Slashdot Mirror
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'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".
--
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.
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'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"
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.
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?
--
make install -not war
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.
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 : )
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
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.
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.
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'?
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.
---
I support spreading santorum
It is a shame that more people don't buy direct from the developer, then there is not a bad publisher in the equation and the developers get more of the $$$ to create even better quality products.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!