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Troika Games Closes
Voodoo Extreme has the story that talented development house Troika Games has closed its doors as a result of lack of funding for future projects. Rumours of their closure have circled for the last week or so, but today's announcement makes the closure official. Troika is best known for its table-top RPG adaptations, such as The Temple of Elemental Evil and games based on Vampire: The Masquerade. From the announcement: "We want to thank all of our fans for their support these past seven years, it has really meant a lot to us that there were people out there who enjoyed our games enough to create fan-sites and follow our progress as a company. But we especially want to thank all of our employees - we had the pleasure of working with the some of the most dedicated, hard working, creative people in the industry, and we really appreciate all that they did for Troika."
Meanwhile the ruthless prosper while throwing breadcrumbs to their employees. Seems one more failure ensures the continued trend.
It's a hard world.
New form EA: Mail Order Monsters: John Madden Edition! Listen to John's witty repartee as your monster slugs it out for survival!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I loved their games for the most part. I sure hope those involved with making them get to work on good projects in the future.
What a shame!
I'm surprised that their games didn't attract enough attention from EA and Activision to get bought out in a situation like this. There must have been more to their lack of funding than meets the eye...
"No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing." -Emperor Claudius 10 BC - AD 54
These people made one of my all-time favourite games: Arcanum. Too bad they didn't release the rights to it before vanishing, I guess they're held by Sierra anyway. I'd like to see an open-source version of this game, with some working multiplayer!
That's not a soda... it's a caffeine delivery device!
I've enjoyed several Troika games and plan on playing Vampire soon, but the incredibly unfinished Temple of Elemental Evil was a huge black mark on their reputation. Entire levels were only partially furnished. There were parts where you could wander for half an hour opening empty chests in unfurnished empty rooms.
I wish them the best 'though. Good luck guys.
-dameron
You knew someone was going to ask it...
mandatory response: it isn't that simple, they cross licensed other comapnies IP, blah, blah
there, now we don't have to go through that thread again
From this review:
Unfortunately, it seems Troika's transition from their prior isometric perspective games to first-person this time may not have been completely smooth. Since release, several bugs have emerged including a showstopper that has quite a few players to experience a crash to desktop in one of the later missions. An interim patch has been released by the fan community, but it's unfortunate a flaw of this magnitude managed to sneak past quality assurance, and that the players themselves had to fix it. Aside from that, characters occasionally glide across the floor instead of walking, and some actions are out of sync with the audio. There are also various graphical glitches like flickering textures and NPCs that disappear in front of you as you move down the street or exhibit other bizarre behaviors such as walking above the ground.
While the review says that the graphics were nice I couldn't disagree more. I wasn't blown away by them and I certainly don't care much for graphics anyway.
Give me great gameplay and a stable playing environment. I haven't ever had a PS2 game crash my PS2 and I certainly haven't had Quake crash my computer. I wouldn't expect any game to do that... Patched or not.
This is just a publicity stunt by Troika. They defied "impossibility" by finally releasing an actual "Temple of Elemental Evil" module, after decades of waiting for that unholy grail. Now they're just spending a year dead for tax purposes, before releasing a tabletop version of "Duke Nukem Forever".
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make install -not war
Maybe if less people would have pirated Vampires they would have actually made enough money to create another title.
And people wonder why all the good games go to the consoles...
Well, I guess it goes to say that, even though they used Valve's source engine (Half-Life 2), that gameplay and content are more important than graphics and cool physics.
Guess they failed the saving throw.
after american macgee's alice, they've just been coming up with crap after crap.
The Temple of Elemental Evil and games based on Vampire: The Masquerade
Oh, that's OK then.
Nothing wrong with a company that made bad games going under.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
It really is quite sad to see how the people who have made two excellent computer RPG's (original Fallout and Arcanum) cannot succeed in the current computer game market.
Fallout was undoubtably one of the very best computer RPGs and Arcanum is not far behind IMHO. I was actually really looking forward to perhaps one day seeing Arcanum 2 with the same great world and especially atmosphere as the original.
It would be really nice to see these people succeed in what they are really good in doing, especially as this (making excellent computer RPGs) produces some additional happiness to other people. The closing of Troika Games is sad in the sense that there is little hope for the same magic atmosphere to appear again soon in computer games.
The game industry is looking more and more like the music and movie industries every day. Soon EA and all the other big corporate names will have eliminated competition, formed an RIAA/MPAA style ruling body, and then actively attack piracy. And thank god, because look at how good popular music is today! I can't wait for game quality to keep sliding as huge companies buy up as many licenses they can and flood the market with crap while companies like Troika can't even pay the rent...
www.kiwilyrics.com - a wiki for lyrics
Probably one of the best PC RPGs ever was fallout and its sequel. First, Black Isle closed. Many of the former employees were working at Troika. Now Troika's gone. If I could point out a single problem, it would be that the original Fallout team was split up; the closings merely show that this team was greater than the sum of its parts.
The major failing of any open-ended RPG from Arcanum to KOTOR2 was 1) an unbalanced ability system and 2) trying to make the game too grandiouse and forgetting the polish.
