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Atari Shuts Down Legend Entertainment?
MachDelta writes "Yet another talented PC game studio has closed their doors today. Shacknews is reporting that Legend Entertainment, most commonly known for their work on Wheel of Time, Unreal 2, and Unreal 2: XMP, has been shut down by Atari. Though nothing official has been announced by either Legend or Atari, insider reports have confirmed that the sad news is indeed true. Losing Black Isle was hard enough, but now Legend? It raises the question: Who's next?" Update: 01/18 04:34 GMT by S : ShackNews has a messageboard post by Legend designer Glen Dahlgren seeming to confirm the closure.
1. I travelled to the future earlier this morning, and read this article.
2. This exact article was posted earlier this morning.
3. This exact article was postead earlier this morning and it was removed, since I can't seem to find the earlier copy.
I owned UR2 and remember how much pain it took to finish that game with all the crashiness it had using a specific SB soundcard. The gameplay was great, albeit short and annoying when it blew up.
No, it really doesn't.
They hadn't made a good game in ages. Put the horse out of its misery, I say.
Does anyone remember that song in the Wheel of Time game that sounded like chanting? But when you listened closely the lyrics went something like:
Glen Dahlgren
Wheel of Time
Glen Dahlgren
Wheel of Time
there was some other stuff but I forgot it.
The game was fun too, once you learned how to play it.
The Unreal 2 XMP Mulitplayer Mod is great.. one of the best mods in the Unreal 2 engine.. and they programmed it for free afterwards. Kudos to these programmers!
Spelling errors were made for your amusement only...
The definition of "begging the question" should be in the slashdot FAQ or something.
Begging the question is a logical fallacy where you assume the conclusion.
This article raises the question: "Who's next?"
Begging The Question
Right.
.
I'm sure it doesn't matter that WoT got the "Action game of the Year" award from Gamespy, back in '99?
The problem with WoT was that it was too complex for the average gamer.
You don't want six different shields, you don't want three different ways to stop someone from attacking you.
Unreal 2 was another matter entirely.
If you don't have good story-writers, it doesn't matter how much talent the rest of the team has.
LegendEnt have come up with some really nice gameplay (see WoT's citadel mode, for instance).
Their skinners, modellers, map makers and scripters are brilliant.
The soundteam for WoT was awesome (To the point that I bought Andy Frazier's CD with WoT-inspired music)
I'll most definitely miss Glen, Scott, Mike and all the others from Legend.. and I hope they stay and work in the industry
Instead of shutting down the studio, they should simply look at getting some real talent for story-development. .
is that XMP didn't come out with the game as it was supposed to.
All of the good dev houses get shutdown, yet all of the utterly terrible ones get to survive?
If you don't have good story-writers, it doesn't matter how much talent the rest of the team has.
Because I play Tetris for the story.
Don't automatically assume that any game without a decent story is going to be bad. Total Annihilation had a terrible story, yet many acknowledge it as one of the greatest RTS games ever. Good gameplay with poor plot sells much better than a brilliant story with horrid gameplay.
gamecube. it's "so dying" (or at least that's what every article on /. always claims...)
Oh, and apple too. totally dead.
Well, that changes everything. I take everything Mark "Subscription Whore" Surfas tells me as prophecy.
They were also most recently cursed at for their uninspired, boring and derivative work on Unreal 2. Anyone who played it hated it. Word of mouth was terrible.
I could never figure this out. It certainly wasn't exceptional -- no Marathon-class groundbreaking story, Halo-class groundbreaking gameplay, or Unreal-class groundbreaking graphics, but I found it fairly fun to play. I never got particularly nervous in some levels where I should have, and the characters were flat. However, there were nice weapon effects, the scripted levels where you defend against attackers were fun (at least for me), etc.
I guess U2 wasn't the big deal that U1 was, but neither was it a Daikatana.
WoT should never have been made because only the 2 people who bought the books wanted it,
I always vaguely thought that there were a fair number of people that enjoyed Wheel of Time out there, but perhaps people just don't read books much anymore, with video games easily available.
May we never see th
To be honest, I never thought that Legend was really that great. "Wheel of Time" was interesting and good looking, but nothing to really go nuts about. "Unreal 2" was another - nice, but not supreme.
This sounds more like capitalistic market forces working than (in Interplay's case) Point Haired Bosses making silly decisions.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Good gameplay with poor plot sells much better than a brilliant story with horrid gameplay.
Or at least has more replay value, which in a game that is both moddable and multiplayer-capable, is a big deal.
Man, I wish someone would sit down and clone the TA feature set that (well, back when I played RTSes) other RTSes seem to lack. It's not that hard, and it's already been done well. Infinite resource generators. Long range guns. Powerful naval units (the naval portion of that game is fantastic). Modability. 3D units. Flamamble terrain. Ability to optionally use LOS, fog of war, etc. Most micromanagement handled by the computer -- you can queue up an unlimited number of units, queue up orders, give general orders ("do not deviate from your ordered path, but return fire if attacked"), queued-up orders, automatic healing/repair by units capable of this when patrolling, the concept of a Commander -- a piece that you can play as a trump card, but that if lost loses the round. So much fun.
