HAHAHA! Take -that- Ion Storm!

[plin]

If you came to RPGCodex expecting anything more that's your problem.

well, if he says fuck off to me, I should be able to at least call him an idiot and childish.

 

[undead dolphin hacker]

Grow up.

Yeah, not liking some piece of shit means I need to grow up.

No, you need to grow up if you think it's cool that a bunch of very talented people lost their jobs.

Learn to read while you're at it.

 

[StraitLacedDeviant]

the righteous indignations focused from the masses on this board is as always pointed towards the faceless forms of overlord developers that fuck themselves over while searching for the big bucks. I may not be a veteran here, or have a post count to compare to a lot but I still have the basic abilities of reasoning to form a coherent argument, even through the thick haze of a heavy nights drinking. What the fuck is your point of contention.

There seems to be a couple of people who enjoy coming to this board to argue with the enlightened few that simply come to post their opinions. If you don't like the trend then fuck off. Nothing I have seen here posted from any of the consenting masses has been anything other than educated rage at the way the beloved genre is being treated.

What reward do the volourn/plin clones get from backing the facesless fuckwits in these companies.. Their flaws are obvious, their mistakes blatent, they have no excuses the lessons to be learnt can be read on the still faces of all the other companies that have fallen while trying to deal from a point of utter refined ignorance.

 

[StraitLacedDeviant]

Grow up.

Yeah, not liking some piece of shit means I need to grow up.

No, you need to grow up if you think it's cool that a bunch of very talented people lost their jobs.

Learn to read while you're at it.

Fuck them, their jobs a nd their little dog too. What is your point exactly, i am a fully qualified adult and I take great pleasure from the suffering of others. I think you will find that growing up has nothing to do with ones own compassion, if anything its quite the oppostite. It is your own naive nature that compels you to feel sorry for theses people that will be back on somebodies payroll earning more money than you can count in no time flat.

 

[Dhruin]

Nice attempt to throw a bunch of big words in to increase the legitimacy of your post but it ended up a nonsensical mess.

What's the point of a forum if people don't post differing opinions to discuss?

 

[Vault Dweller]

In whose pocket Ion Storm, Spector, and tbe Deus Ex license are isn't really an issue here. My point was that such things as dual development or porting had been surely agreed upon before this particular development started. I also highly doubt that Spector was a pawn who was forced to do Eidos bididng

For once, don't argue - it's pointless.

Why pointless? Because you said so? Resistance is futile. All my base are belong to you now? Anyway...

You would be wrong in disputing this, because history has proven itself time and time again that developers are often coerced into this sort of shit.

Yes, in some 3d world totalitarian regimes.

I'm sure you'll remember Tim Cain and gang (including Steve Moret) saying relatively good things about their relationship with Atari, but I'm sure most of us know, that despite their saying otherwise, the relationship is far from good.

Poor example. What exactly do we blame Atari for in that case? Pushing ToEE out before it was ready? Check. Releasing buggier version? Check. Poor after-release support? Check. Failing to realize that the word count limits the game's potential unlike LA who after seeing KOTOR's first draft removed the word count? Check. The rest was Troika's choice. Troika agreed to make a game out of a module. Troika decided to make Hommlet's quests the most boring fedex stuff ever. Well, Troika's decided to do anything else that made or broke the game. I personally like it a lot, it has absolutely fantastic TB combat, and the most gorgeous models evar, and that's about it.

So, moving back to Eidos vs Spector, while we can and should blame evil publishers for every candy stolen from a baby, developers do have a say and a choice. So, whether people like DE2 and Thief3 or not, Spector is responsible for these games.

Lack of communication from the publishers and last-minute bullshit like the removal of children and the switch from 3.0 to 3.5 without due notice are just some of the few issues with Atari and Troika. It's not as if Troika could back out of the deal at that point.

OMG! The children. Why won't they think of the children? Come on, Rex, be serious. As for the deal, any contracts that I've seen, and I've seen a plenty, usually specify a lot of things including everything each party can do. So, if Atai had legal rights to do all those terrible things you describe, then Troika should have been prepared (and I'm not saying they were or weren't, just making a statement). Simple as that.

The same with Spector - I don't think he would have been able to back out of DXIW when Eidos decided to take the console port route with it.

Like I said, I doubt it. I'm sure that minor things like platform were discussed first, and then Spector had a clear choice: to accept it or not. He could have said Fuck Off and tried to make a new game, after all Deus Ex was an original game that wasn't based on any license. He didn't. He choose to accept and that made him responsible for that crap of a game.