I wish someone would release an RPG with the polish of warcraft, the open-endedness of fallout, and the great voice acting/script writing from KOTOR. Now there's a game I would happily pay $80 for.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I think the "shiny" eyes are the most outstanding feature, apart from the atmosphere created by the great level design. And the gameplay was not so bad either. Now, stable, that's another thing.
Vampire: Bloodlines was a technical disaster, but the storytelling is absolutely wonderful. With only a little more polish to the engine, it could have been up there with other great games like Mafia or Max Payne (and IMHO, the story is even better and more original.)
In that sense, I believe using such a new engine (i.e. Source) was not a good choice, especially when the guys at Troika din't seem to have much experience with first-person stuff.
I'm not defending their lack of QA, but to be fair, the QA process for PC games is considerably harder than it is for a closed, proprietary gaming console. Your analogy to Quake is a bit more accurate, but you also have to keep in mind of the funds that smaller gaming companies have available. id has millions of dollars available to them--per title! As the technology keeps getting pushed further and further and games get more complex, you're going to have to be willing to accept some trade-offs. You have the choice of sometimes innovative, but stable, games from the mega publishers, or geniunely innovative titles from the smaller guys. The smaller studios generally can afford either the latest & greatest whizbang or rock solid stability, but not both. Yeah, it sucks that we can't have both, but that's just how things are when the gaming market is as cut-throat as it is.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
I'll get the punch!
why does the porridge bird lay his eggs in the air?
Worst. Ending. Ever.
Just a tip to whoever wrote the ending to Vampire Bloodlines: the Indiana Jones box up the evil artifact and store it away in a warehouse only works if we already know what's inside!
As far as I know, Troika tends to release games that only their programmers could really love; Vampire: Bloodlines was not the first. My not-at-all-uncommon experience with Temple of Elemental Evil was that the games lack of pathfinding capabilities slowed the game to a near standstill, particularly in the extraplanar areas around the end of the game.
Quirky stuff in the way the rules are implemented in the game? Sure, whatever. But a single-player game lagging out for no discernable reason is a programming screw-up that utterly killed the slight enjoyment I was getting out of the storyline and eye-candy. (After, of course, some of the folks who were supposed to be allied with me arbitrarily decided to attack me so I had to go all creedicidal on the whole temple, despite using a Chaotic Neutral party built for infiltration.)
I respect their passion for play, but their production values were garbage and their brand name a warning that my hard-earned dollars were about to be lost on beta abandonware...
Sigh. How's it feel to be in the minority?
The more I mine old games, the less I appreciate too many of today's offerings. Remember when some game with rotating geometric elements took the game world by storm? Original thinking is a scarce commodity.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
With mods and patches the game was very nice - as someone else pointed out Atari forced them to ship an unfinished game (see also Master of Orion 3) but fortunately it was still salvageable.
So - now that the bugs are ironed out ToEE is an excellent engine for making D&D 3rd ed. single player scenarios. Does Troika still exist enough to lease out access to that Code to other design studios? You also need a WOTC license, of course.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
There are alternate endings where you do see what's inside, you know...
Nothing against Linux, but them and 90% of the rest of the gaming companies?
If they don't pass the rights to the games to some other entity, doesn't that mean the rights aren't owned by anyone? Doesn't that mean they're in the public domain? Or do they get scarfed up by the first games lawyer to register the copyright after they expire? What about the copyrights on the game code? If they're not owned by anyone anymore, what's to stop a Troika programmer from publishing the source code?
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make install -not war
crappers! this means that there will never be a sequel to Arcanum (unless they open the license and let folks run amok with it)...
[move
For me, it's that I consider myself a Capitalist rather than a Monopolist. The guys who thought up capitalist economic theory did _NOT_ have the USA's current economy in mind when they thought of capitalism, and many of them even wrote about the need for people to be vigilant because of the constant danger of a capitalist economy turning into a monopolist or oligopolist economy like we have now.
I honestly believe that a true capitalism is better for consumers. You don't have monopolies like Microsoft stifling innovation and price-gouging. You don't have cartels like the RIAA stifling innovation and price-gouging. You don't have oligopolies like the big cable TV providers stifling innovation and price-gouging.
I much prefer the video game market of the early 1990s, where there were lots of games being put out by small start-ups, and they could get attention. The simple fact of the matter was there was a lot of variety on the market because you had a lot of people taking risks to try to break into the market rather than a lot of people churning out the same tired old shite in order to protect their market dominance.
As for your crap about helping disadvantaged youths, how do you think they got to be disadvantaged? Maybe because the middle class works for chicken-feed at massive companies like EA, and their relatively low income drives down the price of low-income services and such, which drives down the pay of the parents of those disadvantaged kids. Or maybe because big companies like EA like to work with as few employees as possible, which increases unemployment and competition for other jobs, which drops pay, which also leads to those disadvantaged kids being poor.
Maybe they're going to release Vampire: Troika and become an undead character in their own game. When this happens, the entire gaming industry is going to collapse due to a stack overflow from the recursion.
Farewell, Chosen Ones!
May the wastes of the gaming industry be good with you!
Their gaming experieince seems to be on the complete opposite end of the spectrum as mine. I did not have a single problem, not a single glitch with this game. The graphics were not mind blowing but all in all the game was great.
