Black Isle Studios Shuts Down Development 392
Zonk writes "RPGDot has a story up right now about the closing down of development at Black Isle Studios. The information comes from an unnamed Interplay source, who says 'Any time you see the [Black Isle] logo on a future product, know that no one who was associated with BIS actually worked on it', as well as a post by BIS employee Damien Foletto on the Interplay message boards, and a Blue's News story that adds: 'The non-announced [PC] title that the division was working on, Fallout 3 [aka Van Buren], has been 'shelved', to quote management.' BIS, you will be missed." Black Isle are particularly known for work on the Fallout series, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment.
Nasty (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it the good companies go under, but the crap ones live on?
And, where the reason? (Score:3, Insightful)
gaming, inevitiably leaving its indie roots, (Score:3, Insightful)
The collective cry of Fallout fans (Score:3, Insightful)
Bummer (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nasty (Score:5, Insightful)
On a slightly related note, has there been a good business project management set-up in relation to the development of games? From everything I've seen and read about, the development seems so hodge-podge, it's remarkable any games succeed.
Nasty-The "cap" in capitalism. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because people are voting with their dollars, and crap is king.
Re:Nasty (Score:5, Insightful)
The gaming industry is more and more starting to feel like just another Hollywood branch. I wonder how long it takes before they'll start redoing old games, like they're doing with all old classic movies now?
Re:Bummer (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
What a fucking waste of technology.
At least the absolute derth of quality PC games cuts short all of the asshole anti-Mac arguments.
OSS-the Rin Tin Tin of solutions. (Score:1, Insightful)
Interplay wants to make money, not games (Score:5, Insightful)
Interplay wanted Bioware to churn out its games faster and faster, and make them larger and larger. It also wanted to pay Bioware alot less then what they had coming. Since Bioware was not owned by Interplay, Bioware told them to f**k right off, and went to Infogrames / Atari.
I guess the same sort of crap went on at Black Isle.
Black Isle was owned, so they could not just walk away from Interplay. Their core group of experienced developers probably told their bosses to stick it where the sun doesnt shine, and took a walk. That, or they dug in and refused to work a death march. Either way, Interplay decided to shut down the studio.
Anyway, this is all guess work. But it seems plausible enough to me to explain what happened.
END COMMUNICATION
Re:Nasty (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it the good companies go under, but the crap ones live on?
I have a pirated copy of System Shock 2 and Fallout 2 on my shelf, that's why.
Individually it's not my fault but if enough people did it...
Needless to say, I've never felt worse about having pirated games and I would gladly dish out the price for both the old and the new game if I'd just get the sequels for the games I truly loved.
For what it's worth. Looking Glass, Black Isle Studios, I'm sorry.
Re:Nasty (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the creative sorts who have fairly robust morals and ethics tend not to survive too often in today's business world. How many companies with crappy products can you name that have succeded primarily because they've flexed their muscles? I can name five in under 15 seconds, and I'm tired.
Unfortunately, "normal" business practise now seems to include fighting dirty, and it's usually at the expense of the final product. As much as I know people would hate to hear it, every big company does it. Look at Apple, Microsoft, IBM, SCO... Yes, some of them have released quality products, but none of them would really be where they are today without a little bullying. Apple used to be extremely litigious, IBM has done more than their share of strong arming, and I'm pretty sure that you can fill in the blanks for SCO and Microsoft.
But some of the "favorite" companies fight just as dirty. Perhaps a company should be expected to be able to heft its weight around in order to gain a respectable place in the market. It's not something that I necessarily agree with, but it seems like you can't really survive with out it.
There's my rant for the evening. I've officially been pointed me down the road towards depression thinking about this.
Re:Nasty (Score:5, Insightful)
Nintendo has managed to repackage all the old mario games for the snes and nes and sell them for new(almost identical to the originals). This time, they weren't cool about releasing all the games in one cartridge(ala Super Mario Allstars).
And Nintendo is not the only one doing things like this on the Gameboy.
that's a damn shame... (Score:2, Insightful)
Quite a loss (Score:5, Insightful)
It's held up for 4(or 5) long years as the best RPG of all time IMO. For using such an old bioware engine, it's actually held up quite well. While graphics were never its strong points, the story alone is worth the purchase. I don't mean to plug it or anything, but if you have yet to play it, and consider yourself an RPG fan, drop 10 bucks and pick it up at any store that sells PC games.
And remember, for all Your P:T needs, The Pit: http://torment.db-forge.com/
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
-
Are we at a point where the gaming masses have become so retarded as to ensure that only copycat FPS, RTS and sports games ever get produced? Plots, characters, atmosphere, it's all gone, but who gives a shit. As long as we can all get 90 fps in Doom3 and relive our favorite Monday Night Football moments, the industry'll be alright.
