It wasn't "ideals and dreams" that got them close to bankruptcy though. Dungeon Siege and South Trash aren't quite targeted at the hardcore RPG audience, are they? and then a cancelled Alienfag game whose alpha footage reminds me a bit too much of the horribly shitty AP combat.
Troika was mismanaged and died for fucking good reasons. Arcanum was a reasonable, while highly flawed, attempt at doing something ambitious, and people would have had a point bringing up Troika in these debates if all their games were like that, but the other two games? ToEE is literally a case of "no one asked for this" (a straight out port of a boring and super old p&p module? oh, great. It might have the best d&d3 engine but an engine doesn't make a game.) and thus no one bought this, while they made the batshit insane decision of picking an unfinished engine for bloodlines and ended up having to release the game before the engine was even truly finished and battle tested by its original developer, Valve. Bloodlines had some ambition in itself but their design decisions really took the cake.
They were a small studio and suddenly decided to work on a fully 3D, voice acted, lip synced game with a ton of unique 3d models while using an untested, unfinished engine. None of these things are what the core audience of Troika was really asking for but it sure did end up ruining them while they were building up their last game, being told to rush the fucker after 3 years of intense development. The wishes of the RPG audience aren't what killed Troika, Troika just did seppuku by themselves.
Remember, they did a full voice acted game with bloodlines just two years after the release of Morrowind, a highly successful game that had almost no VA. They blew their budget on irrelevant crap and paid for it. The idea that Troika died only because it catered to more niche RPG audiences is just one potential part of the story. They were so badly managed that even if they had tried very hard to cater to the largest audience possible they would have still crashed and burned, in my opinion.
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