They will be missed.
Try playing it through again (or re-loading just before you have to pick a faction), and decide to work for the Anarchs or LaCroix. There is something in there.
I'm a huge fan of a fat manual.
This might be slightly O.T. but with the passing of Black Isle and now Troika, I can't help reflecting on the fact that both of these studios IMHO were the only ones out there that spent enormous time and energy in creating beautiful offline content to accompany their games.
Arcanum was a great game. And one of the reasons I have huge respect for Troika is that they didn't just stop there:
That Arcanum manual was a work of art.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Wanna see a really bad ending? Play Knights of the old Republic 2
Linux is not Windows
It surprised me to discover that while Vampire used the Source engine, it ran slower than Half Life 2, and wasn't nearly as detailed.
Goes to show you that underlying technology doesn't really mean much...
On the other hand, I liked the character creation system.
Video Game News, FAQs, etc
This news is hardly suprising.
Release one buggy game (Arcanum) and people think "gee, that's too bad". They might even fall for that "The publisher made us do it" schtick.
Release two buggy games (ToEE) and people think, "gee, better make sure I read reviews from now on." People are starting to think it might not be the publisher, especially since it's a whole different one this time.
Release three buggy games (VTMB) and people think, "why are these guys still in business?"
Guess they aren't.
Troika in a nutshell - Great ideas, bad implementation.
I'm tempted to tell you what's in the box...
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
I found it funny that they picked their two dogs as a show case of great stuff.
Arcanum was a very good game.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Doesn't change anything for you when you use Linux exclusively.
Linux is not Windows
From Penny-Arcade "It sounds as though Troika is no more, or at any rate they are liquidating everything in their offices, so if they are still coherent as a developer presumably their next game involves sitting in a bare room. Troika (for those of you with a concussion) is the little company that couldn't, producing games of marvelous, unprecedented promise coupled with epic lapses in technical execution. The company was a hole that great ideas crawled half-way out of, so I hope you'll pardon me if I don't dab the corner of my eye with a handkerchief and try to look strong. There were undeniably talented people there. Hopefully they'll end up someplace where that kind of thing matters."
maybe if it was craptacular in nature, thye would have made money.
If the pirating of Vampire caused them to loose sales, then why is half-life 2, Doom, and warcraft 3 making money?
Not saying downloading an item that someone doesn't have permission to do so is right(legally or morally), just pointing out that the success of a product doesn't seem to be related to piracy.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This studio has a long history of buckling under publisher demands and therefore releasing half-assed games that need FAN-CREATED PATCHES to fix glaring holes (caps because it's so ridiculous you have to have your players create patches for you).
You want to fail as a game studio? Release your latest game with a showstopper that drops them to the desktop (Vampire: Masquarade).
You want to fail as a game studio? Release an unfinished RPG, with unfinished rooms, quests, and broken bits that were so broken it took MULTIPLE (ugh!) fan-created patches to fix them.
Troika is an example of how to fuck up. It has nothing to do with EA or whatever, they simply released unfinished games with bad, ugly bugs. This will sink any game company at any time. EA or no, if a game doesn't play or is broken, people won't buy it.
"They lost because the world is going corporate."
No, they lost the fight because the world doesn't put up with that kind of performance, horrid out of the box experience, and regulating the fans to make the patches.
I'm sorry for the team involved, and I'm sure they tried their damndest. But whether it was bad management or some other reason, there were clear and easy-to-read signs on why they went kaput.
Troika may have fallen, but the spirit of Black Isle still lives on. Many of them that didn't leave for Troika are now at Obsidian Entertainment (including Feargus), and it looks like they're the more successful offshoot. I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of new RPG's come from that studio!
I don't think it's the market, I think it was Trokia's extreme sucking. No not in the games they chose to make, not in how they decided to do the gameplay or anything, those were excellent. The problem was in the programming. ToEE was so buggy it was unbelievable. In it's inital state, the game was practically unplayable. After two patches it was still riddled with bugs, and they showed no intrest in updating it. Frustrated fans finally set to work on it and made an update that got the game pretty close to what release status should be.
I haven't played Vampire, but I understand it's in a similar boat.
There is a market for RPGs, and they can make money, but part of that is that they must be well developed programs. I'd say this goes even more than many other games. I can deal with a fair bit of glitches in an FPS, I mean all I'm there to do is shoot shit. However an RPG is about character and story development, so things need to work right. If I can't, for example, loot a creature (common problem in ToEE) that really fucks things up.
While I'm sad to see them go, I have no illusions of who is at fault. They produced some of the buggiest code I've seen in a long time and it's no wonder people got frustrated trying to play it and sales were bad.
I wouldn't go to IGN for reviews. I read a review once where they knocked a whole point off the sound score because they didn't like which words were bleeped out. Also compare their scores of the PS2 and Xbox versions of the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection. The Xbox reviewer basically calls the PS2 reviewer out. Its quite possible they were just having a hardware issue.
You can't spell ignorant without I-G-N.
Please get a clue.
