The curse of the Black Isle

[Ellester]

I don't have Vampire, what's at the microphone stand?

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I was curious, too, so I looked it up. Check it out, very mature.

 

Y'know, I was willing to pretend that the Black Isle references in Arcanum were coincidential. This... yeah.

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I would have to say jealousy might be a reason for this joke, along with the former employer deal. Troika has been working their butts off trying to create games and they aren

[zer"0"]

Well, Troika's gone. ... I don't think we'll see a game by them anytime soon.

As to the in-game jibe, its most probably an in-joke, I have no opinions on it.

 

It would be interesting though, to see where Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky etc. end up. ... After all they undoubtably do have a lot of talent.

I wonder if they will decide to stay in the gamebiz?

Word has it a ex-Troikean is already working for Obsidian.

 

Black Isle imho is Legend. Most of the games they had a hand in creating or producing, I enjoyed. Who knows, if Interplay just had better

management, what Black Isle might have achieved.

Alas 'tis not here nor there. I see no curse just human error and cold reality.

[Gryphcon]

Multiple replies here

 

Volo

"Just because the game wasn't perfect; doesn't mean it was rushed."

 

I should clarify that by "rushed" a don't just mean the time schedule. I also mean the design philosophy. Both you and Ellester claim that I point to minor bugs and that other games are buggy. It is not just the bugs, it is the feeling of a *complete* game, polished. Sure you can point to the NWN OC, but NWN has so far been an anomoly in terms of Bioware "failures". Anyway, Obsidian and others have moved away from a BG style game with slow level advancement and immersive environment for fast levels up, lots of loot, repetitive-XP raising battles and poor playtesting. Sometimes these trade-offs were caused by a short development cycle other times by design descions. In either case, I think that game quality suffers, and over-optimistic development cycles, rush jobs, are at fault.

 

Also, it is true that bugs are random, and every person has a different experience.

 

I played through BG2, NWN, and KOTOR on release, pre-patch without any game-stoppers and without any obvious problems. Maybe the numbers did not always add up, but not that I noticed.

 

I also played IWD and KOTOR2 on release, both contained serious bugs. ToEE on release, I don't need to tell you guys about it, yet I played the entire game without any game stoppers and without patch go figure, it was still a buggy PoS.

 

Ellester

"The funny thing is that what is what you feel unfinished happen to be some icons and a bug.

 

Yes they used BG icons and so what?

 

They also used the same spells effects that were in BG and a lot of other crap ... heck I guess they decided it was pointless to waste time on then and moved on to make the game unique content.

 

Everything that was unique in IWD was done, they did not used BG unique weapons icons for IWD."

 

Why do some in BG style and others in IWD style? It screwed with the game's style. Same with spell effects, it doesn't matter if they half-assed it because of design choice or time constraints. It's just not polished.

 

You know, I enjoyed IWD. But it did have it's weaknesses that were not just a matter of design choices.

 

 

Sargy

"...IWD was marketed as an' "ol'-fashioned Dungeon Crawl"; expecting it to be BG was a lack o' research on yer part, not a lack o' anythin' on BIS' part..."

 

Yeah, I was on the BIS boards during IWD's development, I knew what was going on. As I remeber you showed up sometime after that on the new BIS boards posting with some ordinary name like Mike or something, same style though -unmistakeable. I've been on the BIS boards the whole time, Bishop/Red Queen boards, and so on.

 

I knew what BIS was saying about IWD, like I said above, it was a good game, but comparatively uninspired. I don't play a whole lot of games, the games I've played I'll list below

 

BG, BG2, IWD, IWD2 (partial), PsT, KOTOR, NWN, ToEE, KOTOR2 (partial)

 

BG, BG2, PsT, and KOTOR are great games

 

IWD, KOTOR2, and NWN modules are good games

 

ToEE, IWD2, and the NWN OC are poor games.

 

I might give IWD2 the good rating but I've never found the motivation to finish it.

 

So from my perspective BIS/Obsidian made 1 great game, 2 good games, and 1 poor game while Bio made 3 great games and 1 good/poor game that sold very well. I think the design philosophy, the rush job, is a major factor.

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How far back are you willing to take this argument? I can name a genuine list of horrendous games that Bioware brought out before the days of BGand a rock pile of excellent games Interplay brought out.

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I could name only one: Shattered Steel. MDK2 was pretty good. Not great, but good.

[Volourn]

"MDK2 was pretty good."

 

Not to mention that MDK2 came out AFTER BG too. <>

[Briosafreak]

That's just sad...  <_<

 

What little respect I had for Troika is quickly diminishing.

 

Don`t take that seriously, BIS was thinking about doing an encounter in Van Buren where both BIS and Troika would battle to death to see who was better, they were making this type of jokes all the time. Both places had pretty competitive people, but more to the point of making jokes at eachother than anything else. Having said that there were and there is bad blood between Troika members and former Interplay members, but that`s in individual terms, it always happen with a few people you`ve worked in the past, the ingame jokes are exactly that, jokes and teasing from each side, nothing else.

[Darque]

Oh

 

Well if it's a good natured joke that's ok then