Editorial The Rise and Fall of Troika

[Cthulhugoat]

Stop trying to argue with the definition of dumbfuck.

 

[Ladonna]

Well, its horrible for us isn't it Volly? You glad that Troika isn't making games? Are you happy that you cannot play another one? Honestly?

See, thats the thing. The new and improved timescales for making a game is shorter, and the demands of graphics is larger. So what we are starting to get are slightly more complicated First person shooters instead of CRPG's. NWN2 is a mediocre game at best, yet its currently lauded by some here as the best that has been out for some time.

If that doesn't tell you what dire straits we are in, nothing does.

In many ways, the wrong guys have gone under, to me anyway :wink: .

(If anyone takes umbrage at my NWN2 comment, please list what makes it a good CRPG, I am all ears).

 

[FrancoTAU]

Nonsense. It's alreayd 'well known' that contracts between devs and pubs are usually deeply in favor of pubs anyways. Why wouldn't this new, and FAIR ploicy addition not be okayed by desperate devs who just wnat to make games and will pretty much sign anything.

Afterall, the only thing the contract calls for is to finihs the game ON TIME. How horrible!!!

No, it's completely different. The current setup is that Publishers get a bigger cut on the sales of a game. The developer still get their wages during development and their craptastic small royalties. Now you're talking about adding a possibility where the developer actually can get sued and ends up actually losing money in making the game. Who the fuck would sign a deal where you'll most likely make a small amount of money with a what.... 25% chance of losing money and almost immediately going out of business.

 

[Volourn]

"You glad that Troika isn't making games? Are you happy that you cannot play another one? Honestly?"

No, I'm not glad. Like I've said, I have enjoyed 2 out of 3 Troika games and I evena dmit that TOEE has some good qualities. My point has always been that Troika brought its demise on itself. It's time for their fanboys to open up their eyes.


"No, it's completely different. The current setup is that Publishers get a bigger cut on the sales of a game. The developer still get their wages during development and their craptastic small royalties. Now you're talking about adding a possibility where the developer actually can get sued and ends up actually losing money in making the game. Who the fuck would sign a deal where you'll most likely make a small amount of money with a what.... 25% chance of losing money and almost immediately going out of business."

First off, legally, they likely cna alreayd be sued for breech of contract if there's a 'completion date' written in the contract. If the contract calls for the game to be finished in two eyars, and the developer can't complete it by then, the publisher has the legal right to sue them ALREADY. Publishers tend not to go forth that way ebcause they ar eusually udnerstanding when it comes to due dates. In essence, publishers are doing devloeprs a FAVOR by not pursing a lawsuit.

In fact, I remember that one of the big beefs between Bioware and Interplay is that Interplay was pissed off at how long Bioware was taking and IIRC, that was part of the lawsuit between them.

'So, in essence, I'm just syaing they should write it in BIG RED LETTERS since legally it's a breech of contract and you open yourself to a alwsuit if you don't finish the contratc in the given time period.

Sorry... that's a fact jact.

 

[FrancoTAU]

You were suggesting that publisher's should actively sue developers that go past deadlines. Whether or not they have grounds on contract breach isn't the issue. It's just a stupid precedent to even consider starting.

And is Interplay ever a good example on what to do and not do?

 

[aweigh]

How come Troika's games are better than BioWare's???

 

[Vault Dweller]

Are you really saying that you are such a complete moron...

How did you guess?

... that you can't tell the big blockbuster before they release?

Like Daikatana? I really, really wanted to be Romero's bitch.

Did you really not know that Half-life 2 was going to sell well? Final Fantasy(once the franchise was established in the US)? Diablo 2? Come on. The bombs, too- Lionheart wasn't going to suck ass?

MOO3? Ultima 9?

 

[Volourn]

"You were suggesting that publisher's should actively sue developers that go past deadlines. Whether or not they have grounds on contract breach isn't the issue. It's just a stupid precedent to even consider starting."

Why is it stupid? Enforcing contracts that two parties agree to is intelligent. Demanding that someone finishes something when they say they will is common sense; not supidity. I really do wish publishers would sue devs who breached the contract. It would wake devs up to manage the dev time more.