In true Capitalism, there is no one preventing monopolies. Bill Gates would own countries in that world. The US system is decent in that the government wacks monopolies when they get too big. Yes, there is some bribing and crap, but its the best system that's actually been implemented so far. You do realise the EA was one of those start-ups you romanticize about. Those startups either died or grew up and ate each other. That's the way of things. Businesses scratch and claw their way to your pocket, and the government kicks them in the ass when they go too far. I know it's cool and stuff to talk of dark brooding corporate towers where the affairs of the world are secretly controlled, but seriously, you're not some freedom fighter, just some middle class Joe who's cushy life shields you from reality.
And please, there are no EA employees living in dire poverty. That comment shows how even the middle class in America is ignorant of what real poverty is. The disadvantaged I'm talking about are those who aren't equipped to play in our society. The uneducated ultra poor, both native and immigrant. Again, one of the flaws of the US is the education of the poor. It's much better than in the rest of the world, but still needs improvement. You want to fall on your sword for the rights of someone making 50k a year.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
After having purchased that steaming half-finished pile of bugs (I imagine they would have made it buggier if given more time) called ToEE I must say "don't let the door hit you on the way out". I don't have an unlimited gaming budget, so blowing full price on that "game" was very frustrating.
That's been my point too, EA doesn't make good games...
And when "game" companies (I use the term very loosely here) become Monopoly's, the losers are the Gamers/players/consumers. Because let's face it - crap is crap, no matter how you package it.
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]
I much prefer the video game market of the early 1990s, where there were lots of games being put out by small start-ups, and they could get attention. The simple fact of the matter was there was a lot of variety on the market because you had a lot of people taking risks to try to break into the market rather than a lot of people churning out the same tired old shite in order to protect their market dominance.
The video game market of the early 1990s was a different time. Games were simpler and cheaper to make, and the community that played games was mostly the same computer nerds that created them.
Now to produce a mainstream game you need more programmers with more specialized experience, as well as dedicated artists, larger support staffs, etc. Small companies don't have the economy of scale to support such staffs, that's why there is consolidation. It's also why the games are more bland and dumbed-down, because to support the staff required they have to bring in the dollars from average joes.
If you are looking for the same intelligent and innovative spirit of the early 1990s, it's still alive, it's just moved out of commercial space into the mod communities. In fact I would say things are better than that time, because mod developers are able to focus on gameplay rather than worrying about developing the technology; and the games are free for us gamers.
As for your crap about helping disadvantaged youths, how do you think they got to be disadvantaged? Maybe because the middle class works for chicken-feed at massive companies like EA, and their relatively low income drives down the price of low-income services and such, which drives down the pay of the parents of those disadvantaged kids. Or maybe because big companies like EA like to work with as few employees as possible, which increases unemployment and competition for other jobs, which drops pay, which also leads to those disadvantaged kids being poor.
The average salary is $62,500/yr, not exactly chicken feed. To associate difficult work conditions for programmers with the problems of disadvantaged youth is too much.
Having to work 80 hour weeks so you can keep the payments up on your BMW does not compare to the structural and social issues impacting those growing up in lower economic conditions. Improving the economic and social environment for the underprivlidged to encourage education and entrepreneurship is much more important to the long term development and well being of this country. If a programmer gets fed up with his working conditions they can work elsewhere, maybe not in the games industry they love, but there are options. Those from poor conditions who have not been given opportunities for education or experience have no such options.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Damn... That was a really great game... its sad that the company went the way it did... Anyone else find this link http://www.troikagames.com/jobs.htm on there site a little odd?
I own two out of the three games (Arcanum and Vampire) and both are on my desktop for quick replay. I have never had a problem with crashes. I mourn that an innovative, creative company has closed. I want to know why. Are single player Role Playing Games history? Has everyone gone over to Everquest and other internet games? I love the social factor of the internet games, but sometimes I need or want to play a solo game, so I can pay attention to my husband. He tends to get very neglected when I play the MMORPGs, and a cranky husband stomping around, going "And dinner is going to be when???" tends to disrupt your concentration. Is everyone buying first person shooters? Why did Troika fold????
Unfortunately, it's probably more like 99% of the gaming companies.
It got an 80% with IGN giving it a 8.4. The graphics look pretty realistic check the screenshot here.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Now let's hope that Bethesda employs people from Troika to work on Fallout 3.
Speaking of KotOR2, lets talk bugs. Everywhere. Many unacceptable IMO - the broken Pazaak tutorial, aborting a swoop race and never being able to win... just awful QA.
Both cases (KotOR and Bloodlines) are most likely publishers pushing a game out before it's ready. It's really too bad.
Troika did have a history of games that had far too many bugs at release, even in their former incarnations (though Interplay was legendary for that). I thought Bloodlines was less buggy than many previous games by Troika, though it still lacked polish. Still it was probably my favorite RPG of 2004.
{sarcasm mode on} :)
1) Don't buy ToEE, Fallout, or Arcanum when they first come out.
2) Wait long enuf for everyone to finish bitching about the game.
3) Pick it up in the dollar store.
4) Less hardware upgrades and less up front cost to purchase, and nearly all the bugs have already been ferreted out - Profit!
{sarcasm mode off}
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]
It seems like another developer who didn't make games for Nintendo are now suffering the wrath. Hmm... I see a pattern here:
-FCI (Whatever happened to them after SNES Ultima: The False Prophet?
