Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate III by Larian Studios - Early Access announcement on June 13th

Larian: 1996-
Troika: 1998-2005

 

If Troika was so good, how come it's dead?

 

Because Troika was too pure for this world, like a candle in the wind.

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and just as unreliable, too

 

Larian survived because Sven cannot be killed. They made DD which almost killed them, then Beyond Divinity which was horrible, cheap cash-in with poor reception so obviously it saved the company. Then for 4 years they made shitty educational games to stay afloat to release Dvinity 2. Divinity 2 had mild reviews which didn't stop Larian from making an expansion pack for it and re-releasing it a couple more times for good measure.
Troika on the other hand released 3 games, all using different engines, rulesets and genres. No expansion packs, no follow-up sequels, no nothing. I don't know if it was publisher's interference that didn't let them do that but perhaps if they made 2 expansion packs for Arcanum and Arcanum II in the same engine a year or two later they would survive a bit longer.

 

One interesting tidbit is how the divinity original sin 2 steam page has Larian as the creator of baldur's gate 3, even though it's not released. Prestige.

 

Troika was too passionate and pure for a world filled with larians and Bethesdas. We didn't deserve them and they provided for us anyways. We should be grateful that we got anything at all.

Shameless cunts.

 

where did all the discussion about mana and non-mana systems even come from? Gone back almost 10 pages and can't find it.

 

I think it sprung from discussion about cooldowns being illogical.

 

Are you blind? He IS the thread.

 

I disagree here. Even if Turn Based mod worked very well in P:KM (which it did because the source rules were TB), I argue using it actively made the game worse by the simple fact that the AI wasn't ready to handle such a thing. Everyone who uses the mod has claimed that it made combat easier, and that is the main reason why, killing the challenge of the fight. Furthermore, because of the differences between RtWP and TB (almost totally free movement, being able to "kite" even if a bit to avoid being flat footed first round and the like) one of the modes is always going to suffer mechanically. So both Arcanum and PoE 2 had issues if playing one mode or the other, with Arcanum being able to rapid fire certain spells and PoE 2 making martial worse in TB. Introducing both is wasting resources, and I actually think that P:WoR should just stick to RTwP as they already have a good and functioning system. If anything, I fear that TB would be little more than "copy-pasting" the original mod because of the high amount of content they want to add.

 

As I understand it that's basically what they're doing, a more polished/integrated version of the mod. Why would that be a bad thing?
Their focus is still primarily on RTWP but they are also focusing on improving the AI.

Maybe it is just because I haven't played low-level Kingmaker for a while but the enemies in the WotR alpha seem smarter than KM.

 

Yes... mediocre shit sells, because the world is made up of mongoloids and hoople-heads that dont understand art.

PS: Bethesda 1986-

 

As I say, is because in those three games, P:KM, Arcanum and PoE 2 one mode had to suffer for different reasons, and in Pathfinder case it was because the AI just couldn't adjust to TB and use it to its advantage, just like with the Closer to Tabletop mod they were unable to flank your characters. So, if they want to make it work, they must design two set of AI, one which work in RtWP and another in TB. Owlcat is a relatively small company as far as I'm aware, and is clear they had a limited amount of resources which brought some issues for the first game (reused empty areas for example). They are already promising quite a lot of impressive things with the second game (HoMM combat, different storylines routes) which I'll say even big companies would struggle to do right. Considering all of this, I see two likely scenarios:

• They actually left the AI just like it was, but have more intelligent encounter design that mask this. It will work like a charm in RtWP and will be fun, but TB will be mediocre and the AI won't keep up, ruining otherwise great fights.
• Despite better AI, the enemy still cannot keep up in TB because it was designed in RtWP first and TB makes it easy to exploit.

And a less likely scenario:

• The AI will be just better in TB, because they focused on that too much (not gonna happen though)

Now, if Owlcat manages, not only to keep all the content they want, make it good, and then add a AI that functions both roughly equally in TB and RtWP, I would have to take off my hat, because that would be really impressive.

 

A lot of alphas are saying that the AI is much better on the second game.

But you guys are right. Is better for a game to focus on RtWP or TB.

Larian could include a option to skip animations and put enemies in concurrent turns. Since there is a team initiative, it will work better than ToEE.

 

Speaking of team initiative, can we tell Larian not to hardcore the turn order this time around so we can mod in proper initiative?