"And is Interplay ever a good example on what to do and not do?"

Sure. They weren't always a joke in the industry. Afterall, they were the ones who found a diamond in the rough with BIO financing game after game for them. Yeha, yeah, some people ehre will claim that as a bad thing 'cause BIO is evil and what not.

Interplay is responsible for the release of many great games like the IE games, the FOS, Wasteland, and the list could go on...

 

[Crichton]

Sure theres the rare exception, one way or the other, but most games are completely predictable as to which bin they will end up in.

As for Troika, moderate sales seemed likely in each case. (This isn't to say that hardcore RPG fans didn't look forward to them, just sales from the general market and publisher stand point)
Weird ass hybrid RPG thats thats trying to do real time & turnbased + magic/tech? Niche.
TOEE? Well, this could have been bigger just because of the D&D sticker, but it had revamp of classic module and turn based (at the height of Real-Time is the god king of the Industry) dragging it down. Add in looking dated and hella buggy, and a revamp of the moldering Arcanum engine... I can see why the publisher wasn't willing to give it an extra enfusion of cash.
Shooter RPG-lite w/ vampires (yawn), and goth-fag, angsty vampires at that? Meh. Too RPG for the Shooter fans, too Shooter for the RPG fans, and absolutely RAPING the source material for the PnP fans... Moderate sales were the best to be hoped for.

All in all, none of them were games where any reasonable person would expect the publisher to go 'Oh yeah, Have some extra money and time'. And of course, that chance would go down with each game that went 'Ho-hum, fizzle, buggy, blah'.

I think this gets to the heart of the matter; neither of troika's failed games (bloodlines and ToEE) looked like good bets to make much money so when troika couldn't make them for the small amounts of money they'd agreed to, no one felt like going double or nothing. And should they have?

ToEE is a nice tech demo of D&D, but there's no game; no storyline, no quests, no locations, no dialog, nothing but one five-floor pentagon-sized dungeon full of evil bugbears to mindlessly hack down. So give troika however much money to fix the tech problems and what do you get? A nicely polished 10-hour skirmish tactics game with a lousy ruleset.

To me this was just a terrible issue of priorities. Getting the engine to work, tweaking the ruleset make a half-decent skirmish tactics game out of D&D, creating a compelling storyline and providing places to go and people to talk to all took a backseat to a) recreating one of the worst of gygax's old modules and b) being faithful to a crummy ruleset.

Bloodlines takes a game engine designed for corridor shooters and tries to recreate LA with it, leading to painfully small locations, no environmental interactivity and general disappointment. The melee system is simplistic, the shooting is awful, so what's left? Hardcore roleplaying with choices and consequences set in faggot-emo-land. Hooray that's a horse to back!

So when you come right down to it, small budgets leading to tech problems really aren't the issue, troika's ideas for making games are. What was important about ToEE to troika were faithfulness to D&D and to the source material. Their priorities in bloodlines were faithfulness to vampire and SHINI GRAPHIX. Do you see anything that has anything to do with making a good game in either of those? Of course not.

And it's worth noting to everyone that tries to talk about all three troika ventures in the same breath that this is not true of Arcanum. Arcanum has a lot of things I don't like, but troika worked hard at providing real choices in the main storyline (as opposed to vampire's railroad storyline and ToEE's no storyline), lots of locations, lots of quests, lots of game. So it doesn't surprise me at all that after arcanum, troika got two contracts and after ToEE and bloodlines, they went broke.

 

[Volourn]

"think this gets to the heart of the matter; neither of troika's failed games (bloodlines and ToEE) looked like good bets to make much money so when troika couldn't make them for the small amounts of money they'd agreed to, no one felt like going double or nothing. And should they have?"

That's nonsense. TOEE is a D&D game based on, perhaps, the most popular D&D module of all time. It has an inbuilt potential customer base of millions. To tell me that it wans't 'destined' to sell lots is silly. The game was in the top 10 (top 5 I think initially) when it first came out. What killed TOEE is the bad press it got when people actually played the game and trashed it. TOEE did as poorly as it did because people simply didn't want to take a chance on a 'game that was buggy and piss poor story'.

