Hory said:
Morgoth said:
You're all a bunch of butthurt pussies. Blizzard and Valve are awesome, because they're one of the last developers who still make polished PC games. You don't want to spend money on polished PC games? Then what?
The problem is that the more polished a game is, the more likely that it's a simple game. That's why Fallout and Arcanum aren't as polished as Diablo. Troika had to make unpolished games because they made complex games. Long live lack of polish!
Of course, that lack of polish meant that the game that should have catapulted them into mainstream mega-success and funded another 3 games at least (VTM:BL - a game that could have easily appealed to the mainstream), was so buggy that it was unplayable for most people. Not to mention poorly optimised. Machines that could play HL2 no problem couldn't operate once you stepped out of the apartment in VTM:BL. I remember fanmade patches being released to REMOVE the sky, in a vain attempt to make the game run on the recommended specs. And if you had no problems running the game, you would then run into several game-stopping bugs, and a fuckzillion of other bugs, many of which were only fixed by the community.
Most of the poor reviews at that point weren't reviewers being morons - many reviews noted how great Arcanum was, and how much they wanted the game to be great, but that they just couldn't give a positive view to a game that badly broken. And the few idiot reviews that were there could have been alleviated if the developers took the rather simple step (i.e. polish) of explaining to people new to rpgs (or people who couldn't fathom that a FPS was also an RPG - in those days the combination wasn't that common) that yes they can expect guns to be useless until you pump points into it (a line or 2 in the tutorial would have done the job).
Sorry, but you need both. Maybe not Blizz level polish, but frankly that's a rarity. Polish includes things like lore continuity as well, so I certainly wouldn't say there's a clear polish vs quality tradeoff at work. Bethesda manages to screw both up just fine.
Black Isle/Interplay were actually pretty damn polished, professional and had good hype/marketing for much of their existence (prior to their virtual implosion). You can't say that Troika was right to place so little resources into Q+A and polish, given that the result was that their games wouldn't have even been playable if the community hadn't fixed them. If Troika had a semi-decent (i.e. Interplay) level of Q+A, they'd still be making games today. Personally, I would have preferred VTM:BL to have 2 less clans, or even HALF the clans if necessary, if that would have allowed them to adequately bugtest the thing (hey, it might even have meant that the end sequences weren't as rushed and full of mindless combat). Yep, I'd trade 2 clans anyday, if it meant that Troika was still around and on to their 3rd post-VTM:BL rpg.