The truly sad part is the rabid fanboys of FPSs who obsess over frame rates and ever tiny detail are a great minority of gamers. It's very interesting to look at the top sales charts for any given month. Generally 1-3 of the top 20 will be FPS games, the rest aren't. In fact, games with little hardcore gamer appeal consistently take up top spots. (The Sims & their 100 expansion packs for instance.) Many game companies (this means you Interplay) apparently can't see the truth out there and shoot for the hardcore audience. The problem is the real money is in pleasing the general audience.Before I'm skewered for that statement, let me point out that you don't have to dumb down a game to make it appealing to both hard core and casual gamers. A game with a great engrossing story, decent graphics (they don't have to be the world's best) and a serious fun value (something a lot of games forget about) will please nearly everyone. Sure the frame-rate crowd will complain about the lack of quantum texturing or some such crap, but most people will be happy with it and it'll sale really well.
The other unfortunate thing is game companies (again, this means you Interplay) that seem to think PC Gaming is dead, when nothing could be further from the truth. Right now PCs are capable of better graphics than any of the current consoles, and the next crop of consoles is at best a year off (if rumors of Nintendo announcing a new console at E3 next year are true). Hell, now's the perfect time to push PC gaming since current consoles are towards the end of their life cycle.
That being said though, I've ended up a console gamer because of the lack of quality control in PC games. (aka the ship it then patch it approach.) I got sick of finding out I'd have to download huge patches to make a game playable, or need to update to fix a horrid glitch and invalidate my save games in the process. No thanks, I'll stick to consoles till game publishers figure out that consumers want a game that works out of the box. Yes I know that not all console games are perfect, but the extra testing they go through from the console maker as well as from the company making them help out a lot.
I just worry that with the next generation of consoles all likely coming with hard drives and built-in Internet connectivity that publishers will move the ship then patch mentality over to consoles too. If that happens, I'm afraid video gaming as a whole will suffer in ways that'll be pitiful, and potentially non-recoverable from.
Good night, BIS (Score:2, Insightful)
I believe Planescape: Torment revolutionized the world of RPG, and not enough people noticed.
I am pretty much a console gamer now, and I've yet to see any console RPG with the level of writing that PS:T possessed. Many games pose themselves as epics, yet feature nothing but shallow dialogue, psuedo-philosophical ramblings, and CGs aimed at horny high school kids.
What may change the nature of a man? This question ran the risk of cliche, but it was interwoven so tightly into the game system and writing that the premise took fantasy role-playing to unmatched heights. Morte, Annah, Nameless..you shal be missed.
Yeah, then there were those Fallout games, too.
So long, Black Isle.
A lot of people would have bought Fallout 3 (Score:2, Insightful)
Many, many gamers think fallout/fallout2 was the best game they ever played! How could they cancel this. Was it really that crap?
Re:Nasty (Score:4, Insightful)
Poor Management, Xbox, Greed, Suits and Deadlines are probably the more likely reason.
And maybe because crappy games sell - while stellar games - for a smaller audience - do not sell as much, why should'nt they make a hack'n slash that will sell a million titles, instead of a RPG that will sell 100,000.
Re:Questions.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Doom, Halo, GTA, Warcraft, and all of those games have an entirely different sort of appeal to me. I don't look at those games like good books. To me they are like action movies. The are without a doubt fun, but I play them in a very detached manner. The ending to the original Fallout left me choking and getting watery eyed. The ending to Warcraft or Half-Life just made me shrug and wonder when the sequel was coming out. Don't get me wrong, I love those games, but for entirely different reasons.
The point certainly is valid that such companies need to make money. BIS made some great games, but they also made some real bombs. The fact that they did a poor job on the financial end doesn't invalidate the quality games they did put out. Hopefully someone will come along pick up the pieces and package it into something more financially sound. I am still going to miss BIS though, despite thier suckage when it comes to making money.
Re:Questions.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The point was not that the games played like a novel. They didn't. They played like games. The difference was then when you get to the end of it and all was said and done, instead of shrugging your shoulders and idly wondering when the sequal was going to come out, you could have an emotional response. That is a good thing. If you can make something that has all the perks of a game put the emotional response of a novel, you have something special on your hands. BIS did that at least twice for me.
If a developer gets done making a great game with wonderful game play, and at the end people are touched by it in some way, then that developer wold have to be an idiot to try and pull that content. No sane developer is going to go, "Wowa... hold on a second boys, that plot has people having an emotional reaction. Can we dumb this down a little?" Having great game play and a powerful story is a good thing, not something to be avoided as you seem to suggest.
