Leonard Boyarsky On 'Fallout's Spiritual Successor'

An anonymous reader submits "Duck and Cover have interviewed Troika's Leonard Boyarsky about their currently unsigned post-apocalyptic game. He describes it as the 'spiritual successor to Fallout', which sounds good to me."

Comments

engine recycle

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a quotation pulled from the first question:

This game needs roughly a two year development cycle, as we're building the engine along with the game. Once we finish the engine we could turn around another rpg in about 18 months. Since we're building everything you'd expect from a high end 3d engine into it (displacement mapping, bump mapping, specular mapping, real time shadows and lighting effects, etc) we'll be able to utilize this engine for several projects at least.

Is it at all disconcerting that priority is placed on reusability over individual content design? From a company standpoint, I'm sure the economics make it necessary, but when I see the team of 7 inside the Wasteland jacket, I wonder what could be possible with a small, dedicated team who don't have to homogenize their work so that it can be recycled for yearly sequels.

Re:engine recycle

[Morphine007]

They aren't talking about sequels. They're talking about building a (hopefully) robust game engine, which, will allow them to build a game on top of. The game engine has little to do with the content of the game. If it's a flexible engine, which most are, the "sequel" that you talk of would only be related to the original in that they'd be of the same genre, ie. FPS, RTS, MMORPG, etc...

Re:engine recycle

[neelm]

You don't know your game history then, I can tell. Sierra, in it's high days of the Kings Quest / Police Quest / Larry / etc games did the same approach. I don't think anyone is saying all those classic games were crap because they had the forsight to wrote code in an intelligent manner?

Or think about it another way. I have 5 game ideas; I can either a) write the first game in such a way that it takes 3 years to do, but 1.5 years for each game after, or b) I can spend 3 years on each game, writing code that does the exact same thing over and over again for each game, and each game taking 2-3 years.

Oh yes, my games will be filled with more bugs too because of a new code base each time. With option a, once the bug is fixed in the engine, I don't have to worry about it appearing again. So in theroy each game will take less time than the one before it.

It's either that, adopt a Blizzard release schedule, or release something before it's time because the development costs are running to high and it's time to cash out.

Also, why is it assumed that because a man builds a house, he cannot then be a good story teller in that house?

Spiritual Suckessors, Normally

[vjmurphy]

"He describes it as the 'spiritual successor to Fallout', which sounds good to me."

Yeah, just like UFO: Aftermath was a spiritual successor to the UFO games. Usually, that means that the game will really suck and we'll still be waiting for a real successor to the game in question.

Have there ever been any "spiritual successors" to any good game that have been worthy?

Whither turn-based games?

[BlightThePower]

I found this quote rather chilling: There's been a lot of debate since I said that we were considering real time with pause over turn based so that we could get this game made. The fact of the matter is that we're not self funded, we rely solely on publishers to fund our projects. Most publishers have flat out told us that they will not be funding any turn based games, and are not even interested in discussing them. If we can't sell a Troika post apocalyptic RPG to a publisher, it will never get made, it's as simple as that. No more turn-based games?! Perhaps an exaggeration but it depresses me that the market is so raidly sinking. I'm a bit hazy on the specific game(s) but I'm sure I've seen hybrids that offered the player the choice. That would seem to be the equitable solution. Perhaps the coding/game balance overheads are too great.

Re:Whither turn-based games?

[Rayonic]

reputable development shops oughta be able to sell computer games directly to the consumer, without kowtowing to the bottom line.

Even selling directly to the consumer, they still need money to get the game made.