masses have become so retarded as to ensure that only copycat FPS, RTS and sports games ever get produced? Plots, characters, atmosphere, it's all gone, but who gives a shit. As long as we can all get 90 fps in Doom3 and relive our favorite Monday Night Football moments, the industry'll be alright.

The truly sad part is the rabid fanboys of FPSs who obsess over frame rates and ever tiny detail are a great minority of gamers. It's very interesting to look at the top sales charts for any given month. Generally 1-3 of the top 20 will be FPS games, the rest aren't. In fact, games with little hardcore gamer appeal consistently take up top spots. (The Sims & their 100 expansion packs for instance.) Many game companies (this means you Interplay) apparently can't see the truth out there and shoot for the hardcore audience. The problem is the real money is in pleasing the general audience.

Before I'm skewered for that statement, let me point out that you don't have to dumb down a game to make it appealing to both hard core and casual gamers. A game with a great engrossing story, decent graphics (they don't have to be the world's best) and a serious fun value (something a lot of games forget about) will please nearly everyone. Sure the frame-rate crowd will complain about the lack of quantum texturing or some such crap, but most people will be happy with it and it'll sale really well.

The other unfortunate thing is game companies (again, this means you Interplay) that seem to think PC Gaming is dead, when nothing could be further from the truth. Right now PCs are capable of better graphics than any of the current consoles, and the next crop of consoles is at best a year off (if rumors of Nintendo announcing a new console at E3 next year are true). Hell, now's the perfect time to push PC gaming since current consoles are towards the end of their life cycle.

That being said though, I've ended up a console gamer because of the lack of quality control in PC games. (aka the ship it then patch it approach.) I got sick of finding out I'd have to download huge patches to make a game playable, or need to update to fix a horrid glitch and invalidate my save games in the process. No thanks, I'll stick to consoles till game publishers figure out that consumers want a game that works out of the box. 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.

I just worry that with the next generation of consoles all likely coming with hard drives and built-in Internet connectivity that publishers will move the ship then patch mentality over to consoles too. If that happens, I'm afraid video gaming as a whole will suffer in ways that'll be pitiful, and potentially non-recoverable from.

Heartbreaking, but not unexpected

[ctrl-alt-elite]

While it pains me greatly to see the passing of the company responsible for stealing so many hours of my teenage years, it doesn't come as much of a surprise. Black Isle has been going downhill since BioWare came into the game, and their games, while always being a bit ahead of Bioware's in terms of quality, never seemed to sell as many copies.

Planescape: Torment is a great example of this. Torment to this day remains one of the best games I have ever had the pleasure of playing, and it stands as perhaps the deepest roleplaying experience and certainly the most powerful game that I have played. According to BIS's sales figures from a couple years back, Torment had sold around 300,000 copies. While no slouch in the sales department (it certainly got them in the black), it wasn't quite up to the sales standards set by Bioware with the Baldur's Gate saga (also a great series of games, but nowhere near as powerful as Torment).

From there, it was downhill. Project after project was cancelled (including Torn, which looked to be a sweet 3d CRPG with all the reactivity and depth of Torment but with a snazzy 3d engine and the Fallout SPECIAL system), until Black Isle was stuck with a sequel to Icewind Dale (using the aging 2d Infinity Engine of the original Baldur's Gate in the era of 3d Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind). Then there was Lionheart, which took some of the elements of the cancelled Torn and tried to turn it into a decent game. What happened was an Arcanum-esque RPG: a great concept (a historical fantasy game that infused magic in the time of the Crusades) but with poor execution and an even worse engine and interface.

I hate to say it, but it looked like BIS was going to shut down since Interplay got bought out by Titus Interactive several years back. They just don't have the sales numbers to appease high-level marketing execs, despite their innovation and depth. The one silver lining of this predicament is the fact that other companies can now have a crack at some of the talent that has graced BIS for years. This could bode well for the phoenix-like CRPG industry if dev houses utilize this influx of great minds. An RPG fanboy can only hope...

FUCK!

[Shihar]

God fucking damn it!!!!! FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK. Ok, it is out of my system.