 

Troika went under because they didn't master the art of slamdunk. You should never make 1 game in one engine. Unless you are Richard Gariott or something.
There is one rule to survival in the harsh cRPG environment: once you make a game that someone sorta likes, milk it dry.
Goldbox: 14 different games if I counted correctly
Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne: the game itself had 2 re-releases and the combat system along with demon models were used in: Digital Devil Saga, Digital Devil Saga 2, Persona 3 (re-released twice), Persona 4 (re-released once)
Infinity Engine: Baldur's Gate, Tales from the Sword Coast expansion, Baldur's Gate 2, Throne of Bhaal expansion, Icewind Dale, Trial of the Luremaster expansion, Icewind Datel 2, Planescape Torment.
That's how you do it. Someone like Arcanum so I don't understand why there was no straight-sequel like a year later. I don't know if it was Troika's fault or just Sierra being stupid but someone didn't think things through.

I hope both Larian and Owlcat will milk their engines for at least 2 more games.

 

There's nothing to milk from Unity. Larian's engine is pretty good and they've been tweaking it for a while now, so I don't see them abandoning it.

 

I mean the entire game-system as a whole. Owlcat can probably adapt 2 more Adventure Paths and then make a Starfinder game.

 

Yeah, sure. But Pathfinder doesn't have *actually* good adventure paths afaik. Maybe they could try writing one of their own. One set in Geb maybe.

 

If Larian managed to stay afloat longer than Troika, this just means that Sven is more competent at running the company than Tim and Tim always admitted that he is not good at it and prefers to make games. This doesn't mean that games made by Larian are superior to the games Troika made. They were very different and aimed at different audiences.

 

Sure, hell if WoTR is successful they could make their own D20 ripoff and bypass Paizio completely. I'm still angry for them for being against romancable halfling girls.

 

Paizo's entire business was built around the popularity of their adventure paths. There's a lot of fans out there who really like the adventures.

 

Source engine killed troika

 

RT(WP) and phase-based can be done together essentially for free with certain implementations of phase-based, other than making RTWP the twitchy EZ mode.

RTWP + TB is essentially trying to make two games at once, albeit sharing assets and content.

You haven't mentioned NetImmerse/Gamebryo/Creation Engine.

And say what you want about Bethesda but at least the have been systematically innovating for most of their history (true that these days Bethesda is not exactly the same Bethesda) and even now they are still capable of learning and some clever tricks (the ways they managed content creation for locations in Skyrim and Morrowind is a good example of intelligently solving problems in game design).

In the end I don't know of a single competent cRPG company in existence:

• Bethesda does one step forward, three steps back and stumble over the railing followed by wilhelm scream routine most of the time. At best they blunder their way towards something cool while trampling good stuff as collateral damage, at worst it's just collateral damage.
  
• Larian regularly has clever ideas and good overall concepts marred a bit by pulling their punches and much more their adherence to mindobgglingly moronic game design concepts - stat inflation!, item fever!, item treadmill!, epic items in every crate (maybe)!
  
  And no, not their writing, shut the fuck up about the writing and humour already, you senile fucks, DOS1 was their only game that was cringe inducing in that regard and where their humour went mostly shitty, it worked perfectly fine in games before and DOS2 after is by far their most serious game to date, and no mater what your faulty memory tells you, only one of the IE games was Planescape: Torment and its writing, while by videogame standards still isn't as impressive as it seemed to your easily impressed teen ass.
• Interplay/BI/Troika/Obsidian can't hold their shit together in regards to business and commited their fair share of massive fuckups over time.
• Owlcat - I admit to not having played PF:K (I might or not play the next game) but it looks like they were trying really hard to suck BG fans' discks in hope of being paid (so at least they have some business sense) and judging from threads they don't exactly seem to grasp the difference between having and not having a DM and its impact on gameplay and game design, so I'm not exactly holding my breath once the trickle of BG landwhale cum dries out. Let's hope I'm completely and utterly wrong.
  
• And BW was never good to begin with even when they weren't shambling corpse of its former self reanimated by foul EAmancers. They just managed to release Oblivion of their times as a fluke and general public was already tasteless enough to swallow it.

 

Das right boy, Baldur's Gate is Larian's now and you can't do anything about it. Keep on crying here with the rest of the RTWP, Larian hating neckbeards that's all you can do.