As for BL, it's also base don a popualr RPG system. Not on the level of D&D but it also used the super hyped Source Engine which likely helped get it sales it otherwise wouldn't.

To say these games were 'destined to not sell' is silly. Both were pretty decently hyped. They simply did not deliver what they were supposed to accoridng to those who played it for the most part. And, i say that despite liking BL a lot (B00BIES!). In fact, BL is one of those games while merely ';good' coulda should woulda been one 'of the best ever' with some adjustments. *shrug*

 

[Voss]

Their priorities in bloodlines were <snip> SHINI GRAPHIX. .

Fixed.

 

[Durwyn]

I only wish...

- Troika !

- Yes Master ?

- Arise...

 

[DarkUnderlord]

That's a bullshit criticism too. Any industry that takes on a long term project, be it building a bridge to making video games, don't usually hit their deadlines. You just can't foresee shit popping up that far in advance. Why do you think that big developers, who don't rely on publisher's money, go past their original deadlines all the time and put out the most polished and best selling games?

Can you provide evidence of your assertion above that most companies don't make deadline? I'm afraid if that were true, alot of companies wouldn't be around any longer. Most companies/project I have experience with in the working world build time into their projects for unforeseen issues, so as to provide some cushion. But to say it is common that most deadlines aren't met I don't find accurate based upon my experience.

Just out of curiosity, what is your experience?

You can't compare bridgebuilding to designing and building a video game. We know how to build bridges - they're built all the time, using the same materials, according to engineering specifications. But almost every game is different, using a different graphics engine, different game engine, new art, different features, etc.

1. Not all bridges are built with the same materials. Believe it or not, the quality of the steel, how much and so on can vary quite dramatically. Saying all bridges are made out of the same material is like saying all computer games are written in C++. It might be true but as you acknowledged yourself, there are different ways of using that material.

2. Yes, they're built to engineering specifications but it all depends on the design. Each bridge has a unique design which creates stresses in different ways that need to be dealt with. Much like the design of a computer game.

3. I'm reasonably certain that Franco was being a bit facetious when he said bridge building. IE: I don't think he specifically meant bridge building perse but rather construction in general, which is notorious for having cost over-runs.

• Cost overrun is common in infrastructure, building, and technology projects. One of the most comprehensive studies [1] of cost overrun that exists found that 9 out of 10 projects had overrun, overruns of 50 to 100 percent were common, overrun was found in each of 20 nations and five continents covered by the study, and overrun had been constant for the 70 years for which data were available. For IT projects an industry study by the Standish Group (2004) found that average cost overrun was 43 percent, 71 percent of projects were over budget, over time, and under scope, and total waste was estimated at US$55 billion per year in the US alone.
  
  Spectacular examples of cost overrun are the Suez Canal with 1,900 percent, the Sydney Opera House with 1,400 percent, and the Concorde supersonic aeroplane with 1,100 percent. The cost overrun of Boston's Big Dig was 275 percent, or US$11 billion. The cost overrun for the Channel tunnel between the UK and France was 80 percent for construction costs and 140 percent for financing costs.

A canal (pretty simple you'd think, given it's a hole in the ground), a building (which we build all the time), an aeroplane (come on, it's not like the rules of aerodynamics are changing daily and these guys are all highly qualified experienced engineers), and two tunnels (Tunnels? How easy are those?).

Cost over-runs, failing to reach a budget happens and happens often for one very good reason. It involves a lot of crystal ball gazing. How long is it going to take you to design the bridge we want? How long is it going to take to create that piece of art we need? Each item is unique and time estimates are educated guesses at best and complete stabs in the dark at worst.

 

[LCJr.]

That's a bullshit criticism too. Any industry that takes on a long term project, be it building a bridge to making video games, don't usually hit their deadlines. You just can't foresee shit popping up that far in advance. Why do you think that big developers, who don't rely on publisher's money, go past their original deadlines all the time and put out the most polished and best selling games?

