A world without Troika Games

PC gaming has been in decline within recent years -but definitely not dying- especially the RPG genre. But as an avid role-play gamer, I denied that fact. I only dismissed the decline as a dry spell that the genre would soon recover from. But when Troika Games -one of the best computer RPG developer- went defunct early last year, I knew that PC RPG won't be the same again.

Troika Games has always been loved and hated by both gamers and game reviewers. Loved, because of the unique design of their games. Hated, because their games are plagued with bugs. Me, I loved them and played all of their games. True, their games were unique and buggy but it's always better to have a unique buggy game than a crappy bug-free game. A buggy game can be patched and fixed but there's definitely no remedy for a crappy game.

Now, more than two years after Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Troika Games' last masterpiece, the founders shares their story with The Escapist: The Rise and Fall of Troika. And here are some interesting things that I found.

"Troika's original goal had been to just be exclusive to one publisher, kind of their external RPG dev team," he says, "so we wouldn't have to always be scrambling for contracts. At first, Sierra seemed to be that publisher - even when they weren't sure about an Arcanum sequel, they had us working on something else. But then Sierra had its own problems, and that was the end of that." -- Leonard Boyarsky

I wonder if there would be an Arcanum sequel, or if Troika would still be around, if Sierra didn't had any troubles.

"The team was also working on the spiritual successor to Fallout, but couldn't find anyone willing to bite on the end of their line." --The Escapist

I guess game publishers minds are hardwired to the fact that RPGs can only be in medieval/fantasy setting. Because if not, many would bite Troika's line to publish another post-apocalyptic game to many deprived fans of the post-apocalyptic genre.