Re:A huge loss with death of Fallout (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd certainly hope so too, but I'd rather have it end at Fallout 2 than have Fallout 3 radically changed to accomodate the publisher's requirements to sell to the "unwashed masses" and remove elements that made the Fallout series good.
I've said the same thing about Deus Ex 2 ("It'd have been amazing"), and then tried playing it, but it have been a major disappointment for me, esp. the perceived bias towards the Lower Common Denominator of gamers on consoles and I don't want it to happen to Fallout 3.
Background: Looking Glass created the original Deus Ex under Warren Spector. Looking Glass was closed down, but Warren Spector also lead the development for Deus Ex 2 under Ion Storm and Eidos (of Daikatana fame)...
Just like Wing Commander (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nasty (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.princeofpersiagame.com/index.php
nice (Score:2, Insightful)
-jp
Re:Not only are we (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess KOTOR, the Legacy of Kain series, Eternal Darkness, every Metroid game, Whiplash, and BloodRayne 2 don't count, eh? And those are just the ones I've actually played or am looking forward to.
While the multiplayer/MMO market is sizeable, I think that companies who bet on it to the detriment of all single-player games are going to lose in a big way.
There are too many types of game that don't lend themselves to anything other than single-player. The online experience so far also seems to be incredibly shallow, even if it is time consuming (e.g. Everquest).
A lot of people (including myself) are interested in playing through a story-based scenario at our own pace, not hunting up loot and levelling for 8 hours a day or playing FPS/RTS games on the same maps over and over.
Wrong management. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nasty (Score:2, Insightful)
The gaming industry is more and more starting to feel like just another Hollywood branch. I wonder how long it takes before they'll start redoing old games, like they're doing with all old classic movies now?
They are redoing the old games. Just not the way you think of it (putting in them fancy new graphics and releasing them on same platform).
In gaming industry, they rerelease the games on new platform. Like Sonic Adventure went from DreamCast to every popular console today, with little or no changes. Like Space Invaders was rereleased with the same format. Like those "Classic XYZ collection" which comes packed with the same old games..
And very rarely they release the game with better graphics, but they have been doing that also. Like releasing SMB again on SNES [mobygames.com] or Bubble Bobble [mobygames.com], but as you can see - these releases are old (in computer gaming sense) and nothing new here.
The point is, that is more easy to release classic games ported to new systems, like on joysticks [thinkgeek.com]. Why? Because there is a fanatic group of people out there who still thinks these games are cool. And I'm one of them.
Re:Let Interplay know (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't fault Interplay for closing the studio down. BI wasn't making money. Interplay is a business. They can't keep a studio running on merit alone.. =P
Anyhow, I'm going to go cry for Fallout 3..
Re:Nasty (Score:5, Insightful)
Too true, unfortunately.
Planescape: Torment was an incredible game. The whole thing revolved around story, not combat, and you didn't directly interact in combat unless you were casting spell or using an item. You were lucky if you got to Level 15 with the Nameless One by the end of the game. While it was important to level up and boost traits, it was not your driving motivation.
Compare this to Diablo 2. Diablo 2 has one objective - go kill monsters. There's a hair-thin storyline to move you from wilderness to wilderness, but the whole point was to get more gold, new stuff, and higher levels. It was certainly fun, but it was far less satisfying to get another level up because you had killed yet another wraith of some sort than the P:T way of doing things where you could get huge exp through intelligent (and sometimes very bizarre) discussions. The game was so beautfully imaginative that it almost seemed like combat wasn't even necessary at times.
Incidentally, to see some pretty cool fireworks in P:T, launch Level 1 magic missiles, Ignus's tongues of flame, and Dak'kon's reign of anger all at the same time. That'll take down almost any normal enemy without resistances in a heartbeat (it's great against the Carceri guards), plus it looks really cool.
Re:It's all good (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nasty (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll bite, but only because you've been modded +2 Insightful instead of -1 Troll like you should've been.
Care to share your damning evidence of all this rampant piracy with the rest of us? I just built a Windoze box for gaming and I own 2 Black Isle titles right now that I purchased at full price: Planscape: Torment and Baldur's Gate. I also owned Fallout, again, purchased at full price, at one time, but have since traded it to someone else. I own exactly 0 titles that I've copied - legally or otherwise (though, I threw out my jewel case for Starcraft which had my CD Key on it, so I had to get a keygen for it - but I still own the actual CD and manual). I've never copied a game for anyone else.
