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Gyromancer
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North Carolina, USA
Jan 1970
time: 00:25
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Well, for one thing, a rumor is just a rumor. It's probably not worth getting upset over, yet.
That said, QS certainly demonstarated their willingness to lay developers off when they gave Emrich (the original designer) the boot.
/begin mostly baseless speculation
It all seems to make some kind of strange sense. Imagine QS going to IG and saying, "Once we release MOO3 we're laying the team off." IG replies, "OK, but make sure the game works well enough. We don't want any bad PR from a buggy game, especially if we can't patch it." QS replies, "OK, we'll spend an extra month or two regression testing it"
/end mostly baseless speculation
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wervdon
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I doubt the rumor is true given its source, but if it is true the only real significance if you ask me is the prospects for either an expansion pack or sequels to more of microprose's former titles.
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jscott991
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Even if the game is good, it is being released at a bad time of the year and might have suffered from cost overruns associated with the three additional months of testing/bug fixing. That could be a reason for the layoffs, despite the quality of the game.
Others will disagree, but not releasing this game before Christmas is going to seriously impact the sales and future support for MOO3. If they truly were fiddling around with MP bugs, then they are going to regret this decision, as they should.
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Corentor
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Don't worry about patching or the possibility of the lack of a patch or patches. It does not take an entire dev team to make patches, some gaming companies dedicate only a person or two who are familiar with the codebase and so long as the game is released without showstoppers, it is sufficient.
As for the rumors, for those of you who don't know, Fatbabies is one of the best sites on the net that dig up dirt on the industry. Unlike major sites which recieve large amounts of advertising dollars from gaming publishers and thus are worried about pissing them off, Fatbabies has no such dependencies and thus posts whatever it wants, whenever it wants, most of it comming from employees on the inside.
The rumor that the dev team is getting laid off is no surprise. Programmers and artists get paid decent money for their work and when a small developement house doesn't have a major project lined up with a publisher (a developer's primary source of funds), people have to be let go. It happens all the time and shouldn't shock or worry anyone.
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H Tower
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i have a simple math equation for you:
layoffs=!no patches
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kalbear
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quote:
i have a simple math equation for you:
layoffs=!no patches |
Layoffs gets the negated value of 'no patches'?
Thus, layoffs == patches?
Just being a smartass. 
I know of very few development houses that don't do this. It's a common thing for EA, for Westwood, for Interplay's various houses, and yes, for IG. Dont' fret about it none. It doesn't bode well or poorly either way for Moo3. It might bode ill for QS doing MoM2, however.
Moo and Moo2 had quite a few patches. Moo2 had at least 4 that I recall, and only two of them were actually good. Moo2 1.3 was hilarious, though - all the races were completely schizophrenic. They'd blame you for your economic imperialism as your BCs were in the multiple negatives, and then give you a planet as a peace offering to stop your warfare.
It was really, really funny. Especially on drugs.
A
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darcy
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quote:
If they truly were fiddling around with MP bugs, then they are going to regret this decision, as they should. |
quote:
No they shouldn't. No developer should ever regret making their software the best they can, with as few bugs as possible. I can't believe someone would say that about a computer game... |
Well, it is possible to say something like that about the MP part about a game. If I'm not mistaken the people who are actively interested in multiplayer gaming are a small and economically insignificant minority. They are however very vocal and naturally populate all internet sites, so they are often perceived as a majority and influence public opinion. So, late game MP problems might matter for less people than we think.
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jscott991
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Neverwinter Nights was no where near finished when released. Need I remind of you of the XP bug? The fact you couldn't complete the Host Tower chapter about 50% of the time because the battle on top would not start?
If you want an example of a game largely finished before released, you need only look at the other DnD game, IWD2. There are minor faults in it, but nothing gamebreaking.
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kalbear
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eidos went belly-up? They're still quite active right now. DX2 is coming out, hitman 2 is doing decently, timesplitters 2 did great on the console, and they've got that whole tomb raider franchise to go on.
Eidos lost a lot on Daikatana, but I'd never heard anything about that loss being the reason that LG went under. If anything, it was due to the fact that Thief 2/System Shock 2 were both highly critical successes that did excessively badly in terms of sales, especially compared to what they expected.
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Corentor
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quote:
Originally posted by Arnelos
Eidos, the publisher for Looking Glass, spent inordinant amounts of money on Daikatana and went belly-up when the game completely flopped... Looking Glass, which was in debt, then went flop despite Thief 2 being a success.
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That said, I'm highly skeptical of the rumor. |
I believe you are refering to Ion Storm Dallas, the division of Ion Storm that was operated by John Romero. His situation has nothing in common with the rumoured QS layoffs. Romero proclaimed himself as the second comming and spent five years doing nothing while 3 full dev teams walked out on him and then he released a pile of trash as a game.
Looking Glass went under because of the same problem as rumored to be happening with QS: No new contract - hence no publisher funding them.
While it is still a rumour, it is from a site that has a history of getting it right since its info comes from employees on the inside.
The only thing I am worried is that if there is a layoff, that means no expansion pack or major new features in patches.
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jscott991
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Grumbold, you should visit the boards for NWN and look up the old problems with the conclusion of the Host Tower chapter. Bioware admitted that this problem was being experienced by many, if not most, players. The battle on the top would simply not trigger, making the campaign uncompletable unless you cheated and warped into the next chapter.
Plus, the XP bug which was not fixed until months after release substantially effected gameplay. You could earn XP about 3-4x faster if you just summoned a badger and had it hang around. The entire formula, which to my knowledge has never been totally fixed, made MP advancement nearly impossible. This is hardly a minor bug for a RPG.
I won't get in to how good or bad the game is. Suffice it to say, if you wanted BG3, you didn't get it. If you wanted Diablo 3 or Dungeon Siege 2, you were largely satisfied.
quote:
Originally posted by Grumbold
NWN had minor bugs on release, nothing more. A tiny percentage of very vocal customers understandably made a lot of noise about the problems they had with the SP campaign. Others just mouthed off because they didn't like the style of the adventure itself. |
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04-02-2003 23:01
) that we're not experiencing that here. If I'm wrong, I'll have learned to trust my hunches less and stay well away from gambling 
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