May we never see th
imho unreal 2 was fun, very fun. and good looking, very good looking.
but too short(though max payne 2 and call of duty are also too short when looked at like this). oh how fun those defending missions of unreal2 would have been in multiplayer..
however halo was one of the bigger disappointments of last year that came for pc - groundbreaking it surely was not(and wouldn't have been few years earlier either, crap, even giants kicks it's ass), however the pc port had the co-op pulled out of it which would have boosted it up quite a bit.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I guess this means that I'll never be playing a Gateway 3, not that I really expected to anyway.
Series' that good usually end up unappreciated anyway...
- colin
I hate to say it, but consoles may be better platforms for co-operative play (which I've discovered that I really, really like -- the computer is the only loser, and the other player helps add in a random element). Console co-ops *do* suffer from a number of limitations. There aren't a heck of a lot of pixels that get slapped on a TV screen, and splitting them up further is kind of bad.
However, most co-op games are much better if the players can talk to each other -- text messages, a la Quake multiplayer, work, but just aren't a good substitute for voice. That means that either you need good remote voice capabilities -- and remote voice over IP has its share of problems -- or you need players to be sitting next to each other. Folks don't have a bank of computers right next to each other of the same class to play a current game, which means that, sadly, for most real-time co-op games, the PC isn't a great platform.
The main drawback of the console multiplayer game, the inability to easily provide private information to any one player, is not generally an issue in co-operative games, since it's okay if other people know how much health you have and where you are.
May we never see th
No tears here.
I want 2D games back.
The studios are really about the people. Their names mean nothing without the very people that started them. In most cases when these studios are shut down, the personalities that were important in leading them already left. For example, how important is BullFrog when most of its key developers and founder leave to form another studio? What's Origin without Richard Garriot or Black Isle without Ferquant (or whatever his name was)? The bottomline is that's it's really mainly the people that matter. The studios / their names mainly just serve as a marketing vehicle. Unless these developers / designers die - great games will still come from them - just in the form of a different brand / studio.
Good grief (blincoln, presumably). So the meaning of "beg the question" has been completely misconstrued by the media and mainstream culture into a meaning that now makes more sense than it once did. Everyone knows what the poster meant (that it "raises" the question), and the media now uses this meaning in the same way. If something "begs the question," it now means that it is so obvious an indication of something that it does, in fact, "beg" for the following question often then presented by the errant grammar misuser. It is, undoubtedly, a great tragedy that the true - and much more confusing - use
Accept the fact that this particular phrase's original meaning has been tainted (since it was, at one time, as non-literal as it is now) and move on with your grammar life. If, instead, you want lingual purism, leave this cesspool of grammar ignorance we call slashdot and go teach English in South Africa.
Before they ever did Wheel of Time, they were an adventure game house. Steve Meretzky was one of the great names, and came there from Infocom IIRC.
Their first games were basically text games dragged into the 90s kicking and screaming, by letting you play using both verb/object bars, or just typing in your commands like usual. Small still images and BGM tracks constituted the technical advances.
That might sound bad, but the games were good, especially the later ones. The asthetic essentials of descriptive text and vibrant environments were never left out.
I think Legend's two main problems were:
1. It got stuck in FPS games after WOT was a success. Its core strength, after all, was originally in adventures.
2. It got sucked into the folds of a large game company. When a developer reaches that position, it seems like death is inevitable.
The problem with WoT was that it was too complex for the average gamer.
I get a lot of enjoyment out of "complex" FPSes like Deus Ex, System Shock, and Tron 2.0, but I thought Wheel of Time was pretty bland.
Rob
Legend completely ruined Star Control 3, and Unreal 2 was an embarrassment to all gamers everywhere. Since then, every time I've seen that Legend logo when starting up a game, I've had that sinking feeling in my stomach. Finally, the market system has worked and one more awful game development house has closed. The only unfortunate thing is those ex-Legend developers now have an opportunity to work elsewhere, spreading their legacy of crappiness.
Unreal 2's greatest fault was that it lacked inspiration. Visually, being an Unreal mapper myself, I can appreciate the insane amount of work that went into modeling their environments. Unreal 2 had its bright moments, like the Hell level. And others that were less than spectacular (the neverending defense missions). The length of the single-player campaign wasn't bad, considering it started to drone on by the sixth mission. I can accept the Red Faction II approach of "short but sweet" campaign design, but Unreal 2 just droned on and on, even though it was short.
It lacked originality. Though enormously pretty, the environments could have been so much more than run-of-the-mill factories and space stations, and the obligatory H.R. Giger-influenced jaunt into an alien ship. Indeed, there are even scenarios that seem lifted from user-made Unreal campaigns (Xidia Gold, in particular) that came before Unreal 2. By the time it was over, it was a very been-there-done-that affair. Once you got by the pretty looks, there just wasn't much substance beneath the surface.