Troika Games no longer exists....

Well Troika had access to the full Source source code, so it was up to them to polish it into having a decent performance. Saying it had nothing to do with Troika is a mistake in my opinion, since it was their game and it was up to them to make it run at a good speed. Allowing a game stopper to sneak into your game, despite the ease of the work around is very, very sloppy.

I'm not entirely blaming Troika at all, I think they perhaps did the best they could have done with the lackluster support their publisher provided and VTM:Bloodlines is a well designed game, but I wouldn't go so far as to blame VALVe or the Source engine for VTM:Bloodlines issues.

Infact VTM:Bloodlines was said to have been finished before Half-Life 2 but they had to hold off the release because of licensing agreements: which says it all in my opinion. The publisher just wanted the game out of the door as quick as possible, capitalize on some of the hype Half-Life 2 was generating because VTM:B was using the same engine.
 
mortiz said:
Well Troika had access to the full Source source code, so it was up to them to polish it into having a decent performance. Saying it had nothing to do with Troika is a mistake in my opinion, since it was their game and it was up to them to make it run at a good speed. Allowing a game stopper to sneak into your game, despite the ease of the work around is very, very sloppy.
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Whoa, non-sequitur. That game stopper had nothing to do with the frame rates.
Besides that, Troika licensed that engine precisely to not have to polish or develop their own engine. The fact that Valve then delivered an engine that had really poor perfomance with certain graphics chips is not Troika's fault, because they were building a game, and were relying on Valve to supply them with a properly functioning engine. Since Valve kept on improving their engine, the Troika team, who weren't involved with making that engine at all, could not really keep on incorporating all those changes the way Valve could in HL2.
It's a problem inherent to licensing an outside engine, something the Troika team admitted later on as well.


mortiz said:
I'm not entirely blaming Troika at all, I think they perhaps did the best they could have done with the lackluster support their publisher provided and VTM:Bloodlines is a well designed game, but I wouldn't go so far as to blame VALVe or the Source engine for VTM:Bloodlines issues.
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I would go so far as to blame Valve and the Source engine for the poor framerates, though.

mortiz said:
Infact VTM:Bloodlines was said to have been finished before Half-Life 2 but they had to hold off the release because of licensing agreements: which says it all in my opinion. The publisher just wanted the game out of the door as quick as possible, capitalize on some of the hype Half-Life 2 was generating because VTM:B was using the same engine.
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VTM:Bloodlines' release was stalled several times because of HL2 not having been released yet. Valve wanted the HL2 to be the first game brandishing the Source engine.
However, the package the Troika team delivered to their publisher when they said 'it's finished' was rather unpolished. And then, even though the game was far from being released, the publisher didn't want them to release a patch that would've fixed several of those bugs in the game.
 
Sander said:
Whoa, non-sequitur. That game stopper had nothing to do with the frame rates.
Besides that, Troika licensed that engine precisely to not have to polish or develop their own engine. The fact that Valve then delivered an engine that had really poor perfomance with certain graphics chips is not Troika's fault, because they were building a game, and were relying on Valve to supply them with a properly functioning engine. Since Valve kept on improving their engine, the Troika team, who weren't involved with making that engine at all, could not really keep on incorporating all those changes the way Valve could in HL2.
It's a problem inherent to licensing an outside engine, something the Troika team admitted later on as well.


I would go so far as to blame Valve and the Source engine for the poor framerates, though.

VTM:Bloodlines' release was stalled several times because of HL2 not having been released yet. Valve wanted the HL2 to be the first game brandishing the Source engine.
However, the package the Troika team delivered to their publisher when they said 'it's finished' was rather unpolished. And then, even though the game was far from being released, the publisher didn't want them to release a patch that would've fixed several of those bugs in the game.
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The engine that Valve delivered to Troika was the best version of Source available at the time. Troika needed the engine in order to progress with developing the game. They will have been well aware that the version they were getting wasn't polished, therefore time should have been set aside to make the necessary adjustments, but of course they couldn't do that because of the pressure coming down from Activision to get the game together.

Source is massive, thousands of lines of code, something that size means it's going to take a lot of time for your Engine programmers to get a grip with it, since Programming after all must be a sustained effort. You can't just read some documentation then go plunging into the code to make major modifications; you've got to be gradual. Troika simply didn't have the time to go through that process because Activision wanted the game out so soon after Half-Life 2, therefore mistakes were made and bugs were left.

