Axolotl said:
ian528 said:
Planescape I will give you and Black Isle died of mismanagement and poor followups.
Mismangement on Interplays side of things with them deciding that consoles were the way to go and cancelling Black Isle's 3 big projects in a row.
That may be true but we are not privy to why those 3 projects were cancelled. Also the projects they did complete at the end were derivative and no where near the height of what Planescape was. And that team did leave to become Troika. Icewind Dale 2 being a prime example of phoning it in.
But Troika? I had Arcanum and Bloodlines. Both were very flawed pieces that failed to catch on because they had issues that were serious enough to kill being able to really play the game. The writing was okay but if it had been seriously that good it would have caught on. They were ahead of their time considering that the settings were Steampunk and Vampires.
Troika dies because of dickisness from Activision. And Bloodlines did catch on, it has a fan community that is still doing fan patches today. And whilst it had many issues writing quality was not one of them.
Financial success does not equal good writting and vice versa.[/quote]
True that financial success does not equal good writing but it does equate to a sell-able game. Money matters and ignoring the money because you think that product is great does not make the product great. Bioware and Black Isle and in sense Troika (being founded out of the ruins of Black Isle) had worked together a great deal. Obsidian a company that has many people from Troika and Black Isle still works with Bioware and probably will into the future. I think the writing for Mass Effect was exceptionally good overall. However, I also enjoyed and purchased almost all Black Isle and Troika games so I also enjoyed them as well. (I do have elemental evil too.) I must say that I may go back and play bloodlines seeing that there are patches out there but I must admit it was a rage quit as I kept getting blocked by bugs.
I have already pre-ordered Alpha Protocol and hope it lives up to the bloodlines it has.