-American Sammy
-Troika
-Enix (Got taken over by Square)
Just goes to show, if you avoid the most important player (pun hilariously intended) in the games industry, Nintendo, you will not survive. History has proved this again and again and again.
Whenever I see the Nintendo Seal of Quality, I know that the game will have no bugs and will be a lot of fun. This is not the case with the Temple of Experimental Evil.
First of all, when I put the disk in the Gamecube, it didn't even fit. After that, I tried putting it in my Mac, and that was a disaster. Finally, I tried it in a PC. The PC ran the program, but all the furniture was in the basement. What a disaster!
I know a lot of the guys (and gals) who worked at Troika. The writing has been on the wall for a while, but its so sad to see a company of people who I know for a fact just loved good computer games and tried their damndest to make them, end up in the dustbin of history.
Karma: Non-existant. Due mostly to the fact that you smell funny and nobody likes you.
> the QA process for PC games is considerably harder than it is for a closed, proprietary gaming console.
I seriously doubt this is the case. You cannot patch a console game (not on current generations of consoles anyway), so you MUST get it right the first time. The limitations of the hardware (or for the PS2, the strange architecture) force you to make optimizations that range from nasty hacks to intimidatingly complex. DirectX has made the PC more uniform than consoles -- you only need to write for one architecture and API, unlike consoles.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
You're probably not as fussy as me and ran using the first patch - the first patch addressed some serious crashing issues.
There still were minor scripting errors in places (e.g. females being called 'he') and definitely some AI problems, even in 1.1 - for instance, when I went to the fish market to fight the Hengeyokai, I once got the monster trapped on a bookshelf (and lesurely shot it to death) and many times got Yukie stuck shooting her crossbow and never stopping, even when there was no way for her to hit the monster in some places.
When HL2/Vampire first came out, Valve put out a bunch of patches fixing a major stuttering bug on many pc configurations. When Troika was asked about fixing the bugs, they replied that there would be no patches since their budget didnt allow for it. It looks like they were counting on the game's success to carry the company, but the expectation was that the game wouldn't be a huge hit. Why else would they not want to patch the game?
Sorry for the guys at Troika but I'm everything but astonished. With a publisher like Atari you are doomed to fail. The last game, especially totee were so buggy that they were hardly playable. Wasn't Troika's fault, it was Atari that pushed the games into the market before they were actually finished.
I don't buy any Atari-games anymore which sadly hit Troika as well.
Bad publisher == death for the development team. Sad but true.
Let this be a lesson, game companies: Hire *two* sets of testers, segregate them, and make sure they know what they're testing, and what they're testing it *for*: don't cry about budget, either, most would work for relatively low pay and make up the difference in equity.
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
That was an ignorant statement as it is obvious you have never worked on either PC or console development; Having worked on both, QA for console is MUCH easier as compared to PC --
QA for PC games involve hundreds, if not thousands of different hardware/vid card permutations whereas console systems are locked - Plus with console, not only does the developer and publisher perform QA, the 1st party (MS, SONY, NOA) ALSO perform QA after submission...yes bugs do happen to sometimes get through, however not even close to the number of bugs which flood through in PC titles;
so..stop trying be smart and commenting about things of which you know nothing
"Give me great gameplay and a stable playing environment. I haven't ever had a PS2 game crash my PS2 and I certainly haven't had Quake crash my computer. I wouldn't expect any game to do that... Patched or not." making a game stable on a console is not NEARLY as hard as making one stable on the PC. I've seen so many crappy console games it isnt even funny. The Hardware is all set on the PS2, the devs dont have to take in to account thousands of diffrent hardware configurations, many of them with conflicting instruction sets.
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This is MY galaxy...go find your OWN!
Are you suggesting that EA, Activision, and other giants of the gaming industry should bail out failing companies like Troika? Or perhaps the government should, for the sake of fair competition, ya know?
That's not how business works. Companies that produce the better product succeed; those that don't... well, don't. EA isn't successful because they are EVIL, they are successful because they produce games that people want to buy.
Face it: companies don't have a 'right' to exist. They must be able to produce a product that people want to buy. If they cannot accomplish that, then the business will fail. Simple as that.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I'll agree with you to a point, but consider the differences in scope. While PS2 testers have to get it right the first time, the entirety of their lab is that single machine. A PS2 only runs one app at a time, doesn't have user-swappable hardware (other than "offical" accessories), and has a very limited input device.
Yes, DirectX and similar APIs have done a lot to standardize Windows game development, it isn't a magic bullet. Unlike a game console, a PC is a general purpose computer. That jack-of-all-trades approach includes the limitation of not being the best at any of its functions. A specialized API can only take generic platform so far. Look at all the bugs you've found in your games. The first thing tech support will tell you is to upgrade/reinstall DirectX. That will take care of a lot of the problems, but not all. Maybe not even a majority. The rest of the problems are caused system configurations not anticipated by the QA guys. Granted, I'm not a console developer, so maybe someone who is will contradict me, but I think developing for a uniform platform would be much easier.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Yeah Troika had some QA issues, but they made brilliant games. A bug free piece of crap game is not really very interesting. A buggy brilliant game is still a brilliant game.
