Jason Anderson working for Interplay again

According to this news post @ Blues News Interplay (yes, they are still around) has hired Jason Anderson. Jason will be working on an “unannounced MMORPG”. I am pretty sure that’s the Fallout MMORPG Hervé Caen has been talking about for some time now. Although it’s good to hear that Jason is back in the industry, I don’t think it was a good idea to work for Interplay again…

Update: According to the Fallout 3 Blog, Jason Anderson will not be working on the Fallout MMOG but on another yet unannounced MMOG. Hmm, I remember the unannounced part from the original news but assumed there hasn’t been a formal announcement of the Fallout MMOG yet. Hmm, I think I was mistaken. So Interplay is working on two MMOGs or has the Fallout MMOG been cancelled?

Bloodlines patched to 4.3

Another unofficial Vampire Bloodlines patch has been released. It can be downloaded at The Patches Scroll.

New Arcanum modules!

Although “Arcanum – Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura” is out for some years now, several avid fans are still working hard to bring us some new modules to play. And working hard they are, since WorldEd is not the easiest piece of software to use (I tried and failed).

• The first new module was created by Lord of Halifax and its written completely in the french language. It’s called “Le livre des Ombres” and can be dowloaded at the Arcanum Lab.
• The second new module, called Doomsday was created by Terra Arcanum forum regular Quaid. This module is hosted at the other remaining Troika Games fansite “Terra Arcanum“. You can download it here.

I found news about both modules at Terra Arcanum. Special thanks to mathboy for posting the news!

Carbine Studios interview

When I first read about Carbine Studios and Tim Cain’s involvement, I thought about asking them to do an interview for the “Troika Chronicles”. So I contacted NCSoft and David Swofford (Director of Public Relations) arranged the whole thing for me. Thanks again, David!
So Jeremy Gaffney (Executive Producer), Tim Cain (Lead Programmer) and Kevin Beardslee (VP of Design) answered some questions for me.

Steve Moret on Python

While searching for some information on the Python scripting language I stumbled upon an interview that Steve Moret gave pygame.org some time after the release of ToEE. Although it’s quite old, it’s still an interesting read:

Coming off of Arcanum, which used an internal scripting language (an opcode based system that used a GUI tool used to select language constructs), we wanted something that could give scripters more power to do complex tasks, yet still minimize the chance of user introduced errors. In my search for this programming holy grail, I looked at Python, Small, and Lua, and finally decided upon Python because of its simple syntax, its integrated high level language constructs (tuples, classes, exceptions, and serialization), and its ease of integration into our code base. I have to admit, my prior Python experience gave it a bit of a bias, but I always say go with what you know. And we did.

Check out the full interview here.

Jason D. Anderson interview @ NMA

No Mutants Allowed, the (in)famous Fallout fansite has posted their interview with Troika co-founder Jason D. Anderson. Here’s an excerpt for your convenience:

When I was around 9 or 10, my mom read an article about Gary Gygax and went out and bought me the basic D&D set. (Remember the blue one? The one with the die that fell apart when you threw them?) I didn’t have anyone to play with, so I created characters and played by myself until I found some friends at school to play with. We played nearly every day at school during lunch. I remember when the Advanced D&D books came out, with the Monster Manual, it was such a huge deal for us. And I remember when we heard about the movie BladeRunner and the cool world it was taking place in, we used the D&D system as a model and made up our own RPG based on a BladeRunner-esque world. We also liked to play Avalon Hill games and sit around dreaming up our own RPG systems and talking about the games we’d make one day. At that time, home computers were pretty scarce. But one of my friend’s parents had a computer that we would play Space War on (I think that was its name).

Check out NMA for the full interview!

Carbine Studios

Tim Cain, one of the founders of Troika Games, is finally back in the industry. He is programming director of the newly founded Carbine Studios, a dev team consisting mainly of former Blizzard employees. Cabine Studios is part of NCSoft and is currently working on an unannounced MMORPG.

The concept art on the Carbine Studios website gives some hints on the nature of their project without revealing too much.
The “Troika Chronicles” will cover this new game in the future, so stay tuned! If anyone knows of any interesting projects by former Troika people please let me know.
P.S.: Many thanks to Friede for pointing me into the right direction!

Update: There is an interesting article at the Orange County Register website about the new studio and its unannounced project: “It will be an MMOG. There will be some fantasy thrown in but it’s a cross-genre game. And there will be dancing.”

Reading recommendation

If you have enjoyed the magic vs. tech setting in Arcanum I can recommend you some great stories written by Randall Garrett. His stories about the investigator Lord Darcy are set into an alternative 20th century where magic has replaced technology. The setting is of course different from the one in Arcanum, but in my opinion the Lord Darcy stories are a must for every fantasy fan.
You can get the paperpack version of the complilation Lord Darcy at amazon.com (or amazon.de for my german visitors).

Update: I forgot to link directly to the book in question… oops, my bad. It’s fixed now.

The Rise and Fall of Troika

Today I was surfing the ‘net looking for some Troika related articles when I found “The Rise and Fall of Troika“, a well written and researched article about the demise of our favorite game company. Here’s an excerpt for your convenience:

Developing Bloodlines was troublesome for the company. They found themselves having to wade through nearly government-level red tape to accomplish anything. Compared to the relative freedom they had with Arcanum, “design, by necessity, had to become a lot more structured in a game like Vampire, where we had to run everything not only by White Wolf but by the publisher as well.” On top of that, they were using a prototype of the Source engine, one that didn’t yet have Valve’s high-class AI built in, and Troika’s AI code didn’t play very nice with Source.

The complete article can be read at The Escapist.

Interviews added

I finally updated the Q&A page. Here is a complete list of the interviews we did with the guys from Troika Games:

• Tim Cain Q&A #1
• Tim Cain Q&A #2
• Tim Cain Q&A #3
• Steve Moret Q&A
• Leonard Boyarsky Q&A