Company News Is Troika Dead?

[Fez]

4) the rest of the staff are afraid of Rex,

What a crock of shit. You are just making yourself look stupid.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Troika does compromise. As Volourn said, it was the reason why Arcanum had both TB and RT combat. It's probably also the reason why Bloodlines tries hard to cater to the action crowd with in-your-face real time first person/3rd person action with a gratituous amount of violence. Like it's role-playing counterpart, it too was pulled off rather poorly.

 

[Briosafreak]

Are you saying that Troika doesn't make games for money?

Wow wow wow there. Gloating at the demise of Troika, saying that they are "pwned" and that it`s for the best is a bit ridiculous, when they always treated the Codex in a fair way, listened to the criticisms and the positive remarks with respect, was silly in my opinion, but ok, as i said the news were always opinitive and controversy was welcomed, even if hitting someone that doesn´t deserve it when they are at a crisis was low.

Giving ranks to those that used the same weapons you used at the newsbit was partial, childish and egotistic, but you`re the admin, there`s nothing we can do about it.

But saying Troika is only in this for the money is taking things too far. Not even Bioware does things "only for the money", or they wouldn`t be trying to develop new IPs to explore, so saying that of Troika is beyond an inocent mishap, but outright manipulation of history to serve your twisted views . You`re not talking to a few kids that only know what they read in the hip forums, you`re talking to people that know Troika from the start, talked to the trio that found it several times and followed the way they always tried to do their thing, and remained in the hardcore RPG business with choices that were scorned by the mainstream. So do get up from that high horse and stop this crap now.

You already hurt them and made them sad, you don`t need to go into the realm of complete falsehoods and complete manipulation anymore.

 

[asa]

4) the rest of the staff are afraid of Rex,

What a crock of shit. You are just making yourself look stupid.

if it's not true then why do they let him run wild like a petulant child -- as far as I can tell he really has only two friends on here, an anti-semetic norwegian cowboy and overly verbose Volourn (hint: nobody has time to read your littanies).

 

[asa]

LOLZ. Ti4600?! OMGZ so powerful -- if you hurry you can buy one for $12 on Ebay:

http://search.ebay.com/geforce-ti4200_W ... 1QQxpufuZx

BTW, the TI4600 is a DX8 card, not DX9 *sigh*

Recap:

1) Troika does not suck as Rex suggests,

2) Rex's friend is stupid for believing his Geforce 4MX will play DX9 games,

3) Rex abuses his admin power on RPG Codex,

4) the rest of the staff are afraid of Rex,

5) In a few months Rex will be having conversations with himself on Codex as everyone else will have left.

You have four posts. Bow to the almighty newbie.

1) Newbies create statements of fact! This will not be questioned.

2) Get the details right: It's a Geforce 4 Ti4200. It also plays Half Life 2, which is backwards compatible with both DX8 and DX7.

Here's a detailed article on Shader fallbacks:
http://www.valve-erc.com/srcsdk/Materia ... backs.html

Some related threads:
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/38292/
http://www.halflifesource.com/forums/sh ... nextnewest

You are an ignoramus for thinking otherwise. If you only did a little research you would know that the game runs on the Geforce 4 Ti4xxx series. I said nothing of MX, which also contrary to your opinion, will also run Half Life 2, albeit poorly. Half Life 2's source engine has DX7, DX8 and DX9 paths.

3) Says the ignorant newbie, who's only experience with the Codex is a single thread. If this were anywhere else, this thread would have already been locked and the participants expelled permanently from the website.

4) As if.

5) If you can't handle the opinions at the Codex, you can always leave.

 

[Sol Invictus]

LOLZ. Ti4600?! OMGZ so powerful -- if you hurry you can buy one for $12 on Ebay:

http://search.ebay.com/geforce-ti4200_W ... 1QQxpufuZx

BTW, the TI4600 is a DX8 card, not DX9 *sigh*

You're stupid though. Ti4200-4600 can play Half Life 2, because as I said, HL2 has DX7 and DX8 paths. You're too stupid to realize that. I also said that Ti4200 was a DX8 card. Are you sure you aren't retarded?

Here's some more links to show how stupid you are.

Half Life 2 DirectX Comparison: http://gear.ign.com/articles/567/567437p1.html
3D Performance with High End Cards : http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/hal ... rformance/

#
DirectX 8 path

Among the cards included in the DirectX 8 path are GeForce4 Titanium series (including GeForce4 Go), GeForce FX 5200/5600/5700, and GeForce FX Go 5600/5700 series.

# On some cards with poor fillrate, bumpmaps may be turned off in some scenes that use a lot of bumpmaps. At the moment, this is true for the GeForce4 Ti 4200 but we've worked with Nvidia to come up with a solution to reactivate bumpmaps on the 4200.
# Water by default is refractive but does not have local specular.
# Water has a hard edge when it meets the shore, volumetric fog is used for this. Its per vertex screen space effects are better than DirectX 7, but still simple.
# Shadows are render-to-texture but are not supersampled to make them
look softer.

 

[Volourn]

"overly verbose Volourn"

HAHAHA!!

You are a moron.

1. Since when did I become Exitium's 'friend'? Obviously, you should rea dmore since Exitium and I don't always see eye to eye to put it mildy, dumbass.

2. Overly verbose? Hialrity continues! I've been called spammer, one word wonde,r but verbose? R00fles!

HINT: You are retarded, and you obviously out of your elague and don't know what youa re talking about.

Let's see 3 bullshits you've posted.

A. People are afraid of Rex.

B. Rex and I are 'friends'. P.S. I have no friends on the 'net.

C. I'm verbose.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Volourn, when people disagree with your opinions they will call you things that make no sense. Verbose, for instance, is a term based used for people like Ave, and not for you, due to the obscene length of his posts. Of course, none of them will call him on that, because they're just as shameless as he is when it comes to fanboyism.

Most of your posts are too short, by the looks of it. Calling you verbose is the epitome of calling Saddam Hussein a humanitarian.

 

[Fez]

4) the rest of the staff are afraid of Rex,

What a crock of shit. You are just making yourself look stupid.

if it's not true then why do they let him run wild like a petulant child -- as far as I can tell he really has only two friends on here, an anti-semetic norwegian cowboy and overly verbose Volourn (hint: nobody has time to read your littanies).

Ok, have a think here about what you are saying; you claim that the staff - Saint and all - are in such fear of someone on an internet forum and newsite that they let him do what he wants? You really are stupid. What is Exitium going to do to enforce his "reign of terror"? Send out goatse PMs? Threaten people (on the intarweb, oh my!) This is the internet. Welcome, please leave your stupidity at the door.

 

[Ekodas]

It wasn't THAT long ago.

From a game industry perspective, it was AGES ago. I keep on talking about the XBox, not because i'm rambling or anything, but for a good reason.

PC games can be successful. To say they cna't is silly.

I said PC-Only games.
And I said RPGs.

Punisher, or tomb Raider 7 or whatever can be successfull PC games.

HL2 is also a very successfull game. But, again, it's the sequel of a huge sucess. That *kinda* help.

Except HL2 and WoW this year, I know very few PC-games that made decent sells (the average breaking point is around 300-400K copies I believe).

NWN sold over a million copies, had 2 exapnsions,a nd is still selling at a failry good clip consideirng it is a 2 + year old game. You obviously don't know what youa re talking about.

What saved NWN was Bio's BG and BGII. Hell, I bought NWN because I enjoyed BG and BGII. A lot of people who enjoyed the first BG (and obviously there was a lot of people who did) bought NWN for the same reason. And there's was this whole online-thing also.

No. That's not pragmatic. It's what BIo wants to do. BIO has been planning JE for YEARS. It being on x-box has nothing to do with pragamaticism. Afterall, if it was, it be on the PS2 where it would sell a lot more copies.

No, that's where you fail to understand my point about the X-Box. When Bio's crew says that they're making their games on XBox because it's the only console that can handle their game, they're not saying that for PR purpose only.

You may not be aware of this, but the X-Box can do a lot of things that a PS2 can't. In 1999, you could hardly imagine how a console could handle a game like BG. Now an X-Box can handle a game like KOTOR.

Moreover it is very attrative for a PC dev to switch to the X-Box or to do cross-platform games. The X-Box was designed to make the PC-dev's life easier.

A PC dev won't start to code for a PS2 for a simple reason : a lot a technical constraint + a complexity that goes beyond what you can imagine (except if you're a software engineer). It can take 2 or 3 years to eventually become familiar with the PS2 hardware and code some decent stuff.

On the other hand, from a PC dev standpoint, coding for a X-Box is not that hard. There are some differences, tech constraints also, but the hardware is definitively more dev friendly.

So that IS pragmatism.

There are some stuff that a PC can do, and a XBox can't. But, compared to a PS2, an XBox can do a lot of things. Coding both for PC and XBox means that you'll have to cut the PC-specific content (things an X Box could not handle from a technicall standpoint) ; but on the other hand there are close to 20 millions X Boxs.

Put in balance the content-cut vs the boost in sales. That's pragmatism.

Now if you think about developing games like KOTOR for PS2, we're not talking about content cut, but rather a chainsaw massacre. That's why Bio won't even consider developing for PS2 ; they're willing to make some small compromise (as a PC gamer i regret that) but not big ones.

Why would *anyone* make games for x-box if selling lots of copies were there goal when PS2 is more liekly to have you sell more copies? R00fles!

See above.

Um. Theya re. Once it's a business; it's about money.

Running in circle here. If you don't want to understand that making games is also an art and goes beyond a simple work for some dev teams, that the' business' part of video game is just that : part of the game, and not the whole game, you'll keep on saying business=game=money .Talked like a real game publisher.

Using your own logic I could say : novels...hmm, novels, it's a business. You know, selling books and stuff. So it's about money. So Faulkner was actually a business man. Or John Irving.

Things are a little bit more complex than that.

This is no different nowadays. RPGs are what they've always been - a part of the market.

There is a difference. The game industry evolve fast, very fast. The X-Box was a first, powerfull blow to the PC market. Wether you want to admit it or not, it changed also the position of PC RPGs in the market.

And it will probably get only worse with the next gen consoles (X Box 2 and stuff...). PC-only's market will only grow thinner, and PC-only RPG market's share will also keep on shrinking.

No, if they fail; it's because they failed to deliver what we gamers as a whole wnated the way we wanted it. It's that simple. If their games weren't buggy, if their games had a decent story, if their games didn't didn't short circuit near the end; maybe more peopelw ould have bought it.

I think that Troika's game got pretty much strong and decent stories. And I don't think their games shot circuit near the end (expect Bloodlines, right after the cab driver sequence). But that's beside the point : that's just our opinion.

You have a point about bugs though : their game could be less buggy.

And, oh btw, they *did* compromise. Don't fool yourself.

I said 'Little compromise' I didn't say no compromise!

 

[asa]

B. Rex and I are 'friends'. P.S. I have no friends on the 'net.

C. I'm verbose.

I think we've made a breakthrough here! You have no friends because of all the nonsense that comes out of your mouth.

 

[Fez]

Asa, by some miracle you also seem to have manage to miss the million and one times Ex has been insulted here. He's like an executive stress toy for the forum, when things are heating, Ex gets a beating.

Though at least he has done some work for the Codex, you just appear out of nowhere and act like a cock-jockey to everyone.

 

[taks]

There's some truth in that statement of course, but you have to understand that some companies out there are not doing games for money only. Specially in the game industry, you'll find out that a lot of independent studios are powered by a passion for games. People in these small companies don't pull 80+ hrs per week to make some fat bucks.
Imho, Troika is one among the few companies driven mostly by passion. Or they would have dropped RPGs 4-5 years ago to makes some XBox titles (action/adventure games).

while i agree that the people that do things requiring dedication usually have passion, but it's still about the bucks. general game designers don't make a lot of money nor do they have much control over the games they get to design. start your own company and you get that control (kinda) and end up with the potential to make a lot of money.

remember, just because xbox titles often sell more does not mean they make more money, either. development costs for all the console platforms are ridiculous in the beginning as the devs are required to buy special "stations." these things cost bucks. also, turn-around on a console title is 9 months, yet toee took 22. this means you have to employ a VERY large development team. the competition in this market is unreal as well (because it's larger for one thing) so selling a few hundred thousand copies is a recipe for doom...

taks

 

[asa]

Let's see what they have to say on the subject, otherwise we're dealing with hearsay and speculation.

