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Black Isle Studios Shuts Down Development

Posted by simoniker on from the bye-bye-president dept.

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.

10 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. Nasty by Goldberg's+Pants · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Nasty by frankthechicken · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Nasty by tero · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

    3. Re:Nasty by smithwis · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Nasty by 0x0d0a · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      May we never see th
  2. This is terrible by obeythefist · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
  3. Several of the Fallout guys left long ago.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

  4. Quite a loss by Chapparal · · Score: 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/

  5. Re:Wow by Maestro4k · · Score: 5, Insightful
    • 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.

  6. Heartbreaking, but not unexpected by ctrl-alt-elite · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...