BIS was by far my favorite studio. Fallout, Fallout II and Planescape: Torment were my three favorite games of all times. Does anyone remember the end of the original Fallout? That ending was one of the few endings that left an emotional impact upon me. The ending as simply amazing. As he is walking away to that song I felt my gut twist in a knot and left me choking. Ahh hell, I admit it, I was getting watery eyed as he was walking away from the vault with his head down to that old bluesy song. No game had ever done that to me before. To this day hearing that song twists my gut into a knot.

Don't get me wrong, I love games today, but I have had none that made really knocked my socks off. War Craft III has great game play an all, but I have never felt any emotion while playing that game other then annoyance at the bastard over battle net you managed to raise an army and level his hero to 10 in five minutes. Fallout and Torment had an emotional effect like a good book. Nothing in these past couple of years has effected me like that.

I know I sat drooling over the prospect of Fallout III. I simply loved that entire setting. If anything, I was always supremely disappointed that BIS never ran with the title. I would loved to have seen a Fallout FPS or MMORPG.

On that note, does anyone know who the rights to the Fallout title goes to? The studio might be dead, but I would be surprised if someone picked up the rights and a few of the original creators and intend to run with it.

Re:Questions....

[Shihar]

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.

Let Interplay know

[Slack3r78]

Please, let Interplay know how you feel!

pr@interplay.com

The email I just fired off:
Dear Sir/Madam,

Let me open by saying I've been a long time supporter of Interplay, going back to the days of the old Star Trek adventures in the early 90's, and some of my favorite games of all time have been on the Interplay label. With that said, the news that Black Isle Studios has been shut down in order to pursue a console market which myself and many fans of Black Isle's titles have no interest in, I'm afraid that that relationship will be coming to an end. Interplay has demonstrated that they have no interest in me as a dedicated PC gamer, and as such, I can only assume that Interplay is no longer interested in my business.

While I'm normally not a believer in boycotts, the dissolution of one of the most talented group of developers in the industry in a misguided pursuit of the bottom line is more than I can ignore, and since it seems money is the only thing Interplay is listening to these days, I will be voting with my wallet. Perhaps those involved in the decision to cut Black Isle will comprehend the mistake they've made when the fans that have been so loyal to them move on.

Regards,
[Name witheld for Slashdot]

Re:Wow

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

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

Think before you judge

[Sivar]

There appears to be quite a lot of Interplay bashing. While I will very much miss BIS, which made the Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment, and Fallout 1 (my first, second, and third favorite PC games of all time respectively), Interplay is doing *very* badly in the finance department. They are laying people off because they probably can't pay them if they wanted to.
Interplay has had some terrible legal problems preventing them from releasing a next-generation 3D Baldur's Gate-type game--a game 2 years in development shelved for good because of Wizards of the Coast, or whoever owns the AD&D license this week.
Fallout 2 was reportedly to be based on the same graphic engine, but after management got excited about the >1 million unit sales of the plotless, worthless, mindless action game, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, and because of a number of PC failures, their management apparently became increasingly dissilusioned disillusioned with PC games.
Perhaps it never occurred to them that Dark Alliance sold because of Baldur's Gate's fine name (which it blemishes), and that Fallout: Tactics may have sold because of Fallout's pristinely good name (which it not only blemishes, but it drags through an ocean of shit in its disrespect for the founding masterpieces of the series).
Interplay has been focusing on low-quality, quick-to-develop games for their less cerebral fans, and apparently the strategy hasn't worked (hint hint Ionstorm/Deus Ex 2).
I am not happy about Interplay's woes, and some of the biggest causes were legal and not necessarily management related, but if you look at Interplay's financial statement, you would be surprised that they aren't declaring bankruptcy right now--no, that will come in mid/late 2004 when they cannot get a line of credit after defaulting on previous loans and being unable to give any clear indication of a light at the end of the tunnel.
I hope that the Fallout licence is sold to a company that has some of the original design geniuses behind it, such as Obsidian Entertainment or Troika Games

Anyone who believes Interplay's management enjoys laying people off before Christmas needs to seriously consider the concept of "hearing both sides of the story."
Never blame on malice that which you can blame on incompetance (and America's legal system)!

Fan Boy RPG Groupies

[Godeke]

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.