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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.
No, it really doesn't.
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.
Just so you know you're not some kind of messed-up Ashton Kutcher, this article _was_ accidentally live for about 3 minutes this morning before it got moved, I believe. Good eye, that man!
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
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.
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 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.
You've obviously never played any of Legends Entertainments older games that weren't mentioned in the summary... the Spellcasting games(101 201 301) Gateway 1,2 the list goes on...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
Fact of the matter is, nobody does Co-op anymore. What was the last big co-op game to be released? Raven Shield? That was months and months ago. Let alone there should be another game with the same scope and playability as Op Flashpoint or Ghost Recon.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.