It's easier to improve quality than it is to improve brilliance.
Even with quality issues, TOEE and Vampire have sold pretty well. The bigger question should be, how can a company make critically acclaimed games that sell well and still go under? What's wrong with the market? Do we want to see game production limited to a few major studios like EA and Ubi or do we want to see innovative titles?
I hope everyone participating in this thread is voting with their pocketbook and buying great games made by small studios.
I hope that those small studios can come up with business models that let them succeed. Maybe Valve's STEAM model is the future? I'd like to see more suggestions for how small studios can survive and less bitching about QA issues.
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I support spreading santorum
Try telling that to a company that is releasing simultaneously on multiple platforms (PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, maybe PC, maybe Xbox 2 and PSP) in multiple languages (at least North American English, UK English, French, Spanish and German).
Troika tends to get *one* element right. Arcanum had amazing music, Bloodlines had great voice acting. (ToEE was just terrible... nothing redeeming in that game whatsoever.) Unfortunately the games weren't quite good enough overall to justify the headaches.
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I'll deal with Morrowind running at 5fps and crashing twice an hour because frankly it's still one of the best rpg's around (BG2 without a doubt takes the top spot imo). I certainly won't put up with crashes and game-crippling scripting errors for the mediocre Vampire gameplay.
P.S. The Arcanum music was released for free. They composer even put out the full quartet scores so the music literate can follow or even play along. Grab it before it's gone!!
http://arcanum.sierra.com/us/media/media-soundt
http://www.benhouge.com/arcanumscores.htm
Um... the game didn't crash the computer. He just said it "crashed to desktop." The program ended abruptly and exited to the desktop. That happens all the time.
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.
I was disappointed with SA on a number of levels. First, GTA3 was very open-ended; most missions you got to choose your own car for and could even make roadblocks and the like to make chasing someone down easier.
In contrast, every mission in SA almsot introduced a new control scheme and came with ready-made vehicles for it. Far from being open-ended, the heavily scripted non-sandbox nature of each mission drained any creative problem solving.
The story wasn't too bad I suppose; though the voice acting was good, I felt the plot was rather shallow.
As a final note, I disliked playing it on a console thoroughly for one reason. On PC, I could set draw distance to be far away and thus I could see traffic while going fast. Due to whiz-bang graphics, while racing down the street, cars literally would materialize right in front of me.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
NOOOOOOOO! Take EA or... EA. but pleeease don't take Troika. First Looking Glass, then Black Isle/Interplay & Westwood, now Troika.. What's next.. Blizzard,Bioware? How am I suppposed to sit through my lectures today? Eating a bucket of ice-cream, wrapped in a blanket and sobbing uncontrolably? Probably not, but that's what I would do if I could.
"I'm not defending their lack of QA, but to be fair, the QA process for PC games is considerably harder than it is for a closed, proprietary gaming console."
That's not true. In fact, QA on consoles is harder and more demanding, because of certification requirements and the knowledge that you pan't patch later. And don't come with the "same hardware" kind of crap, it's not true. Do you have any idea how many different DVD drives there are for Xbox or PS2?
It's WASN'T a MUMMY! :)
Hehehe, no way I'm gonna ruin what it really was :)
Vampire, as much as I wanted it to be a great game, had show stopping bugs, and half way through just starts to suck.
Temple of Elemental evil had showstopping bugs, so bad that I could never get it to play.. and by the time they released the patch ti was way to late.
Fallout 1/2, were made by a few of these folks, but also had some major bugs, and while I loved both of them, the bugs were really not needed. ESPECIALLY since 90% of them were in general play, aka easily seen. Whats worse, is how many quests were partially made and then abandoned.
I think Arcanum was perhaps the only good game with few bugs that these folks made.
IMHO, you make games that have issues as above, you risk your own business.
I have played much Arcanum, and enjoyed the working parts of it. Their poor work continued even to bloodlines, the stories pull you in, but the sloppy programming ruins it. I hope that the writters and dreamers that started these projects will get a chance to work for a company that can give their ideas full potential. Not just something half-ass you can put in a box, sell, and promise to make a patch for later. They are going out of business due to their own mistakes.
This signature is part of a balanced post.
Okay, so the two other games that Troika made were crap. Arcanum, which wasn't even mentioned above, actually holds a place in my heart as one of the best PC roleplaying games ever made. Yes, it had that Troikatastik sense of incompleteness, but this amounted to little more than a few unbalanced objects (Who can complain that their gun does 40-40 damage instead of 4-40 anyway?). What it had that most roleplaying games don't is roleplaying. An open-ended game where you can choose what kind of character to play, and the game actually responds to your personally tailored self. This as opposed to, say, NWN, wherein your chaotic evil drov tiefling blackguard still ends up saving the world from evil in the end. I am very sorry to see Troika gone; there was potential for so much more. Farewell, sweet prince.
but it suffered from replayability issues, like most FPS. and the street scenes ran like a dog on my laptop, unlike HL:2 which runs nicely
Though some levels were boring as feck.... the tunnels? cut n paste. that place with the white checkered floor? boooooring.
no game had has the replayability of the original Deus Ex - multiple ways of getting into places that you dont even notice for 3 or 4 replays. large levels (hello DX2, you were crap)
I replayed HL2 this week after I uninstalled it for 3 months after playing it the 1st time. very fast now and very boring, only one way through.
with games at £40 a pop i expect a bit more replayability. cant beat the original DX.