Can you provide evidence of your assertion above that most companies don't make deadline? I'm afraid if that were true, alot of companies wouldn't be around any longer. Most companies/project I have experience with in the working world build time into their projects for unforeseen issues, so as to provide some cushion. But to say it is common that most deadlines aren't met I don't find accurate based upon my experience.

Just out of curiosity, what is your experience?

You can't compare bridgebuilding to designing and building a video game. We know how to build bridges - they're built all the time, using the same materials, according to engineering specifications. But almost every game is different, using a different graphics engine, different game engine, new art, different features, etc.

1. Not all bridges are built with the same materials. Believe it or not, the quality of the steel, how much and so on can vary quite dramatically. Saying all bridges are made out of the same material is like saying all computer games are written in C++. It might be true but as you acknowledged yourself, there are different ways of using that material.

2. Yes, they're built to engineering specifications but it all depends on the design. Each bridge has a unique design which creates stresses in different ways that need to be dealt with. Much like the design of a computer game.

3. I'm reasonably certain that Franco was being a bit facetious when he said bridge building. IE: I don't think he specifically meant bridge building perse but rather construction in general, which is notorious for having cost over-runs.

• Cost overrun is common in infrastructure, building, and technology projects. One of the most comprehensive studies [1] of cost overrun that exists found that 9 out of 10 projects had overrun, overruns of 50 to 100 percent were common, overrun was found in each of 20 nations and five continents covered by the study, and overrun had been constant for the 70 years for which data were available. For IT projects an industry study by the Standish Group (2004) found that average cost overrun was 43 percent, 71 percent of projects were over budget, over time, and under scope, and total waste was estimated at US$55 billion per year in the US alone.
  
  Spectacular examples of cost overrun are the Suez Canal with 1,900 percent, the Sydney Opera House with 1,400 percent, and the Concorde supersonic aeroplane with 1,100 percent. The cost overrun of Boston's Big Dig was 275 percent, or US$11 billion. The cost overrun for the Channel tunnel between the UK and France was 80 percent for construction costs and 140 percent for financing costs.

A canal (pretty simple you'd think, given it's a hole in the ground), a building (which we build all the time), an aeroplane (come on, it's not like the rules of aerodynamics are changing daily and these guys are all highly qualified experienced engineers), and two tunnels (Tunnels? How easy are those?).

Cost over-runs, failing to reach a budget happens and happens often for one very good reason. It involves a lot of crystal ball gazing. How long is it going to take you to design the bridge we want? How long is it going to take to create that piece of art we need? Each item is unique and time estimates are educated guesses at best and complete stabs in the dark at worst.

And what's the extent your experience in the construction field VD?

I've personally been on several jobs where the contract stated the completion date and penalties for not making it. They've ranged from small restaurants, hundreds of student apartments to, the worst, a 14 story beachfront condo taken out by hurricane Ivan. And let me tell you when the real estate people have a building with 83 beachfront condos rented for the start of the tourist season they don't give a fuck about "unforeseen difficulties". Like I keep saying if you bid on a job you'd better be damn sure you have the resources to do it unforeseen difficulties or not.


Now what I'd really like to hear is the publishers side of the story. Just what exactly was going on behind the scenes that none of the 3 felt they had anything to gain by giving Troika more time?

 

[Kuato]

Maybe some publishers have learned that unlike bridges and houses, games dont actually have to completely work or be completley tested in order to be marketed and sold. Of course practicing this type of business over time this could have a devasting effect.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=atar&d=t

 

[DarkUnderlord]

And what's the extent your experience in the construction field VD?

Why are you asking VD?

I've personally been on several jobs where the contract stated the completion date and penalties for not making it. They've ranged from small restaurants, hundreds of student apartments to, the worst, a 14 story beachfront condo taken out by hurricane Ivan. And let me tell you when the real estate people have a building with 83 beachfront condos rented for the start of the tourist season they don't give a fuck about "unforeseen difficulties". Like I keep saying if you bid on a job you'd better be damn sure you have the resources to do it unforeseen difficulties or not.

