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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.
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 don't think it was the delaying of Vampire, so much as it was the rampant bugs that were still present in the game even after the game had been delayed for so long..
Whether it was Troika's or their publishers (I wanna say Sierra, but I can't remember right now) fault is debatable.. but you simply can't ship a game with that many bugs and expect it to sell well (MMORPGS being the possible exception to this rule).
I'm playing vampire right now and I love it. Yet, to say that it needs only polish is a little too nice.
The fight system is flawed.
This is a gameplay design issue. They didnt choose between fps style fight and rpg style fight, tried to blend the 2 of them and failed. You find yourself, if you go with firearms, with a slow aiming target, when you can finally fire, you do hp damages (!!!) to the guy in front of you (let's say, you just unloaded a shotgun at blank point in his head -> he gets 34 points of damage and immediatly shoots back) meanwhile other guys behind you unload their machineguns in your back with an ease you can't dream of. So it's better to go blades or fight but it is quite dull -> third person view, same moves all the time, only damages vary.
Some quests and dialogues are unfinished, not unpolished, un-FINISHED.
If they had time before the release as being said above, those could have been taken care of. The whole game world seems less and less finished as you go further. Santa monica, the first map is so much above the other ones, chinatown seems like a 8th of it, with empty side quests, empty buildings, empty NPCs. Empty as in meaningless.
The loading time are killers.
As much as it was bearable in Santa Monica, whith all the side quests and action going on, it is unbearable in Chinatown to have those loading times for uninterresting dull building/quests. It may be an issue with the source engine, i don't know.
How much are those issues due to troika or to activision, i dont know, but ultimately, it is activision which payed and released the game, and in my mind it is activision which is responsible for releasing a great yet flawed game.
The worse is that they just have to release a SDK to have all the above fixed. There are a lot of people who loved the game and cried for one, and are ready to develop whats missing for free.
Man, it would be free PR for both the videogame and the RPG.
Release the SDK!!!
please?
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.
Buggy games... like Fallout and Fallout 2?
I just played through Fallout over the past month, and there were quests I'd completed that I didn't get the reward for, there's no interface to arm your NPCs (you have to barter with them, and they won't trade with you unless you give them an even trade) or you can steal from them and plant weapons on them. They have no max weight capacity through barter, but they do through stealing (they have a max item count capacity in both). Several dialog options make no sense where they lead you, it started exiting to the desktop every 5 minutes in the military base for me, and from what I hear, Fallout 2 is worse.
That said, despite the bugs, Fallout was awesome.
There are fan made patches for Fallout 2 that fix allot of the bugs.