Troika did all development on Temple of Elemental Evil, Atari simply published it.
I didn't think Atari had done anything more than that, but thanks for the headup on Troika's relationship with TOEE--I had heard long ago that they were only peripherally involved, and accepted that.
Granted, it wasn't as good as I had hoped it might be, but I personally thought that Arcanum was a fantastic open-ended RPG.
After the Fallout games, I would have expected Arcanum at the very least to 1) possess a good interface, and 2) possess a decent follower combat AI. What surprised me was the truly awful quality of both. There were many good points to Arcanum, and I've been a supporter of the game, but these two points didn't win it any friends.
Having seen Vampire: Bloodlines firsthand on a few occasions, I think their reputation will increase dramatically when it is released (barring another bug-filled release).
I hope so, sincerely. ToEE was pretty and a good engine implementation, but if one's looking for reasonable interaction with NPCs or sensible quests, there's none of it, there.
That said, they approved the mess. I suspect, given its extraordinary amount of bugs when released, that Troika simply wanted to get it out the door.
For me, this is the heart of the problem. I can accept that a company makes design mistakes. I can accept the implementation of poor AI. I can even accept (with a looong stretch) that every NPC you encounter in a Troika game feels obliged to devulge their deepest secrets to a party of people they've never seen before, and asked for help on achieving goals they could probably have managed in one-tenth the time if they'd just asked around. Admittedly, accepting these things changes the "roleplaying" into "rollplaying," but if it's a dungeon crawl folks want, who am I to deny it to them?
But when a company releases arguably the buggiest game since Ultima 9 knowingly to a gaming public that it's convinced through PR is the biggest, brightest thing ever, they have created a major credibility problem for themselves, IMO. And when they do this just to get it out the door, they don't engender much sympathy. A few bugs are understandable. It's impossible to release a game of any decent size and scope these days in a pristine fashion. But when you issue incredibly buggy code in the hopes that you can sucker your intended audience into thinking they're getting a reasonably good playing experience of the deal--credibility is blown out of the water. It's just my POV, but I think Troika has a lot of ground to make up, here.