... and how many corners did you cut? You know... Skipping a few things here and there because it'd take an extra day and that's time you don't have. Using X over Y because while Y is the legal requirement, X is there now and who's really going to find out? And sure, you may not quite have enough concrete to do the floor properly but if we just fudge it a bit here and there, "she'll be right". (I worked in politics and those are a few things I've seen and right now we've got an apparent cost blow-out on a major infrastructure project).

As Kuato perhaps alluded to, buildings just have to have the walls standing up and look right. If the pipes explode 10 years later instead of the 70 they're supposed to last or if the walls aren't quite as strong as they're supposed to be and so the roof collapses in a mild storm that it's meant to have been designed to withstand, who's fault is that? That's either shifting sand or "the weather man's problem".

 

[The Watchman]

All arguments aside, i just miss Troika.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

Hell, I would give anything for a game coming out today remotly resembling such a masterpiece of RPG as was Arcanum.
And while Bloodlines had many flaws, it was still a good game (and a great RPG at the early stages of the game).
The only game from Troika which I truly dispised was TOEE.

Seems funny to me people are hacking on Troika as if they had some personal grief against them, and talking about Arcanum as if it was a complete failure.
Especially at the current state of the genre

 

[peak]

Runners-Up [best RPG]:
Neverwinter Nights 2
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance

Wtf?

 

[Vault Dweller]

And what's the extent your experience in the construction field VD?

I assume you meant Dark Underlord, but if you really want to know my answer, it's zero.

Now what I'd really like to hear is the publishers side of the story. Just what exactly was going on behind the scenes that none of the 3 felt they had anything to gain by giving Troika more time?

Greed and stupidity. Before you dismiss the answer, ask yourself why Lucas Arts shipped KOTOR 2 in an unfinished state.

 

[Ladonna]

Thats what pisses me off about some of the whining cunts in this thread; the current state of RPG's. I would love to know all these RPG makers that still exist and who are better than Troika, perhaps the whiners could enlighten me and tell me why said makers are better/ games are better.

 

[Surgey]

Runners-Up [best RPG]:
Neverwinter Nights 2
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance

Wtf?

We all know that smashing trash cans for health power-ups constitutes an RPG.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Exactly. Troika made RPGs for a niche audience.

That same audience bought Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate. Bestsellers.

The majority of gamers doesn't want to read excessive dialogue (actually, they don't want to read at all, that's why the blockbusters feature full voice overs)

That must be why Morrowind and Baldur's Gate sold so well, right?

or a complex world full of choices and consequence.

Or Gothic 2 in Europe.

Those gamers want easily accessible games that they can pick up and play casually for 1 or 2 hours without putting much thought into it. Bethesda and Bioware realize this. Troika RPGs were oldschool, that's why they didn't sell.

Bullshit. They didn't sell because they were buggy, unfinished products. Parts of their games were good, but that hardly mattered when the games would run poorly and crash all the time. Beyond that, Arcanum's combat system was a piece of shit, choices and consequences stopped meaning anything once you reached the half-way mark in Bloodlines and the overhyped vignettes in ToEE were little more than 3 minute introduction sequences. Never mind the dialogue; ToEE didn't even have a storyline, so you can forget about that too. Half Life 2: Episode 1 has more of that than ToEE and it's not even an RPG.

See how that guy is pushing the lever all the way from code, over art, to design? At least they had their priotities right. The games were often buggy, but the beautifully designed game world more than made up for it, at least in my opinion.

I wouldn't call Arcanum's combat system beautifully designed.

 

[Ladonna]

Sol, you didn't know Sierra forced them to do a hybrid combat system for Arcanum? So instead of decent TBC (We have all seen that they can do excellent TBC mechanics) we got the forced shit straight from the Publisher.

Troika should have tried to find another publisher perhaps...

In any case, don't worry Sol, they are gone now. Enjoy the new RPG's that are coming your way :D

 

[Sol Invictus]

Runners-Up [best RPG]:
Neverwinter Nights 2
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance

Wtf?

It's got a pretty decent character building system.