Woah

[Mithrandir]

Two big pieces of news in the gaming industry today: MS hires Nironobu Sakaguchi and Troika bites the dust.

Every Xbox owner has to be excited about the hiring of Sakaguchi, and it should be interesting to see how this effects the sales of Xbox 2. It's my understanding that he hasn't has a whole lot to do with the latest FF games, but the old ones are still the best anyways :) It's moves like this that made me say before Xbox was even out that MS would eventually - not with Xbox and probably not with Xbox 2, but eventually - take over the gaming market.

MS just refuses to lose. Purchase Bungie. Check. Purchase Rare. Check. Exclusivity deals with Blizzard and BioWare. Check. Now steal a huge name right out from underneath your biggest competitor. Double check. You have to admire their tenacity, if not all of their methods, I suppose.

Anyone else get the feeling that Sony just feels... complacent?... almost.


As for Troika, this is quite sad news. Arcanum was one of my favorite RPGs ever, horrible balance job notwithstanding. I just loved the setting and the way exploring and just doing whatever you *wanted* was emphasized. Although the character I designed specifically to abuse the diety awards and overpowered abilities was a walking, talking force of destruction. If you knew what you were doing, you could utterly trivialize combat in that game :whistling:

Not that my extra cash would have saved them or anything, but in retrospect I wish I had bought Temple of Elemental Evil and Vampire: Bloodlines just to show my support for what was a good company. Especially because I heard good things about both. Oh well, if it can happen to BIS, it can happen to anyone I suppose.

[pakman]

It is sad the Troika is now pushing up daisies. Bloodlines is a good game, however it was released prematurely and has qutie a few bugs that really need to be fixed. And if you can't find it in stores...there are always other possibilities... :shuriken:

[Armin]

IMO, Troika got 100% what they deserved.

Last 2 products they released were unfinished, bug-ridden travesties at time of release and pretty much approaching fraud level... from below.

One less company around that sells defective merchandise at full price. Now, if only their distributor would follow them to the Abyss asap... :angry:

[Walkiry]

MS just refuses to lose. Purchase Bungie. Check. Purchase Rare. Check. Exclusivity deals with Blizzard and BioWare. Check. Now steal a huge name right out from underneath your biggest competitor. Double check. You have to admire their tenacity, if not all of their methods, I suppose.[right][snapback]68959[/snapback][/right]

In this case, I think their methods are par for the course. The main competitors (now that Sega is out of the picture) are Sony and Nintendo. If MS manages to make a bigger dent I expect them both to turn around and do the exact same kind of thing...

[jahcs]

IMO, Troika got 100% what they deserved.

Last 2 products they released were unfinished, bug-ridden travesties at time of release and pretty much approaching fraud level... from below.

One less company around that sells defective merchandise at full price. Now, if only their distributor would follow them to the Abyss asap...  :angry:
[right][snapback]68989[/snapback][/right]

I'm with you on this one Armin. The trend for PC game companies is to have an open beta, release the game. And patch, patch, patch, and patch again. A patch should be used to fix minor balance issues, small technical problems, and spelling mistakes. They should not be needed for major issues like multiplayer connectivity, major game crashes, broken plot lines, etc. Take a look at Novalogic for the way it should not be done.

[Mithrandir]

IMO, Troika got 100% what they deserved.

Last 2 products they released were unfinished, bug-ridden travesties at time of release and pretty much approaching fraud level... from below.

One less company around that sells defective merchandise at full price. Now, if only their distributor would follow them to the Abyss asap...  :angry:
[right][snapback]68989[/snapback][/right]

I believe that this has more to do with the publisher - constantly pushing for earlier and earlier release dates - than with the actualy game makers. Troika was founded by the creators of Fallout... maybe they just got lucky once and created one of the best games ever, but my gut is more inclined to say that they had some actual real talent and were just destroyed by their publisher.

But, like I said, I only played Arcanum and have never played their two latest games.

[Armin]

I think it's a bit too easy to always put 100% of the blame on the evil publisher and 0% on the poor overworked devs...

I agree, the Fallouts were some of the best games in history, however, for actually running one's own company, there's a bit MORE involved than talent in creating games.

There's also some talent in administration needed, some ability to negotiate and come up with a *reasonable* contract that has a doable project plan, some sensible milestones and al least halfway founded estimates on manpower needed.

No matter how hard a publisher pushes, there's always an agreement reached on what to do until when and in which quality. And if they failed to reach a remotely doable agreement or if they failed live up to the one reached... well they FAILED. And did so twice in row - spectacularly if I may say so.

The new company I work at also does contract manufacturing. Not games, recombinant proteins in GMP quality, but the principles are the same. Make a project plan, define milestones, estimate project costs and needed manpower, and agree on a mutually reasonable contract. Then, once the contracvt is signed, alocate resources, start the work packages and keep an eye on the milestones. If we'd fail to deliver a product in time, or within quality requirements twice in a row we'd be out of business, too. Heck, probably after the first failure :P

[Professor Frink]

I believe that this has more to do with the publisher - constantly pushing for earlier and earlier release dates - than with the actualy game makers. Troika was founded by the creators of Fallout... maybe they just got lucky once and created one of the best games ever, but my gut is more inclined to say that they had some actual real talent and were just destroyed by their publisher.

But, like I said, I only played Arcanum and have never played their two latest games.
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Fallout -- both 1 and 2 -- were beautiful games, and I love them dearly, but they are two of the most bug-ridden travesties of programming ever delivered onto the gaming public (doubly so in their unpatched forms). Game balance was shamelessly left up to the players, you pull up the configuration menu and adjust the little bakelite knob to how hard you want the game to be at that moment. (and how much save-load cheese you let yourself get away with). I don't know who is at fault, but most other Interplay games i've played had a similar theme (the turn-based strategy game MAX was also buggy and poorly balanced, yet great fun, at least until it stopped peacefully coexisting with modern computers).

-- frink