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The Troika Games Saga
GameBanshee has an interview up with Leonard Boyarksy, one of the founders of the late Troika games, describing the last days of the much missed RPG developer. From the article: "It became apparent in January when the last of our possible deals that we'd been pursuing fell through. When we started looking six or so months ago, there was a lot of initial interest but our projects could never seem to get past the marketing department."
You can't make Temple of Elemental Evil and then expect people to ever have any contact with you again.
Really. It doesn't matter if you've also done good things. Nobody wants to look at a project and determine, based on past history, that it might be good, but it also might be freaking terrible. In fact, determining that it will almost certainly be entirely mediocre is far more pleasant than that.
...I thought it was the I-miss-torrent dept. That might have explained a bit of it, not to mention the old Half-Late--I mean Life delays. Didn't help their Source-dependent game Vampire...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Too bad, I actually really liked playing VtM Bloodlines - partially for the storyline, but mostly because the ambience of the game reminded me a lot of the SNES Shadowrun game. Call me weird, but it just seemed to have a similar 'feel' to it, what with the various missions, social interaction, computer usage and simple combat. Which makes me want a similar treatment for a Shadowrun-based game really bad.
I can't say I'll miss them. What games did they make? Most of them (and they were very few) were very buggy. It was a shame to see some of that very talented Fallout team releasing buggy games, but I guess if that's all you're capable of, the success of a title like Fallout can blind you into thinking that you're better than you are.
Much missed? By whom exactly?
After such amazing "role-playing" classics like ToEE aka kill all monsters and VTM aka kill all monsters once again?
Arcanum, yes, was pretty good if you got past horrible interface, bugs, plotholes and mediocre 18th century stylization. But all that other stuff was complete hack-n-slash crap.
And if you can't even get your hack-n-slash crap pass the marketing you'd better leave the industry altogether.
Actually TOEE is based on a D&D adventure with the same name.
It was mainly an hack'n'slash adventure through a quite large dungeon, so the videogame reflects this.
Vampire was full of bug, but the story was quite good.
If you don't consider the bugs, Vampire was probably the best RPG of the year.
One of their main programmers was Andrew Meggs - who by the way was most well known for the whole Myth III tragedy - is it any surprise that there was much "buggy crapware"?
And according to a bunch of forum posts, it looks like as was in the case of Myth III - Mr. Meggs will find a way to blame everyone save the people deserving of blame for the quality of the produced work.
This is the second company to fold for him like this. First being the original incantation of Mumbo Jumbo... and now Troika. Perhaps we can get him to go work for EA.
THat's the problem with this f***'ing industry! Marketing types shouldn't be deciding what gets published. Sure I understand the rationale of "If I can't sell it, it's no good", but people in marketing lack imagination. They also lack a sense of risk for fear of losing their jobs. UGH! I hate this.
This is why we need an entirely new game distribution model. This is why things like STEAM, despite its short-comings, NEEDS to work. We need the bean counters and guys who negotiate ad-space out of the equation.