Why did New World Computing go bankrupt?

[Morkar Left]

MM had always big, pretty worlds with lots of content like dungeons, treasures to find, good loot, puzzles, kind of collectibles, later on a minigame, lots of different enemies and freedom of movement. But it totally lacked in interaction with npcs and therefore anything other than fetch quests as well. It was pretty clear for the player that he is just there to kill and loot everything despite having an overall good world narrative.

That sounds like gaming owes most of the currently popular trends to M&M. I wonder what could happen to the series if it was released today.

Besides open world and maybe minigame I see no similarities. I guess the open world approach in modern games comes from the success of Morrowind/Oblivion on consoles.

 

[laclongquan]

There's the Skywind project which port MW to Skyrim engine. It is going to be pretty awesome~

 

[:Flash:]

I googled for the JVC interview I mentioned and, lo and behold, it was actually a Codex interview:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=8379
Shame on you guys for not remembering it.

Here's another interesting excerpt:

RPG Codex: How would you describe the way 3DO handled your franchises after you sold NWC to them? What do you think was their reasoning behind it, and why did they not listen to you? In hindsight, do you think something could have been done to keep NWC alive or at least preserve the franchises?

JVC: Initially the relationship was great, I was able to spend more time on development and 3DO handled many of the administrative issues that took up a lot of my time. In fact the first couple of years, we did some of our best work with Heroes II and Might and Magic VI.

Later, when 3DO started to have financial difficulties, the relationship became strained and things went downhill from there. I did try at the end to keep NWC alive, we had several offers to buy my division away from 3DO, but The Company did not want to sell off the pieces in the hope to sell the entire entity. Unfortunately that didn’t happen.