Tigranes said:
A big factor was that they kept screwing themselves with the LithTech engine. Do you know if the design documents or the game idea in itself was seriously flawed? I had believed torn would have been complete if they stuck to, say, IE (not that IE is god.)
I'll give a hint of a reason why it also wasn't going well.
SPECIAL!
Perhaps, yet you cannot deny they have had bad luck and bad events thrown at them since PS:T.
About the only work of BIS' that I consider anywhere near quality is PS:T. That was a truly good game and many CRPG players adore it for such. It had some amazing creativity put behind it, but it also had its own flaws. It is unfortunate that they had to use the IE for it, as the combat capability would have been very sweet in a TB system, where you can add extremely exotic attack methods if you wish and not run into a synch problem. It's Sigil for fuck's sake!
It's also bad that IPLY really didn't support this game like the others, mainly because their inbred marketing people have no clue how to sell a game unless it has "trendy copycat" written all over it.
There was say...Fallout 2, which was chock full of bugs and stupid easter eggs, not to mention entire cities that didn't fit into the Fallout universe, thus leading to entire sections of the Fallout Bileball where Avellone forgot to take his meds. I'm fairly confident that none of them really looked at the first game and instead did a mod and called it Fallout 2 judging on some design docs that Tim Cain and the rest did before they left, and the images. The feel of the game was way off from Fallout 1.
Did I mention that this was before PS:T?
Then there's IWD, the snoresville of H&S games as it almost plays it for you and it's pretty much just trudging through the same ...rest ....fight ....rest ...fight ....rest, and you get the picture. It felt dull and tedius compared to Diablo, and Diablo didn't have much of a storyline. Where they missed out with IWD is the fun factor. People bought the first game expecting BIS goodness (read the FAQ if you need to for the claims), and then were let down and didn't bite for the SLAM DUNK! hook of the sequel (it also didn't help that Diablo 2 came out around the same time as IWD). Especially not after HoW. How the hell that got out the door in the state it did...HOLY FUCK!
If you mean FO2, many people like FO better, others like FO2 better, but I don't think the general opinion is that FO2 was a failure or nothing new.
The difference is that the bugs in the first one number almost nil.
The bugs in the second one, if you printed them all out in 12 point text and in a stacked list, you couldn't piss that far without being above a second story.
The easter eggs were done with style in Fallout 1.
The easter eggs were pretty much the entire fucking game in number 2, to the point where people have given up trying to catalog them all. Yeah, that would be me. Feck off!
The setting in Fallout was dismal, dark, bleak. I love that word. Bleak. It sums up the feeling of the Fallout universe to a word that can easily be applied to nearly all of the elements.
The setting in Fallout 2...well, heh, see above about easter eggs.
I understand that many do prefer Fallout 2, but I tend to look at it from a design standpoint because that's where I want the attention of developers. Not some little kid's mental ejaculation onto the forum for morte guns, with their only experience in gaming is on the drooling end of a console controller. That led to most of the problems with Fallout 2 to begin with.
BIS had been living on BioWare's teet since 1998. How many titles did BIS make using BioWare's infinity engine? All of them except Fallout 2. PS:T, IWD, IWD:HoW, and IWD2 were all IE games.
The thing is, first he says Bioware drained BIS/Interplay, now they're saying BIS got screwed when Bioware left.
That is quite true. BIS really had nothing truly theirs to work with. They may had a few engines to use (but from older Interplay games), but nothing more convenient for the execs than the IE. When the IE started to become really outdated, previous it's own release in a time-honored fashion of BioWare's, then BIS was left with "What do we work with now?" So with their money drained and nothing of their own to really fall back upon, they were pretty much screwed.
Unfortunately, they got stuck in the method of some idiot's preference to nickel and dime games out for a full price tag. That also raised a number of other people's ire. It led to many people, including myself, who started to wonder if all the creativity was squeezed out into PS:T or if the Interplay execs forgot to put the chemicals into the water when the designs were written up by BIS.
Either that, or they found someone's stash bag.
A2?
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