I will say this, however, if you examine this thread there have been valid complaints about Rex's behavior from established, respected members and I have yet to see teh staff address them, so I can only draw the conclusion that he has:

a) intimidated them (it is not pleasant to converse with him, so this is not a stretch);

b) they don't care; or

c) they allow Rex to inflict his obstreperous personality on the people who frequent this site -- possibly in order to purge or cull would be nuisances greater than Rex (an historical example would be Hawaii's importation of the mongoose to deal with the Island's snake problem).

I chose option a since it was the simplest explanation, but I had hoped to spark some debate on the topic in order to satisfy my curiosity.

4) the rest of the staff are afraid of Rex,

What a crock of shit. You are just making yourself look stupid.

if it's not true then why do they let him run wild like a petulant child -- as far as I can tell he really has only two friends on here, an anti-semetic norwegian cowboy and overly verbose Volourn (hint: nobody has time to read your littanies).

Ok, have a think here about what you are saying; you claim that the staff - Saint and all - are in such fear of someone on an internet forum and newsite that they let him do what he wants? You really are stupid. What is Exitium going to do to enforce his "reign of terror"? Send out goatse PMs? Threaten people (on the intarweb, oh my!) This is the internet. Welcome, please leave your stupidity at the door.

 

[Quentin Payne]

I may be mistaken, but I heard that on BG1 Interplay wanted to ship the game before Bioware wanted to, and Bioware paid to finish the game themselves. So Troika's biggest mistake has been not learning that lesson. Also, they shouldn't have tried to make ToEE so true to DnD, if they had streamlined it like BG then they might have not had as many bug problems.

And by the way, when did everyone forget about what a bug ridden POS Fallout 2 was when it was shipped? Disappearing car trunk along with your items, anyone? And didn't the patch invalidate save games? Why aren't we bashing the Troika for that? Oh, that's right, they left at the beginning of FO2, though I'm sure that it was somehow their fault anyway.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Wow wow wow there. Gloating at the demise of Troika, saying that they are "pwned" and that it`s for the best is a bit ridiculous,

My opinions on Troika's mismanagement stand, but the 'pwned' bit was intended for the fanboys. It certainly had an effect.

when they always treated the Codex in a fair way, listened to the criticisms and the positive remarks with respect,

When was that? They hardly ever visited our site and unlike the way Bethesda treats our questions, Troika seldom bothered to elucidate on whatever issues pertained at the time. The state of Vampire's patch, for instance.

was silly in my opinion,

Customer response is silly? By the looks of things, Troika's PR stands for "Poor Response" and not for "Public Relations".

Giving ranks to those that used the same weapons you used at the newsbit was partial, childish and egotistic, but you`re the admin, there`s nothing we can do about it.

Perhaps if you read into Ave's posts you'd realize the merit in my decision. "Bloodlines runs perfectly fine." "Get a better PC". "Every game has bugs". Those are stupid things to say and hardly dismisses the poor quality of the game.

But saying Troika is only in this for the money is taking things too far.

Saying that a busines does things for money is taking things too far?

Troika is a business and it does things for money. That is what businesses do. Their passion for what they do takes second place to making a profit, and as Volourn said, is a completely irrelevent matter where business is concerned. Making money is the nature of business. Period.

Not even Bioware does things "only for the money",

Of course not, but that doesn't stop some of the Troika fanboys on this thread from claiming otherwise.

Like Troika, Blizzard, Valve and many other developers, they do what they do to make a living, but on top of that, they also do it out of passion or they wouldn't be in the game industry as developrs to begin with. There's a lot more money to be had developing networking applications for corporate clientele, and it's far less risky.

or they wouldn`t be trying to develop new IPs to explore,

You're preaching to the choir. Instead of telling that to me, try telling that to everyone who's slandering Bioware and presenting Troika as the 'last bastion of passion in game design'.

so saying that of Troika is beyond an inocent mishap, but outright manipulation of history to serve your twisted views .