Take note that Warren Spector, as important and as respected a developer as he is, just didn't have the opportunity as Blizzard's former chiefs and especially Bill Roper - who had the clout, the investors and the manpower to back him up in his departion from Blizzard when the higher ups decided to take over the reins and shut him out of providing development input.

What I respect Bill for is that he had guts to quit instead of eating shit and going with a flow. Spector isn't some nobody, btw.

Would you quit your job just because it displeased you? Perhaps, but you'd probably give it a little time before you did, to see if conditions changed.

I did. Twice. I was making 6 figures and had a lot of people reporting to me at my last job. I had a lot to lose, yet losing was a better choice then ... what was expected of me. As for conditions, they don't come out of nowhere and they don't depart suddenly, so it's usually a matter of accepting them or not.

Ah, well... it looks like conditions have changed for Ion Storm, and not for the better.

Indeed they have. Did you expect any different?

 

[Grefter]

So, moving back to Eidos vs Spector, while we can and should blame evil publishers for every candy stolen from a baby, developers do have a say and a choice. So, whether people like DE2 and Thief3 or not, Spector is responsible for these games.

Spector wouldn't have had a say just so he could avoid the tyrrany of choice

Edit - Did a great job at removing all my own text there.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Yeah, that tyranny of choices bit was priceless, although I'm sure that Eidos forced him to say that

 

[Volourn]

Plin: You can say what you want. It's another beautiful thing about this board.

StraitLaced: What ya babblinga bout? I ahven't even talked about the silly Ion Storm company. They mean nothing to me. I'm only in this retarded threa dbecause some blowjob deigned to foul the thread with my name. I'm like the Candyman except you only need to type my name once to get my to cum.


So stop bellyaching, hold your ehad high, put on your reading glasses, and don't lose your smile as you pee your pants while hiding from the the lover in the cell next to you as you duck into cover from his bed buddies.

Enjoy. :twisted:

 

[Vault Dweller]

Here are a few quotes for your amusement

Meanwhile, the "tyranny of choice," as he (Spector) puts it, can threaten to make the player freeze up because they're simply given too many options for things to do and places to go. The player doesn't know the particular rules are of the game--what he or she can get away with, what the long-term repercussions are of "bad" behavior, and the rewards of "good" behavior.

Priceless.

When we were making Ultima 6, or Ultima Underworld, or Ultima 7, or System Shock, or any of those games, we all sat around and said, "It would be so cool to do a console game. Oh wait. There's no way a Genesis is going to run a game like this." And this is what we want to do. We burn to make this kind of game. We have to do this. It's not something we sort of wanted to do. The only possibility was the PC. And now, even with the PlayStation 2, but especially with the Xbox -- and oh my god PS3 and Xbox 2…go, go, go! -- once we get there…

Yep, here is a PC game champion who always dreamed of making console games. It looks like many of the legends of the old days got that job by accident. Ol' Bradley said recently that he wanted to make Wiz real time but didn't have the technology back then. Go figure.

Reaction to the Deus Ex: Invisible War demo was mixed, many making negative comments - did that surprise you, or were you prepared for those reactions?

Spector: I wouldn't say it surprised us but... Here's the thing. Deus Ex is not a game you can just pick up and play - I mean, I'm sorry. I do things, I tell Eidos all the time - I'm ready to make decisions and do things that are going to cost us sales; because there's a greater good, you know [chuckles]. And so you're going to have to invest your own time, as a player, to learn the ins and outs of the game. And if you give us time, I think we'll just absolutely win you over.

So, what do you know? These were his decisions after all.

We figured we'd save everybody the trouble of figuring out which skills were useful and which were wastes of time by just cutting the useless ones. Believe me, we started out with a larger list of skills (and nano-augmentations and weapons and objects) and, as the missions came on line, went after those lists with a machete. If designers weren't actively constructing situations that took advantage of a particular skill (or augmentation or object) it got cut.

Alternative, you could have suggested designers to use these skills, but hey...

I call it a roleplaying game because I subscribe to the belief that an RPG is a game in which players PLAY A ROLE (novel concept, eh?) and make character development choices that insure they end up with unique alter egos... In computer gaming, we have other simulation and character differentiation tools available to us. We can let you interact directly with people, objects and geometry in a simulated environment. We don't have to roll dice.

OMG! Teh roel-plaing!

