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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.
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.
The good dev houses make games you want to play, with innovative features, impressive strylines and novel gameplay (not that I'd claim any of this for Unreal 2. I've finished it once and found it the emost cliche-ridden, predictable, bug-infested game for years, but that's beside the point). The problem is that doing this involves the very thing publishers increasingly tend to abhor: risks.
The uesless houses that churn out formulaic sequels are the low-risk, simple option. They're also less likely to be staffed by people who will stand up and object to publisher policy. Hence they get to survive at the cost of the better developers..
I do find it interesting that Epic/Atari/Legend decided not to put MP in Unreal 2 originally, presumably to prevent competition between the single-player focused Unreal 2 and the multiplayer focused Unreal Tournament 2003 that was coming out at the same time.
Then Legend gets to put out a multiplayer add on for Unreal 2 and it blows away everything Epic put into Unreal tournament 2003; it's a resource hog atm (fixed in the next patch), but it's far more playable and less buggy than 2003, the gameplay is deeper and better balanced, frankly, the epic guys should be ashamed that they helped keep Legend down in this case.
It's obvious the Legend crew had way more on the ball than Epic did; too bad they had to get the axe just when they showed what they could do in the Multiplayer FPS arena. U2 XMP is frankly the best game in the Unreal franchise if multiplayer gaming is your focus.