If Troika was working under the assumption that Half-Life 2 was going to be on the shelves by September 30th 2003 you could argue that that could have impacted the quality of the finished product, however, what development house or publisher in their right minds take a release date that was announced 5 months previously as fact? There should have been measures in place to allow for a delay in Half-Life 2 and therefore a delay in Bloodlines.

After Half-Life 2's repeated delays they should have sent Bloodlines back for further development, the fact that they didn't, probably because of the additional cost, is what's responsible for Bloodlines being unfinished.

I really sympathize with Troika in this situation; it was like they were trying to hit a moving target which was the release date, but Activision should have given Bloodlines a proper and full development cycle regardless of what Half-Life 2 was doing, then if Bloodlines was finished to a satisfactory standard but Half-Life 2 still wasn't out they could have stored it ready to printed and dispatched. As it turns out though, Activision didn't want to give Bloodlines a full development cycle preferring to instead work towards someone else's release date.
 
mortiz said:
[
The engine that Valve delivered to Troika was the best version of Source available at the time. Troika needed the engine in order to progress with developing the game. They will have been well aware that the version they were getting wasn't polished, therefore time should have been set aside to make the necessary adjustments, but of course they couldn't do that because of the pressure coming down from Activision to get the game together.

Source is massive, thousands of lines of code, something that size means it's going to take a lot of time for your Engine programmers to get a grip with it, since Programming after all must be a sustained effort. You can't just read some documentation then go plunging into the code to make major modifications; you've got to be gradual. Troika simply didn't have the time to go through that process because Activision wanted the game out so soon after Half-Life 2, therefore mistakes were made and bugs were left.
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You're overlooking the fact that working with an engine not made in-house causes a lot of problems as well. You need to start learning how to do things in that engine, and if you didn't write that engine yourself, and don't have direct, quick access to someone who did, it's a lot harder to get things done. This played a huge role in development as well.
 
One thing that didn't get mentioned; Vampire did get delayed because of some licensing agreement with Valve about Half-Life 2, but their publisher's deadline did not get delayed along with that. One of the guys who worked on Vampire posts at another forum I go to, and according to him it was sitting on a shelf that whole time because the publisher wouldn't pay them to keep working on it. Even if Troika did spend all that time polishing it up, the publisher wouldn't have accepted the new build because (1) they would have to pay them for their work and (2) they already had it in the production process and it would have cost them money to stop and start up again with a new version.

Even if you argue that it was in Troika's best interest to keep polishing the game anyway and release a patch with the fixes later on, remember that they have to pay employees to work, which they can't do if they aren't bringing in money, and they don't own any of the games they made, the publishers do - so they couldn't have released a patch to the game without the publisher's permission. If the publisher was kind enough to say "By all means go ahead and release it, but we can't pay you for it", then Troika essentialy was just working for Activision for free all that time and draining their own meager finances. When it's 'reputation' vs. 'bankruptcy', bankruptcy wins.

Of course, it's a moot point since they went under anyway. Imo, the main thing that Troika needed was a good manager/producer with a great mind for business - someone who could negotiate with publishers for development times that were actually feasible, and efficiently and effectively manage the project so that it got completed in the time no matter what the deadline was. I could be wrong though, maybe Tim & co were really good at this side of things and just took on unrealistic tasks because they had no choice, since rpgs are so avoided by publishers that they had to do it the way they did in order to make the games they wanted to make.
 
this really pisses me off...

i was looking on newegg.com for some stuff and i saw that they had a great price for my scsi hds... i look around for a good game and i see an RPG from troika called "temple of elemental evil" and i say cool ill get that to see how good it is. so i get it and try to install it. i get nothing but cd read errors so i copy all the files to my hd and install from them.

then i dload the patches and install them in order. lock up after the cd spinning cursor. force framerate to 75 hz and change to 800x600 and nothing. i try using a no-cd hack and now i can actually get to drawing the window and it flashes and goes away. turn it to windowed mode and i see it flash up and still crashing. then i look further and see that it requires a directx 9.0 compatibale vid drivers but runs under directx 8.1 ...

so i can no longer even play this game because nobody will fix this damn game. troika's icon shows up once on the box, atari shows up 9 times. thats kinda stupid imho.
 
Calis is the original Terra-Arcanum.com administrator, IIRC, and he used that a long time ago as well. :D
 
I was quite undisturbed by the, for me, minimal bugs. I enjoyed the games quite undisturbed, I never expect games to be perfect. I guess I'm the developers dream player, somebody who doesn't encounter alot of bugs and doesn't complain much and has alot of tolerance for outrageous things.