God, I will never dumb down a game, I will use the word "never." No, I mean, the word we use around here, and I hope no one in our audience hears this in a bad way -- accessibility is the word here, and a lot of people hear "accessibility" and get scared. "Ooh, they're simplifying. Ooh, they're dumbing down." No. What we want is, as many people as humanly possible to experience the kind of gameplay we provide....
We want a lot of people playing these games, and the reality is -- let me give you a classic example -- the reality is that a lot of the games that hardcore gamers love, that I love, that we love, that I worked on, were inaccessible to normal human beings, unnecessarily

It's the conspiracy! Some bastards were making complicated games on purpose! On purpose!!! Some poor fuck tried to play buy couldn't even use the mouse. I'm sure that mouse was made so difficult to master on purpose to keep the stupid people out of the loop. Thank God, that there is Warren Spector, the champion of morons who'd bring the light of computer gaming to the dumbest fucks ever without any discrimination.

http://www.rpgcodex.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=3931
http://pc.ign.com/articles/437/437677p1.html?fromint=1
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/r/ ... ry.php(que)id=101101
http://pc.ign.com/articles/071/071578p1.html
http://archive.gamespy.com/interviews/f ... dex4.shtml

 

[undead dolphin hacker]

Grow up.

Yeah, not liking some piece of shit means I need to grow up.

No, you need to grow up if you think it's cool that a bunch of very talented people lost their jobs.

Learn to read while you're at it.

Fuck them, their jobs a nd their little dog too. What is your point exactly, i am a fully qualified adult and I take great pleasure from the suffering of others. I think you will find that growing up has nothing to do with ones own compassion, if anything its quite the oppostite. It is your own naive nature that compels you to feel sorry for theses people that will be back on somebodies payroll earning more money than you can count in no time flat.

1.) I feel sorry for these people insofar as they just got fucked over by the next Interplay, aka, Eidos Interactive. Sounds like Black Isle all over again.

2.) You shouldn't hate the developers at Ion Storm. Most of those who were laid off just were doing their jobs as they were told--if you read the articles, you'd see most of the managerial staff stayed. Thus, the fuckwads responsible for Deus Ex 2: Invisible Gameplay are still right in charge.

3.) Listen up, lardass. You're not qualified to judge shit when it comes to whether a guy keeps his job or not. YOU ARE A POWERLESS CONSUMER. Go ahead and bitch at the world like LlamaFuck or whatnot from behind your greasy keyboard in your parents' basement--nothing is fucking going to change. If there's one thing that pisses me off, it's idiots that try to gloat about something THEY HAD NO HAND IN.

I swear to god, did the forums here suddenly become magnetic to fuckwits?

 

[Dhruin]

This is all well and good but it's primarily Randy Smith's Thief3 team that got shafted, not Warren Spector's DX:IW people who have moved on to an action game. The lesson? Make a decent game and get canned. Make a dumbed-down sequel and get another gig.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Nice attempt to throw a bunch of big words in to increase the legitimacy of your post but it ended up a nonsensical mess.

What's the point of a forum if people don't post differing opinions to discuss?

Hear! Hear!

Frankly, I'd be quite sick of this place (or any place) if there weren't any Volourns, DemonKings or Plins around to offer differing opinions to the norm (e.g. Bioware sucks and have never, and can never produce a good game, ever!). It'd become the senseless masturbatory fest that is the NWN forums where those there harp on about how cool NWN was. Now, it's one thing to think that NWN is cool, and anyone has that right, but a forum full of people who repeat the exact same thing isn't exactly worth visiting.

Just the same, it would suck if each and every one of us here was rejoicing over the fact that some 30 or so talented people lost their jobs because they didn't fit into the plans of some high ups at Eidos who've been making bad decisions since day one (running Tomb Raider into the ground, investing 30 million in Daikatana and then cancelling projects like Revenant mid-development).

If any of you think it's 'cool' or 'funny' that these 30 or so people lost their jobs, grow the fuck up. I know you might have some grudge against them for DXIW but you're all forgetting what a good game Thief 3 turned out to be (If you've played it, you'd agree) and how they worked their asses off on it only to get fired. You'd also be hard pressed to recall how good Deus Ex was when it was released - I'm sure there are some of you who enjoyed it.

You all have to realize that the only thing this means for the PC game industry is that the publishers like Eidos are beginning to get the idea that the reason DXIW didn't sell wasn't because of the multi-port and how much they had to rush to release it (most development was, at the end, focused on releasing the console version, and the PC version was subsequently rushed because Eidos wouldn't give them more time to fix it, especially in the aspects of the poor inventory, slow loading times and performance.). Instead, Eidos probably thinks that the reason DXIW didn't sell so well was because the game was simply still 'too intelligent' for the console crowd. It should occur to you that Eidos, Interplay and Atari are pretty much alike in their stupid, stupid ways.

I'm willing to bet that Herve Caen thinks the reason that Fallout: Tactics didn't sell well wasn't because it was a hackneyed rushjob with very little in terms of actual tactics, but rather because it was simply 'too intelligent' for the average gamer to grasp. So dumbing down ensued, and FOBOS was the result. I'm guessing that Eidos (still holding onto the Deus Ex and Thief IPs) will release console-only versions of the game in the future as complete Halo clones, with none of the originality or the AI offered in the original Halo.

 

[Rosh]

*sigh*

While I will say that I didn't find Deus Ex to be that thrilling, it was their own IP to do with as they please except if they really fucked the game up. I haven't played the sequel, haven't even followed it, since I found the first to be a bit dreary.

Thief was a previous IP that someone else worked on, however, as I have not played nor researched the third one yet I cannot make an educated opinion of this matter. From what I have heard, it is a bit different, but along the same lines. I will have to wait until I get the game until I make a concrete opinion, however. It is something that is a little too disputed to believe any impressions of others at this point.

Chuck's team (those in the decision and design position) would be more deserving to be laughed at if they were fired. If the Thief 3 team did the same, then they got just desserts. If not, then EIDOS' execs are being stupid cunts as usual.

However, I didn't like Spector's reasonings, as it went against everything the apparent real developers at Origin stood by. It seems to be the company line, but I don't imagine someone toting the company line willingly to interviews like that if they didn't believe it to some level themselves.

 

[Sol Invictus]

DXIW aside, Thief 3 has turned out to be a pretty good game and even the hardcore fans on the Looking Glass forums consider it to be a true sequel, so I don't think any of them deserved to get the boot. If anything, Eidos is fucking up bigtime.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

It's the Thief curse.

 

[HanoverF]

They couldn't figure out how to make rope arrows work, even though they worked great in the last Thief, how talented can they be?

 

[Constipated Craprunner]

They couldn't figure out how to make rope arrows work, even though they worked great in the last Thief, how talented can they be?

I found this a little weird at first, but I got over it. They liscenesed the Unreal Engine, they did'nt start from scratch, thus it's entirely possible that the Unreal engine is totally incapable of ropes.

And I would'nt even call that the biggest flaw in the game, that, IMHO, goes to replacing a sword with a dagger, as the swordplay was one of the funner things in Thief 1&2 (though alot of people did'nt like it).

Overall, I'd call it better then Deus Ex, but then again I'm a bitch for the Thief series.

 

[Country_Gravy]

I swear to god, did the forums here suddenly become magnetic to fuckwits?

Hey, is this the fuckwit convention?

I like that there are differing opinions on these boards. It's what makes these boards so fun. I love it when people take it so personally.

I think it sucks that these people lost their jobs. How many of them were the decision makers on the games? A lot of them probably aren't even the ones at fault for many of these games shortcomings. I don't know too much about the situation, and I haven't played these games, just some of the demos. It seems that people here aren't really rejoicing that these people lost their jobs, just that it appears that Eidos is headed the way of Interplay if they don't watch their ass. Therefore if you don't like Eidos, this could be good news.

I forgot my point, or I never had one. Anyway, I am going back to work.

 

[Rosh]

DXIW aside, Thief 3 has turned out to be a pretty good game and even the hardcore fans on the Looking Glass forums consider it to be a true sequel, so I don't think any of them deserved to get the boot. If anything, Eidos is fucking up bigtime.

It wouldn't have been the first time. Their first big mistake was in giving Romero a shitload of money versus LGS. LGS was the last developer I had considered to be worth following with that was under the EIDOS title at that time (Ion Storm took their place, but at a lower rung for awhile). Wisdom would have been pushing Romero down a flight of stairs and ask LGS and Spector to work together. That would have made quite a damn fine dev house, especially if Warren got ahold of licenses to continue his old work, Ultima Underworld. Oh, wait...EA already fucked that up. Damn, a lot of suicidal moves in the game industry, where has the wisdom gone? It's been replaced by unabashed greed. At least there might have been a decent System Shock 3.

 

[StraitLacedDeviant]

I don't even remember posting that last one, but I still hate you guys so it doesn't matter.