I never heard of Troika or any of their products. I'm totally at a loss of what's going on or why I should care. So, I know this post is really pointless, but after reading the summary, and the prolonged "Huh?!". Just thought I'd waste some time by noting I don't know what the hell any of this is about. What does this have to do with linux? heheh :p
apparently you've never written for a pc publisher. the big publishers do QA themselves too. none of them will be the first line of QA, same as the console publishers.
get the stick out
This industry is infected with fat and bloated parasites and needs more than anything a nice cleansing crash to separate the people just in it for the money from the people who are in it to make games, a growing amount of the money is being openly diverted from actual game development its an out of control epidemic a plague of parasites is just right out in the open sucking the money out. developers suffer games suffer consumers suffer publishers suffer
Um, he probably meant kids who lost their parents or had some sort of physical or mental disability. I doubt you can blame EA for crippling children, though I am sure you would love to. Listen, EA is not forcing people to work for them, they can freely leave, and should if they feel they are treated poorly. Exclusive deals with the NFL absolutely should be illegal...as far as that goes, it's bad. Other than that, they are just another company out there. There are more great games out there than I could even dream of playing. The quality has shot up so much, it's amazing. A lot of people have this romanticism with when they were young and games. They play old games and re-live that youth. But really, gaming today is better in every aspect. You get tried and true genres, and every now and then you get something unique like Pikmin. The guy was just saying that supporting some small business that makes games that you really don't care about is stupid. Buy the games that you like playing...whether it's from EA, Square Enix, or some small business. If you really want a cause, yeah, helping disabled children would be a wonderful way to do that. Man, you talk about what this guy says as "crap", and then you turn around with bull shit on how EA is destroying the middle class and causing kids to become disadvantaged. You may hate EA, but you don't have to make idiotic exagerations to make a point.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Processes.
They lacked proper processes internally. They did not have a cohesive organization scheme. They simply slapped stuff together and called it a game.
Yes, they were individually creative. However, they approached game development with a very ad hoc approach. They were not internally consistent.
There is some brilliance in the things that Troika did. However, there's also a lot of disorganized thinking. This is the chief reason behind the lack of quality in the product.
So given the rich are just getting richer this means the smaller gaming companies are going to have that much a harder time at getting into the industry to compete with the big boys. So how will smaller mobs wanting to make the next Quake or Baldur's Gate 2 try breaking into the market? I just don't see how it will be possible...
I haven't ever had a PS2 game crash my PS2
I see you've not met my friend Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly...
Fscking unplayable...
steam-like distribution may encourage more people to go into game development if it gives developers more money or better bargaining power (valve would have to price nicely, not competitively though). i'd considered going into that area after getting out of business software development and taking a year off, but the risk is very high and so little money gets passed on to small companies. i hope my old mod team succeeds without selling their twenties away for three fifty.
The patch for Bloodlines solved all of the major issues, I played through the entire game with no problems. Blame their publisher (Activision) for pushing the game out two months before it was ready.
Vampire: Bloodlines was one of the more innovative, immersive, and overall excellent games I have played in the last couple years. Definitely one of the best RPGs.
It's an impressive achievement to make a game where you actually care about what happens. I hope others follow their example.
I recommend Vampire: Bloodlines to anyone with even a passing interest in RPGs, vampires, or intrigue.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Lately I've started buying a much larger share of the games I play, however I never got around to buying anything from Troika. As an avid fan of their work, I'd guess it wouldn't be too far from fair to say me and the likes of me caused their downfall.
Vampire The Masquerade; Bloodlines was an amazing game, with some of the best dialogue/script writing I've ever seen:
"Who are you talking to? I am not here. "
"Stop," , "No, you stop!" - conversing with a stop-sign
"The fleet-foothed God is broken!"
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
In a free trade, an effectual combination cannot be established but by the unanimous consent of every single trader, and it cannot last longer than every single trader continues of the same mind. The majority of a corporation can enact a bye-law, with proper penalties, which will limit the competition more effectually and more durably than any voluntary combination whatever.
The pretence that corporations are necessary for the better government of the trade, is without any foundation. The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman, is not that of his corporation, but that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence. An exclusive corporation necessarily weakens the force of this discipline.
From An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.
Your excerpts are all over the place, taking things out of context. The "corporation" in this case is more akin to trade guilds and certifications. The section discusses the issue of goverments by law restricting the labor pool through the requirements of long apprenticeships, to maintain high wages.
