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Editorial The Rise and Fall of Troika
- Thread starter Vault Dweller
- Start date
Sol Invictus
Erudite
There's nothing scientific about elves and shit.kingcomrade said:
hoochimama
Liturgist
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2004
- Messages
- 665
aweigh said:
AO rated :D
I have never seen so many bitchy fucking nerds all in one place since Bill Shatner accidentily referred to Star Trek as Starwars at a trekkie convention. Seriously, all this hand wringing is pathetic no matter how you feel about Troika.
Yeah, that's why there was about 100MB worth of unused wav files on the game disc that never saw the light of day simply because they weren't given teh time to setup the cutscenes they occured in. Also, many of these wav files indicate a myriad of different options available to the PC in regards to the outcome of the story that never made it into the "final" cut. If you call that finished, you've obviously never baked a cake, fucked another person, or had a paying job in a long, long time.
If you still don't follow me on that:
-You can bake a cake without the sugar and it may look like a cake, but it's gonna taste like shit unless you don't like sugar.
-You can fuck another person, but you can stop half way through too before either of you get yours.
-You can say you're an author and write a damn brilliant book, but unless it's ever published that's not exactly a paying job.
Now all of these things above are in parallel to how KOTOR2 was released with content on disc that never was actually used in the game. It's a cake without sugar, it's fucking without the O-face, it's an occupation that doesn't garner a check at the end of the day. AKA: Unfinished.
Now if you want to get into semantics, by all means let it out. I'm sure someone would care. Or not.
Sorry for the long-winded analogy. You guys can go back to crying over spilt milk now.
Volourn said:
Yeah, that's why there was about 100MB worth of unused wav files on the game disc that never saw the light of day simply because they weren't given teh time to setup the cutscenes they occured in. Also, many of these wav files indicate a myriad of different options available to the PC in regards to the outcome of the story that never made it into the "final" cut. If you call that finished, you've obviously never baked a cake, fucked another person, or had a paying job in a long, long time.
If you still don't follow me on that:
-You can bake a cake without the sugar and it may look like a cake, but it's gonna taste like shit unless you don't like sugar.
-You can fuck another person, but you can stop half way through too before either of you get yours.
-You can say you're an author and write a damn brilliant book, but unless it's ever published that's not exactly a paying job.
Now all of these things above are in parallel to how KOTOR2 was released with content on disc that never was actually used in the game. It's a cake without sugar, it's fucking without the O-face, it's an occupation that doesn't garner a check at the end of the day. AKA: Unfinished.
Now if you want to get into semantics, by all means let it out. I'm sure someone would care. Or not.
Sorry for the long-winded analogy. You guys can go back to crying over spilt milk now.
Sol Invictus said:
True. It's more philosophical than scientific. Do elves shit in the woods?
Which retard is arguing steampunk isn't fantasy? Read Mieville and then feel eligible to debate the subject.
But then I guess the lines have blurred a lot. Hard SF is still about using scientific possibilities to hang a story around whilst much of the rest is "OMG! Teh alienz who is like teh elvies (so Tolkien fans pleez reed) are invading!".
I waded through 5 pages of this shit just to note that nobody seems to have pointed out how Atari failed Troika: piss-poor QA, which they apparently contracted to provide (just as with JoWood and PB).
Let's update VD's home-building analogy a bit: It's more like the publisher provides an inadequate budget and draconian deadline for finishing the house, but also agrees to fully test the house to ensure it's fit for human inhabitation; the developer foolishly accepts those terms and is (unsurprisingly) unable to produce a decent house; and the publisher passes it anyway and sells it to the public, who, upon moving in, discover they've paid a fortune for the privilege of falling through the second-floor bathroom all the way to the (unfinished) basement.
This isn't true in all cases, obviously. It's worth pointing out that VD's examples of Blizzard and Valve aren't just companies with the freedom to give themselves plenty of deadline extensions; they're also companies which provide their own QA and are thereby able to integrate it into their dev process. Same goes for Bio these days. But for small dev houses like Troika without the resources to sustain an effective, dedicated in-house QA team, there's no choice but to rely on publishers' QA services...and the end result is seldom good.
Let's update VD's home-building analogy a bit: It's more like the publisher provides an inadequate budget and draconian deadline for finishing the house, but also agrees to fully test the house to ensure it's fit for human inhabitation; the developer foolishly accepts those terms and is (unsurprisingly) unable to produce a decent house; and the publisher passes it anyway and sells it to the public, who, upon moving in, discover they've paid a fortune for the privilege of falling through the second-floor bathroom all the way to the (unfinished) basement.
This isn't true in all cases, obviously. It's worth pointing out that VD's examples of Blizzard and Valve aren't just companies with the freedom to give themselves plenty of deadline extensions; they're also companies which provide their own QA and are thereby able to integrate it into their dev process. Same goes for Bio these days. But for small dev houses like Troika without the resources to sustain an effective, dedicated in-house QA team, there's no choice but to rely on publishers' QA services...and the end result is seldom good.
suibhne said:
The Pope is Catholic.
Mefi said:
It's not that obvious. Many people here hold Troika responsible for poor QA, but they typify a problem faced by many small developers: living off project-to-project funding means it's difficult to sustain an effective internal QA unit, and the aggressive deadlines given by publishers (especially to devs with little clout) mean even less opportunity for QA, which overall requires much more reliance on publisher QA. And publisher QA almost always blows in a very big way, never mind the fact that it's generally not an iterative part of the whole development process.
Baphomet
Scholar
Why would a publisher do QA? That makes no damn sense to me. It seems so much easier if the people who are paid to break the game in interesting ways work in the same building as the people who made the game.
Well, devs obviously do some QA throughout the development process, but not always as an end in itself. I recall one of the Troika guys (maybe Moret?) mentioning in a ToEE post mortem that one of their biggest lessons learned was the need for a more integrated QA process throughout development, not just at the end.
The typical QA approach of "wait till it's in alpha or beta and then beat the hell out of it" just doesn't work with games like RPGs, predicated on flexible and potentially very complex interactions between the player and the game. (Even Oblivion, despite being laughably simplistic for an RPG, is much more complex than Prey or HL2.)
The typical QA approach of "wait till it's in alpha or beta and then beat the hell out of it" just doesn't work with games like RPGs, predicated on flexible and potentially very complex interactions between the player and the game. (Even Oblivion, despite being laughably simplistic for an RPG, is much more complex than Prey or HL2.)
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