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."

Comments

Re:Temple of Excremental Evil.

[AnyNoMouse]

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.

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.

This is sad

[apharov]

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.

Re:Bad reviews on Vampire: Bloodlines the cause?

[XorNand]

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.

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.