Oh well.
 
Robot Santa said:
Calis is the original Terra-Arcanum.com administrator, IIRC, and he used that a long time ago as well. :D
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I figured, the admin addy kinda gave it away. But my Morte's better, he floats!
 
I thought Leon and a couple of other guys had a company that developed board games and the like. I guess business didn't pick up.
 
Ratty said:
I thought Leon and a couple of other guys had a company that developed board games and the like. I guess business didn't pick up.
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So Leonard is working with Blizzard.... :?
I hope they won't release another 'Diablo'. Hate that game.
:roll:
 
Ratty said:
I thought Leon and a couple of other guys had a company that developed board games and the like. I guess business didn't pick up.
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No, no, he just made some art for one of the games of Chris Taylor, Tom Decker and Scott Everts ("Beam me up ScottE!") new company, Zero Radius Games.

You can see his work in the main page, he made it while looking for new oportunities in the gaming world.
 
Bloodlust said:
But in First person view.Is that ringing any bells??? :wink:
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I know what you mean and I have no interest in that game either..
Killing demon with smg? Think I will stick with Warhammer40k tabletop. Thank you. 8)
 
Well, when I played VTMB, I came across 3 bugs.
Firstly of course the boat bug, when the game just crashed. (after killing the guy with the cross and rescuing that other dude)
When I checked some forum about that bug, people from Troika were telling players to go into developer mode and teleport to another scene. They did fix this bug with the first (or was it second) patch however.
Secondly during the first half of the game, it kept crashing because I had too little RAM (256). Screen just went black and I got "memory too low blabla" error. So.. bought some RAM (now have 256+512).
Finally near the end of the game I got some kind of weird engine error. Something about not being able to bring NPC's along or whatever. Really can't remember because it's been around half a year when I last played it.

It is sad because Troika isn't anymore...
The story in VTMB was quite good. Not as good as in the VTMR still..
And the all fps-rpg mix thing wasn't all that good imo. It lost the hack-and-slash concept from VTMR.

Also that is just nonsense that they let the game sit on the shelf all that time. I mean what were the publisher or whoever expecting? Hey, it's fps, it has vampires... despite all the bugs and 30min. loading times and no multiplayer... hell let's let it sit on the shelf, maybe it will get better by himself.

Can't think of anything else to say about Troika at the moment...

Edit: Killing demons with smg reminds me of Painkiller.... and Return to the Castle of Wolfenstein... although they had more advanced weapons then smg in painkiller...
Edit2: And Doom... and Blood...
 
jee7 said:
The story in VTMB was quite good. Not as good as in the VTMR still..
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Redemption? It almost had no story to it. In fact, it was perhaps one of the shittiest stories I have ever had the misfortune to play through three times in.

And the all fps-rpg mix thing wasn't all that good imo. It lost the hack-and-slash concept from VTMR.
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White Wolf isn't all about mindless hack and slash, despite how people treat their licenses, and the games shouldn't be compared cross-genre wise. VTM:R was a pitiful hack and slash game with a static and predictable story, with actors in the game that were so dead, they might as well already have a stake in them, where Bloodlines has far more complexity to it.

Really, you should get to the part where you tell Cai...err...the taxi driver where you want to go, and where you put your loyalties. It explores the dilemma and situation of the Cainite race far better than the pitiful story of Redemption.

Also that is just nonsense that they let the game sit on the shelf all that time. I mean what were the publisher or whoever expecting?
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That the they (publisher) could just release the game and not bother to give it any support worth mentioning?

Hey, it's fps, it has vampires... despite all the bugs and 30min. loading times and no multiplayer... hell let's let it sit on the shelf, maybe it will get better by himself.
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Of course, all single-player games have to have their design skullfucked for multiplayer. :roll:

Can't think of anything else to say about Troika at the moment...
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The direction you're going, it probably wouldn't be the brightest thing to do around here.
 
jee7 said:
Well, when I played VTMB, ......
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Bloodline is waayyyyy better than Redemption <---- mindless Diablo wannabee...

On the side note, I enjoy Arcanum more compare to the other 2 titles..
Honestly, I have never play a RPG which has the freedom do to anything.. (cept Morrowind but it feels generic :roll: ). I never get tired sticking a dynamite into a pile of gold and watch the unfortunate pick it up and BOOM.. :lol:
 
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