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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."
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
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...
You can thank Atari for that. They published it early, and a two month old build at that.
If you look around for some of the user patches and install them, the game is quite playable.
-Redundancy Man strikes again!
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.
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"
Temple of Elemental Evil got a 6.5 average press review: http://www.gamestats.com/objects/497/497967/articl es.html
Bloodlines got 7.9 press average:
http://www.gamestats.com/objects/566/566186/articl es.html
So... he is basically correct in saying both were bad games... and if I company only makes bad games then doen't it make sense they should go out of buisiness? The slashdot admins seem to confuse "Troll" with "Truth" or at the very least, "Opinion".
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."
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