Again, you're reading far too much into the subject. I said nothing of the sort. I don't know why you find it so easy to think that making the plain, and truthful statement like "Troika is a business and businesses are in it for the money" could be conveyed as 'sinister' or, in your own words, 'twisted'. You are overly paranoid.

You`re not talking to a few kids that only know what they read in the hip forums, you`re talking to people that know Troika from the start, talked to the trio that found it several times and followed the way they always tried to do their thing, and remained in the hardcore RPG business with choices that were scorned by the mainstream. So do get up from that high horse and stop this crap now.

That might be true in your case, but for each and every single one of you? I'll call bullshit on that one. Some of the people participating in this thread in support of Troika don't even know what the fuck they are talking about, especially when they come out with that melodramatic crap about how Troika was our last best hope for a real RPG. What was Bloodlines, then? It certainly didn't seem like much of an RPG half way through the game, what with all those respawning monsters and first person combat.

You already hurt them and made them sad, you don`t need to go into the realm of complete falsehoods and complete manipulation anymore.

Drama!

 

[Volourn]

"What saved NWN was Bio's BG and BGII. Hell, I bought NWN because I enjoyed BG and BGII. A lot of people who enjoyed the first BG (and obviously there was a lot of people who did) bought NWN for the same reason. And there's was this whole online-thing also."

Backtracking now. You had said NWN was a failure and nearly destroyed BIO yet now you said it was 'saved" because of BG and BG2. That's bullshit. If people were buying NWN just ebcause of BG series; and NWN sucked as you think it does; NWN's sales would have stopped dead in its tracks after the first month. Guess what, moron? It didn't. The game continued, and continues to sell at a pretty decent lace. Whether you like it or not, NWN is successful because people like it. Period. It's no wonder that it has a sequel coming up. And, that whole 'on line thing' is such a minor thing about NWN's finanical success; that's silly to bring up. Nice try though.

It's one thing to dislike NWN as that's just opinion; it's another to post bullshit about it.

As for x-box stuff; you are just so full of shit; the manure is starying to smell through my monitor. WOWSERS!

"Using your own logic I could say : novels...hmm, novels, it's a business. You know, selling books and stuff. So it's about money. So Faulkner was actually a business man. Or John Irving.

Things are a little bit more complex than that."

Once Faulkner starts charging money; busines sis a big aprt of it. Deal with it. Just because it's about business; doens't mean they don't love it. Afterall, have you not heard 'loving one's job'?


No, if they fail; it's because they failed to deliver what we gamers as a whole wnated the way we wanted it. It's that simple. If their games weren't buggy, if their games had a decent story, if their games didn't didn't short circuit near the end; maybe more people would have bought it.


"I think that Troika's game got pretty much strong and decent stories. And I don't think their games shot circuit near the end (expect Bloodlines, right after the cab driver sequence). But that's beside the point : that's just our opinion."

A. You obviously didn't play TOEE then.

B. An opinion shared by many.


"I said 'Little compromise' I didn't say no compromise!"

They ahve done more just a 'little' compromising. Agreeing to add RT to Arcanumw as huge; limiting themselves to doing an old D&D module was a big comrpomise, making BL combat into a FPS was a pretty big compromise for the so called ahrdcore TB RPG lovers TOEE supposedly is.


"You have no friends because of all the nonsense that comes out of your mouth."

Wrong. I have no firends on the 'net as I don't want any. That's why I insult people when they ask to be insulted like you are.

 

[asa]

holy crap, and you say you're not verbose?

 

[Volourn]

If you didn't post so much shit; I wouldn't have to respond like so.

 

[Sol Invictus]

I may be mistaken, but I heard that on BG1 Interplay wanted to ship the game before Bioware wanted to, and Bioware paid to finish the game themselves. So Troika's biggest mistake has been not learning that lesson. Also, they shouldn't have tried to make ToEE so true to DnD, if they had streamlined it like BG then they might have not had as many bug problems.

I think that the problem with ToEE wasn't that it was true to the rules, but that it was true to the horrible module (Temple of Elemental Evil) that Gygax made years ago. When he made it, it was written in barebones format for DMs to improve on and add their own storyline, characters and twist to it. It was how he made his games, and it allowed for plenty of creativity in part of the players and DMs who played his modules.