The exclusive privileges of corporations are the principal means it makes use of for this purpose. The exclusive privilege of an incorporated trade necessarily restrains the competition, in the town where it is established, to those who are free of the trade. To have served an apprenticeship in the town, under a master properly qualified, is commonly the necessary requisite for obtaining this freedom. The bye-laws of the corporation regulate sometimes the number of apprentices which any master is allowed to have, and almost always the number of years which each apprentice is obliged to serve. The intention of both regulations is to restrain the competition to a much smaller number than might otherwise be disposed to enter into the trade.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
I loved Vampire because it was so ambitious, and that of course is why there were so many bugs. I haven't played any console RPGs lately, but back when I did (FF7 etc) I was struck by how incredibly linear the plot was in the japanese games. You could act like a complete asshole to Tifa and theotherone the whole game, but both would *still* sit down at predecided plot points and have tentative talks with you about their developing feelings for you, and then fall madly in love with you before the game ended.
Changing stats for your character wouldn't change how you solved a mission or in what order you did them, it would only change how much damage they did when whacking someone with a sword or casting a spell. The ending was always the same.
Compare this with Vampire:
You get different missions and dialogues depending on which clan you choose to play. You get different possible dialog answers depending on if you are male or female, persuasive, dumb, etc. You get very different endings depending on if you played good or evil and who you choose to trust and align yourself with, if anyone, but don't expect all of them to be happy endings. You can develop your character as a magician, a gunslinger, a Thief like steal-without-being-noticed, a Splinter Cell/Metal Gear sneaky assassin, a charismatic seducer, a crazy katana wielding maniac, etc, and the game tries to challenge you and let you have fun either way, so you can play it as a shooter, a sneak-em-up, a talkative RPG, etc. Of course there are going to be more bugs in this, its at least 20 different games in one!
Strange how differently people can experience a game. I thought the graphics were excellent, both technically and the artwork. Music and effects were also good, especially the LA Downtown theme.
I agree with you when it came to stability though, some bugs were a bit hard to forgive. I came to places where objects or event triggers seemed just to have failed to load, so the game was impossible to continue unless you went back to an earlier save and replayed (doors not opening though I had the key, cars hanging in the air because all car tires on the level had failed to load, vital characters standing still and not reacting when you approached or tried to talk to them).
Still... sad sad sad that they close. A very few companies seem to try to develop games as a new artform, giving you experiences you can't get from books or films. Troika in my opinion was one of them. Obsidian (with people from Planescape: Torment and Fallout) looks like another. They also seem to want to make incredibly ambitious games, but since Lucasarts rushed Kotor2 out, they might eventually get the same reputation as Troika and meet the same end.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Adam Smith was well aware of monopoly issues. He wasn't that worried about them since monopolies were easily controlled by government and governments by society. However he was was concerned about corporations and warned vigerously about allowing "immortal persons" (perpetual corporations) to accumulate economic power in the society. What he advocated was corporations disbanding, selling the assets every 25 years or so and perhaps an entirely new stock offering for some of those assets.
Of course we are all supposed to revere Adam Smith, just not read what he wrote.
I agree, there are 12 types of Cylon^H^H^H^H^H PS2 ,sure they aahve the same basic chips, but those changes probably can affect how a game might run. Looking at how some PSX games dont.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
Wait, I know! Pain. errr wrong box.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
You are smoking crack if you think that fallout was solid - the first few patches invalidated your saved games - pretty much a hanging offense for any RPG...
While the publishers might be at fault for pushing ToEE out early, the real fault lies with programmers who are unable to push out relatively- bugfree code in a committed timeframe.
He mentions several types of corporations. From the East Indies Company, to education corporations and so forth. Seems pretty clear from that, to me at least, that modern corporations would fall into the same category. To me, it seems he didn't trust any corporate structure, because it isolated the workers from customers, decreasing accountability and efficiency.
He mentions several types of corporations. From the East Indies Company, to education corporations and so forth.
He discusses what we commonly refer to as corporations in other sections of the book. The specific section dealt with incorporation of individual trades and their protection by laws of goverment, which result in monopolies of labor talent.
To me, it seems he didn't trust any corporate structure, because it isolated the workers from customers, decreasing accountability and efficiency.
The corporation he was referring to was trade guild type structures. In this case he argued that apprenticeships were not the way to ensure quality output and infact could have the opposite effect by limiting the labor pool reducing competition.
The other sections where he talks about corporations like East India Company, he discusses not so much of a distrust of corporations but of monopolies. He states the need to have merchants pool their money to spread out potential captial losses for business endevours that are risky, but also potentially profitable for both the merchants and the country (specifically he mentions opening up trade routes). The overriding theme is not against corporations, but rather, against monopolies and excessive goverment intervention.
Corporations are important for efficient use of capital, so long as they don't become monopolies. Too many small companies is not efficient because of fixed costs and economies of scale, the price is artificially high because captial is not used efficiently. At the opposite end, a monopoly may have economy of scale, but the price is artificially high due to lack of competition.
The problem is trying to identify where the natural balance is. Even identifying a monopoly is difficult. Just because Nintendo had 90%+ of the handheld market didn't necessarily make it a monopoly. Competitors were able to freely enter and compete in the market, the public just decided that 9 out of 10 times they preferred one companies' offering.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Another great RPG-developer going down. Well I guess that i will have to wait for a long time for another good RPG. Golden age is over, only boring repetitive SHIT is now on the gaming market! Well i refuse to buy another game until a solid RPG comes out! I wonder how long will it take? SHIT SHIT SHIT!!!!!