Fan Boy RPG Groupies (Score:5, Insightful)
For all that effort, the game is placed in a channel with a very small market footprint. Sports (including racing) and (first|third) person shooter/platform console games now rule the because they are easy to communicate to the market, and there is a market waiting to buy them. Think of how many parents who have purchased consoles for the kiddies, and are responsible for buying the game. Imagine them browsing the store shelves. Only the most dumbed down concept and straight forward message is going to make it through. "Hey, lets buy Timmy a football game."
So something like Planescape Torment, which is one of the great RPGs of the modern PC era, is completely beyond most of the market. It offends parts of the market simply by context (a game played in the realm of the gods? Pagans!) and it has an appropriately ugly box cover of the Unnamed One. You can't install Torment as a "demo" in the store, because most people would see a static isomorphic view with no action, and walk on past.
Console RPG makers learned long ago that you have to sacrifice integrity to move product. Thus console RPGs have "over the top" limit break moves, FMV of sexy anime babes and leveling treadmills that makes the D&D system look tame.
Thoughtful storylines probably should take refuge in books. The era of the gaming geek being the majority gamer is over, and so the market follows the money. All I can hope is that a few publishers will weather the storm and be willing to sell to the niche. Of course, if you want worse, you should check the health of my other favorite type of game: the turn base strategy game. Thank goodness for game boy SP: without it, that style would be extinct.
reoccuring trend (Score:3, Insightful)
I've seen way too many good studios go downhill after a large, kickass release, only to disappoint with sequels because their better employees have left. Activision's Mechwarrior series is a good example of this: after Mechwarrior 2's line of games, MS bought 'em out. Now, Mechwarrior isn't even entertaining. Currently, Mech3 and Mech4 are sad mimics. While they have better graphics, their gameplay is stunted due to poor insight into how the game dynamics work, and other things of that nature. Story isn't even there, and the in-game audio is anything but satisfactory. Mech2's stuff, on the other hand, had the opposite of all that I complain about.
Off the top of my head, two more developer studios that snowballed after a couple great runs were Westwood, Blizzard and Interplay.
Blizzard kicked ass with Warcraft through Starcraft, and with Diablo 1 and 2 (so I hear, I'd rather not waste my time with such impersonal RPGs - the real thing is better. I hear single player was good, though.). Now, look at them. Their latest release, War3, sucked major goat scrotum. I hear it's because it wasn't developed by the same folks as the previous RTS releases.
Westwood came out swinging fairly strong... and then did nothing. Command and Conquer was a great game, and Red Alert was pretty fun too. But their games have done nothing but improve since then - in graphic quality. And that's about it. They've got nearly the same units, and the same AI, in almost every single game. Don't even start talking about Renegade. Urg.
Interplay created a cult following with Descent and Descent II. Descent III wasn't much of anything special - it didn't improve upon II at all, and didn't offer much in terms of real gameplay value. Sequels can only go so far without new concepts and gameplay-types interjected. A better multiplayer existence would have helped.
My letter to Interplay (Score:3, Insightful)
Gaming these days (Score:2, Insightful)
The type of game created by Black Isle had the quality where they would draw you in and make you want to keep playing indefinitely. This is a great thing for a game, because many are just behavior mods designed to keep you at your computers.
These days though, people want games that you can play for a short time and stop. Maybe pick it up again later, but not one that engrosses you to the point where you don't notice the sun coming up. I would say the money is definitely in the former type of game. People's schedules don't accommodate time sinks the way they used to. That could be a little false nostalgia.
Occasionally you'll find great titles that function for both the marathon and the casual player (e.g. Tetris or KOTOR, or certain massive online games) but it doesn't happen that much, at least in my experience.
So in addition to Interplay's troubles as a company, BIS' demise is a sign of the times.
Ravi
Re:Interplay wants to make money, not games (Score:2, Insightful)
Interplay shut down BIS because they will be console-only from now on. Their stock is at 7 cents/share and they've lost their Matrix and DnD licences (Baldur's Gate 3 was about 90% done when they messed that up) and all they have is the Fallout licence. They think, for some ungodly reason, thing the bastard that is Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel and its sequel will generate more revenue than F3 would.
For canning a game that they repeatedly promised for 4 years, all the while pumping out DnD titles, finally announcing after unleashing a Fallout console game with about as much to do with Fallout as a beer commercial and canning a dedicated, talented team and a great development house 2 week before Christmas, they have my absolute animosity.
All I want from Interplay now is for them the fail. I can't do much(spread bad word of mouth about their future titles (if they even last that long) and retell how shittily they fired off a few dozen people)but I'll do what I can.
Fuck Interplay.
Re:Questions.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Stanley Kubrick was no Quentin Tarantino. Kids like yourself probably think the latter is the better filmmaker. Enjoy your consensus. May you continue to run your life by it.