Troika's mistake was going by the barebones module and doing absolutely nothing with it. That's why the campaign sucked. Nobody complained about the combat, not even me - because it was, bar none, the best implementation of turn-based combat in ANY game.

They also screwed themselves with the 18 month estimate and allowed feature creep (50 spells turned into 250 along the way, so spells were buggy until they released the 1st and 2nd patches). Even now, the game is still very buggy, with weapon ranges still unfixed. The CO8 patch alleviates some of these problems, though.

And by the way, when did everyone forget about what a bug ridden POS Fallout 2 was when it was shipped? Disappearing car trunk along with your items, anyone? And didn't the patch invalidate save games? Why aren't we bashing the Troika for that? Oh, that's right, they left at the beginning of FO2, though I'm sure that it was somehow their fault anyway.

Yes, and everyone complained about Fallout 2 at the time, too. However, unlike Arcanum (multiplayer doesn't work, balance nonexistent), ToEE (crash bugs, performance issues, memory leak, etc), and Bloodlines, Fallout 2 runs relatively bug-free these days, as it was eventually patched. Unfortunately for all of Troika's games the publishers of those titles refuse to finance any more patches.

 

[Ekodas]

NWN's sales would have stopped dead in its tracks after the first month.

You're speaking like a rookie. Good or bad reviews, hearsay or anything won't stop the fanbase from buying a product.

As for x-box stuff; you are just so full of shit; the manure is starying to smell through my monitor. WOWSERS!

Can you at least pretend that you have a point or an argument ? Please, just prove that what I said about X-Box is bullshit or try to.

 

[Fez]

I wish you'd use the quote tags, at least in those longer posts, Vollie. It makes it more of a chore to read, especially when you miss a quotation mark or something and the thread of the conversation is confused. It's not like I'll cry and whine about it if you say no, it's just as a courtesy to others reading it, like punctuation. I suppose this will be ignored anyway, judging from how these things usually go here, and with you.

 

[Sol Invictus]

You're speaking like a rookie. Good or bad reviews, hearsay or anything won't stop the fanbase from buying a product.

So, why didn't the supposed 'fanbase' buy TOEE beyond 300,000 copies? I thought D&D players were supposed to be hardcore.

 

[Vault Dweller]

I will say this, however, if you examine this thread there have been valid complaints about Rex's behavior from established, respected members and I have yet to see teh staff address them, so I can only draw the conclusion that he has:

a) intimidated them (it is not pleasant to converse with him, so this is not a stretch);

b) they don't care; or

c) they allow Rex to inflict his obstreperous personality on the people who frequent this site -- possibly in order to purge or cull would be nuisances greater than Rex (an historical example would be Hawaii's importation of the mongoose to deal with the Island's snake problem).

I chose option a since it was the simplest explanation, but I had hoped to spark some debate on the topic in order to satisfy my curiosity.

Well, I can't speak for all, but here is my position on that. I disagreed with Rex's opinion on Troika's situation and I posted mine. That, as fas as I'm concerned, settles it. In regard to ..what was that?..."inflicting Rex's obstreperous personality on the people", I'm pretty sure that people can deal with it and don't require anyone speaking for them or acting on their behalf. When I'm not posting news, I'm a regular poster here. So is Rex. You are free to disagree, argue, discuss, and even flame. What more do you want?

 

[Ekodas]

You're speaking like a rookie. Good or bad reviews, hearsay or anything won't stop the fanbase from buying a product.

So, why didn't the supposed 'fanbase' buy TOEE beyond 300,000 copies? I thought D&D players were supposed to be hardcore.

You mean Troika Fanbase maybe ? It's quite small.

By the time TOEE was out, there was others RPGs and Action-RPGs on the market, including DnD game. So why choose TOEE over NWN's expansion pack ? There was also Dungeon Siege, Gothic II, Arx Fatalis etc...

Add the bugs, the average quality of the game (wasn't that bad, but it was disapointing compared to Arcanum), Atari's renown and shaky marketing (imho, expect Independance War II : Edge of Chaos they didn't publish a single decent game) you can understand why TOEE didn't sold 300K copies. It did better than Arcanum though, and I'm quite sure that the DnD licence helped.