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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.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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!
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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