Kuato said:
obediah said:
With ToEE, Troika had a reputation of releasing one buggy game that they had sat on the gold for months before release, ignoring bug reports from the warez community. And then partially patched to mediocre sales.
Troika didn't release ToEE Atari did. Im not defending Troika's performance the game was buggy and felt unfinshed but its not like Atari showed up on the last day and said ok lets see what you got ? completely clueless as to what was going on, they do have to get milestones approved. Someone at Atari knew the shape that game was in the whole time.
Troika didn't sit on the Arcanum gold Sierra did and I believe all patches have to go through QA to be approved and officially released, again thats the publishers call.
It's simple. Troika agreed to develop the game in a given timeframe. They even gave interviews explaining how they were going to do this (i.e. upgrading the arcanum engine). People in this industry know that you can upgrade a sportsgame to new graphics in that given timeframe, but you can not develop a triple-A RPG in that time, it's not possible. Troika overshot their given timeframe a couple of times, Atari threatened to pull funding and at some point took a release candidate and sent it for production, without Troika's approval because Troika had no say about the final go / no go for the game.
Postmortem said:
The contract was signed and work officially began on February 1, 2002, and the game was originally scheduled to be completed on June 1, 2003. About one full year into the schedule, we amended the deal to add two additional months to update the rules to 3.5 Edition D&D and add additional content, which put us at an August 1, 2003 completion. We delivered the final product on August 30, so we came in ultimately at almost one full month late. I think with the bugs we have discovered since then, we should have delayed this for at least one additional month beyond that. Our game would have been solid with an October 15 completion date.
http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/441/441983p1.html
Note that the above statement is, again, ignorant. With all the bugs, they would not have been ready to ship October 15. It would have been not as bad, but it would still have been quite bad. Anyway, I think Octobler 15 would have set ToEE up against some other heavy sellers on the market.
Publishers balance their releases not only against their own other projects but also against the projects of other publishers. If you know that Doom3 releases on a certain date, you will not try to launch Nondescript Shooter 2005 at the same date. You have a so called optimal release window for a game and for some games hitting this window decides between profitable or loss. ToEE was lined up against SW: KotOR and NWN: HotU. They already got 2 month extension and Atari apparently wasn't willing to let them slip into the vicious Xmas sales window (For those who think that would have been good - Xmas means that top sellers sell more and everyone else tanks even worse).
In retrospect, I don't think the bugs killed Troika, - what killed them was the demonstrated incapability of releasing working products within the contractual limits.
Publishers don't want to work with people who can't fullfill the contracts they agree to.
For programming, I think the biggest challenge was getting the party pathing in and working. We had a milestone for pathing very early on, but we had sort of fudged that one together using existing code from Arcanum and making it look pretty good... but the intention was always to rip it out entirely and come up with something new. So, a new milestone was added called "complex party pathing" for several milestones down. Well, when that one hit, for some reason we got that past Atari too, even though it really wasn't as complete as it should have been. Ultimately, pathing was being worked on and improved up until the very end... and there are even additional enhancements in there now from the patch.
Again - publishers don't like to be fucked with. That's the stuff that ensures you don't get future contracts right there.
Hell, Activision lied about Bloodlines being done and just waiting for HL2 when it was in fact not done - it's still not done. They just pulled the plug because the budget was blows.
Yes, the big guns like Bioware or id can take the publisher hostage and force them to wait with release until the game is done, but the big guns also have their own QA departments and the ability to self fund extension periods they might get for their contracts.
And yes, we, the fans, had too much expectations in ToEE - we wanted it to be an AAA title when in fact did not have the potential to be one. Read the post mortem, it was a 1 year development cycle and a 14 people core team - probably less than the NWN expansion packs. It could have become a A game at best, more likely B, if they had used those two month of additional development time in stabilizing the game instead of putting 3.5 rules which only a handful of rabid geeks would care about and it's tragic that the same mistake was made with Bloodlines. While Bloodlines likely tanked for scheduling (heads up against HL2) and "unappealing IP" reasons, it was delivered buggy because they again designed outside their capabilities. Why fill the fucking last quarter of the game up with combat if you could have nicely wrapped up the story at the end of the third quarter of the game.
Obsidian can play the "first game with this team" card and get free out of "why the fuck did you not wrap up the game properly when your publisher started to ramp up crunch on you"-jail this time. They hopefully learned their lesson not to fuck with publishers about contractual release times and it won't happen again.
