Yes, they were approached, and then told that they had a selection of what to pick to work on. All those licenses. It really wasn't just because of Arcanum, which I still believe the one true flaw happened to be the RT combat. I'm not sure if it was a publisher thing, but I believe it might have been (could Tim or anyone else there at Troika give some background on that?). Judging a company's talent pool based only upon what they've done
as that company is well...quite frankly obtuse. There's so much more to take into account.
Take Ion Storm for example. Oh, no, their head guy was a bullshit artist and wasted millions of dollars, put in skylights that caused nasty glare on his workers' screens so bad they had to put blankets up to block that out (natural light is very harsh when developing for long hours, I know), and generally had one flop release, one that did fair, and another that shined under the direction of someone that makes Romero look like a child. Should there be any optimism for Deus Ex 2, or should you crush that out on the basis that Ion Storm really only had one good game? Or are you going to say even a worse guess that since Deus Ex 1 was good, the sequel will be good as well? Or how about Fable, since B&W was a bit mediocre, even though it sounds like a sort of interesting RPG/Sim mix, does offer some of the elements people do enjoy from the work Troika has done. Even if it's an action game in many ways, I do think Fable is worth a look because of Moly's previous work and I want to see what he will do with this. Bottom line is, you can't just say a company is good or bad based upon what little they have done as the company. The only respectful way is to acknowledge both their good and bad, and their previous work in experiences.
I do recall a ribbing we gave some BIS people about not having experience with making a character system to date, with balancing it, etc. and then trying to say that we should expect them to easily put together RT and TB alongside each other, when it's quite impossible to do that and balance both alongside each other. The reason why that ribbing was done is while their were some vets in BIS (only a small handful now), there's also a larger number of kids that Interplay has hired that might have been on one game before. Those vets at the time had only a bit of experience with one combat system or another, but no real full-fleshed out attempts to combine or to implement one alongside the other. Even experienced people fail when it is something that impossible.
Then, you could look at the base facts of Troika. There's a group of talented people, who have been in the business for quite some time in one form or another and in different areas (most of which have credit lists larger than many people put together at Interplay), and now don't have the head morons at Interplay interfering with any of it, and they've also shown that they are better at creating quests
long before the BioWhore kiddies came up with their first Fed-Ex in Baldur's Garbage. Hell, even Feargus' creations in Fallout 1 basically mopped up most of BioWhore's shitty design. Troika also are working to keep D&D rules faithful and precise as they can, and while it is quite combat intensive, it does show in many ways that it will easily surpass any BioHype game in terms of role-playing and D&D construction. That it will try as best as it can to stick to the P&P roots will likely earn it a point of respect from D&D players, even over the crackheads that prefer the BioWare's style of raping the rules. Hell, even PC Gamer has a nice, gushing article about ToEE, the only downside is their preference for multiplayer. They go on about the many different ways to start, play, and finish the game. Gee, how many ways does any BioHype game offer? One starting, a few cliché path choices, and usually one ending. Two, if you count the death screen. They might have snuck in another ending for some of their IE games, but MDK2 offered more endings than most of them.
It also seems that someone else aside from a good portion of the consumer base and magazines, too, was tired of the cock and bull garbage of BioHype.
). Really, I don't think it's too horrible, but maybe that's just because I've heard so many bad things I was expecting the worst. It beats BG2, though that's not saying too much. I think some of the story and characters are pretty interesting, but Bioware does need to learn more about game-making. Their pathfinding is as atrocious as ever, and they really need to get away from the meaningless decisions. The game isn't challenging at all, either; after the first chapter, I no longer even needed spells, my cleric just trashes everyone in melee with no buffs or healing. If I come up on something "impossible" divine power alone puts them down in no time. Can't imagine how much easier my current style would be as a fighter. There's all kinds of traps, but I just wade through them with my damage reduction and regeneration items and yawn.
P) consensus is:
