Shadowrun most likely turned out the way it did because of management/investor decisions. The devs simply have to make do with the situation and try their best even if the foundation is horrible. Wishing death on a studio and people losing their jobs isn't a very nice thing to do.

the guy in charge kept talking about how he and his fellow programmers were avid online shooter players and thats how they were designing the game. to hell with what the original game was.......that didnt matter to them. this wasnt some faceless investor saying it it was the head guy for FASA or whatever they were called. they completely ignored everyone and i mean everyone in the forums concerning the direction they were taking and the game didnt sell and they lost their shirts. good riddance to them for ruining one of the best franchises ever. i hope that tool never gets hired again.

the people at eidos montreal who are making the Deus Ex Human Resources game which is another very popular franchise, have made an attempt to listen to their forums and have even made several changes because of overwhelming opposition to certain ideas. im not too fond of the head guy over there either since he though the first deus ex was "boring" and he was the one that pretty much destroyed the rainbow six franchise..........at least he learned his lesson though. they even put out videos showing the differences between the PC version and the console version. how many developers have done that?

FASA got what they deserved and they can svck it.

Their QA is improving. And besides the graphical horrors of a new engine, NWN2 was less buggy than KotOR2. Obsidian is just really bad at managing time and pour it more into ideas than technology. The devs even admit this in interviews, so it's not like they are looking for any excuses.

Oh, and Fallout 2 was the only project that one could really call to be in the spirit of what Obsidian does now - take game, make big, lots of more creative input. And that one was horribly bugged, too. ^_^

Maybe, but Mask of the Betrayer made it ALL okay.

Obsidian games, a plethora of buggy awesomeness at launch. They are still one of the only developers who understand that a modern rpg doesn't need to be boiled down to interchangeable cutscenes or simply a straight action game with "options" in order to sell. Let's just forget about the sales of Alpha Protocol on this one. That game didn't get the respect it (mostly) deserved.

Mainly because it was a bad game.

The core concept of a computer RPG is to define a character through decisions and statistics. I think both the Bioware approach (storybook) and the Obsidian approach (story branches) are equally viable. But I agree that we need more of the latter, since Obsidian is, right now, the only bigger dev to follow it.

Oh Alpha Protocol, you horribly broken beauty.

Weren't Bethesda in charge of the New Vegas Q&A, or did I hear wrong?

Personally I'd take a buggy Obsidian game over most of the games I see released lately. Bugs can be fixed but a crappy/boring game will generally stay that way.

True. But that's like being mauled by a tiger instead of a lion.

Still, not an excuse to say that they deserved, its not a good thing to say

As for Deux Ex being "boring", people tend to aim in his neck just for criticizing the first game, looks like that the game was the big one, since that no one can say that :rolleyes:

we are going to have to disagree on the jobs part. i dont believe that bad developers should be employeed. if they are employeed, they are making bad games. im not digging the random programmer who just does what he is told but the head designers and programmers.

Deus Ex is considered by almost anyone who has played it to be one, if not the best game in its kind ever. alot of people were worried because or what he did with rainbow six essentially turning it into a generic console shooter. when they first started on HR they started talking up third person cover system, flashy scripted takedowns........you know those totatally awesome game mechanics. :rolleyes:

after intense negative feedback and i mean several factors more than the "bring spears back" threads in the skyrim section, they changed it so that the crappy cover system is optional now and scripted takedowns are very limited in use. me personally, i will be avoiding them like the plague. the fact that they made the changes has turned alot of the most ardent nitpickers around. the only thing that i still wish they would fix up are the "xbox" graphics which are dull and flat. the art style helps mitigate it some though so its not a huge deal for me.

edit: they recently just changed the "highlights" that show everything to be optional as well. if the game comes out like they are selling it now and its better than IW this will be a developer that i will be looking to get games from in the future.

Installed PS:T, Widescreen Mod, Ghostdog's UI Mod, Fixpack, Unfinished Business, Tweak Pack. LETS DO THIS.

Edit: Wow, works flawlessy on Windows 7 and the latest ATI drivers. No DDraw issues or anything. Sweet!

Yup, Infinity Engine rocks. ^_^

OMG! I really really hope they do make a sequel I've been waiting since 99. Everyone who knows me, knows Planescape is my #1 favorite rpg of all time!

Someone who never ever played Fallout 2 at launch detected.

Also I really don't care about bugs. Some of my favourite rpgs of all time are Troika games and they were more buggy than Obsidian games are.

Well last time getting PS:T to run on WinXP 64 bit was a pain, I had to disable DDraw through some kind of compatibility program in order for the game not to stutter constantly, and a side effect of disabling that was that the cursor left trails of itself everywhere in the menus. Not pretty.

Not sure if it's the switch to Win7 or the updated graphics drivers that fixed it for me now. Either way, it works!

Where did you find those mods

As I've explained, I NORMALLY don't mind bugs in a game. It's natural for some to slip by, especially in today's modern RPGs that have so much going on inside of them. HOWEVER, as I've also explained, when the bugs are SO BAD that some people can't even get a game to work upon first installing it and have to wait for the first or even second patch to be released to play it, that is entirely TOO buggy, even for me(let's put it this way: If you were to go to a fast food restaurant, order a cheeseburger and fries, and then be given it, but then told that you had to wait a week until you could eat it, would you be happy? Would you EVER go back to that particular restaurant ever again? especially if you heard of other people having similar problems there several years later? NO? I didn't think so). That was the case for Neverwinter Nights 2, and since then, I've had a very hard time trusting Obsidian when it comes to RPG type games, and after FO:NV was released with numerous bugs, including some that caused some people to be unable to finish the game, it just soured me on them even more.

Also, you are correct. Actually, I've NEVER played Fallout or Fallout 2. I had never even heard of the Fallout Franchise until Bethesda acquired it. I wasn't into Post Apocalyptic games with guns, even if they were RPGs, when I was younger. So, no, I have no idea how buggy FO2 was ^^. I just use what I know of Obsidian now.

All http://www.spellholdstudios.net/shs/modding, under the Planescape: Torment mods tab on the left.

I don't like the chances... You're going to need to get rights from so many people its going to be a headache.

But if they do manage it, they'll have to do Ultima next, cos that will take an equally impressive minor miracle.

There's a big difference between "we'd like to do this" and "we are actively considering a sequel."

I love Planescape, I picked up the original campaign boxed set when it was first released and DMed it through middle school and high school. After the very disappointing Blood Wars trilogy of books, which were awful in their own right and did a crummy job with the setting, I was elated to play through Torment and not only find an excellent RPG but an excellent portrayal of the setting. At first a sequel sounds great but I really don't think it could be pulled off. The planer cosmology was changed quite a bit in 3E and 3.5 E and I have no idea what it looks like in 4E, although I'm highly skeptical that the 4E ruleset would fit into this setting well. (Although I do have to admit that AD&D had it's faults and one could argue it didn't fit the setting particularly well either).

If Obsidian was able to do a Planescape game, and maintain the setting of the original, I think that would be great. If they were allowed to heavily tweak the underlying rule system to fit the campaign that would be even better. Without these I'd be quite skeptical but I wouldn't be read to throw in the towel either.

Rather than a new game in the Planescape setting I'd much rather see a true spiritual successor - something that built with an on interaction, characters, and belief, with a unique setting on top of it. This side steps the problems of using Planescape, even if it is dear to my heart, while also giving the developers more leeway in where they take the game. Sounds great to me.

New interview with Chris Avellone here:
http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,2055.0.html

Gold

http://thunderpeel2001.blogspot.com/2009/01/planescape-torment-fully-modded.html, for those tempted to play the original (again) now.

This again? Nobody noticed that Bethesda did the QA for Fallout: New Vegas, eh? The QA team were all Bethesda employees. True story.

Obsidian's biggest problem is taking projects with ridiculously short timeframes and low budgets. To say that buggy games have to do with a company's "work ethic" just shows a complete lack of understanding of how games projects are managed and budgeted. Honestly, what kind of company would spend months of their lives working on a project and then just decide to go out for a beer instead of doing testing? To assume this is what is going on is absurd. When you're a smaller dev shop that mostly gets farmed-out sequel projects and hasn't produced any big cash cows for publishers you don't have a lot of clout. When it comes time to release and you tell said publisher that the game still needs work they'll tend to say, "too bad...release and patch later."

Could Obsidian be better at scaling down their games to make sure they get done on schedule? Probably, although it's not as easy as it sounds when your developers have to learn someone else's dev tools before they can even start planning enhancements and you're working on a drastically shortened schedule as such sequel projects typically are. I'm not saying they don't have a bad track record with buggy releases (then again, so does Bethesda), but to say that it has anything to do with laziness or work ethic is silly.