Great now the two companies can both continue their fantastic trends of releasing unfinished titles. :D

JoWooD acquires Dreamcatcher
 

The ad hoc minus the company infos:
More information.

Hehe … I really love the stuff they try to do, perhaps with combined resources they can do better QA … or maybe they'll develop 'the greatest game ever (half) made!'

Yes, they do good titles and usually release them really unfinished. Probably they will help each other.

What if each one makes half a game and they put the 2 together?

This is today's biggest joke in news.

Actually Dreamcatcher releases their games a quarter finished and Jowood releases theirs half finished. I had the horror of playing Dungeon lords when it first came out when it should have still been in pre-alpha stages.

Dreamwood or Jocatcher?

Kind of like Dreamwood… fits the 16 to 20yr old Nancy Drew demographic… <yikes>

It would be like Siamese twins each with one butt cheek - a doubly half-assed game :D

And we all get to play comedian for a few hours ;)

:lol:

OK-- someone's got to say it:


Coming….

in 2008 (or 09 or 10)….


GOTHIC LORDS!!!

The small print:

(To be quickly followed by several patches over the course of several months that actually complete the game you already purchased. Some restrictions apply. Not valid in most states, but we're not telling you which. You'll have to find out on your own)

Wow, you guys are really harsh..:lol:

Very interesting news but we'll have to wait a long time before we can see how this plays out

Not long ago JoWood nearly went bankrupt, Gothic 3 must have sold very well when they already start buying other publishers.

I don't know about that. From the news clip, it seems it was a simple stock swap. Strictly paper. Granted, JoWood's stock has to be worth something to make the acquisition, but it's not like DC's stock price is in the stratosphere. Not to be a pessimist, but JoWood may have even rushed the purchase of DC to hedge their bets in case a disappointing showing of G3 in NA causes their stock to drop before the end of the year.

Would those restrictions be "new content not avaliable to original purchasuckers" I own the damn thing. Day 1 retail $43.99. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR >:O >:O

That would be very smart, actually - they're riding high with the success of Gothic 3 in Europe, and can leverage that. Dreamcatcher would have been wise to leverage their Painkiller success like that a couple of years ago. They have some decent properties, but much more work than money (like the nice adventure game Keepsake).

I think that all of us wish that it would create an entity that would get more games of the types we love published. But we fear that it will just keep the status quo of poorly polished and unsupported games flowing.

Theoretically speaking it´s a good idea to get access to TAC´s line-up because Germany is the world´s most important adventure market. These games are sold in decent numbers for full price. But practically you need a lot of creativity and know-how to market adventures. Only DTP / Anaconda has proven time and again that they can market adventures successfully. JoWooD is traditionally weak when it comes to smaller games. Furthermore - and that´s an important point - TAC often only has the North American rights. The lucrative German rights are with DTP, CDV, Flashpoint or Deep Silver.

I learn more about the global game market every day ;)

Im not very good at all with this inside baseball type of talk regarding game makers/publishers whatever.

So I'll just add a loud HAR HAR HAR! BOY THEY WILL DOUBLE-SUCK NOW!

Did I do it right?

I woke up with one this morning.

… Jocatcher sounds like a itch/rash product advertised by baseball player. "After a long season squatting down behind the plate, I need so Jocatcher just to walk right … "

One small publisher buying out another … let's hope something good comes out of this before they both go down the drain and someone big takes over …

Btw, I always thought that Gothic was announced as a three-part series. Pyrahna should do something entirely new for their own sake.

Well, after DL, I swore NEVER to buy another Dreamcatcher game. I hope PB switches publishers!!

Yep, me too. I would have checked out Metalheart and Painkiller but…Dreamcatcher - no go.

So if you got to buy DL 2x from Dreamcatcher, will the next game be something we buy 4 times?!?

Dungeon Lords… *shudder* i completely forgot about that…

In that case, i retract my earlier optimistic statement and would like to offer "DEAR GOD NO!! SAVE GOTHIC!!! *curls up in a fetal position, whimpering*

HI

I don't really understand this info/news sinde I know from varius European
Gothic 3 sites that Jowwod doesn't have any money - or at least not that much money….

This is why, according to the German Gothic 3 boards, that Jowood 'pressured' Piranha Bytes into releasing Gothic 3 way too early -
to get (a lot) of money.

Until further notice, I will remain skeptical of this/info news.

If it should be true, then I fear for The Adventure Company's fate (or or destiney). I hold it to be true that Jowood as a publisher for at least the last decade didn't hold any real interest in the adventure genre as such.

I just don't hope that Jowood only buys Dreamcatcher as a means to get
a profit on the bottom line, meaning that it will use Dreamcatcher's earnings
to cover is own financial losses.

From a strategic business perspective it is of course good news. This enables both Dreamcatcher as well as Jowood to release games at the same time - both in Europe and in the Northamerican market.

HI :)

It is I who made the comment before this post

aries100

Spot on.

Seriously though, I hope they can get their act(s) together and support some decent developers in a decent fashion. Perhaps Satan will start skating to work too.

Hey, guess what? I saw Dungeon Lords "Collectors Edition" in the store the other day! HAR HAR HAR HAR!!!

Man, that ONE guy must be really stoked they made it just for him. :lol:

You hadn't heard about that? Yep - in January they put out the CE, and made it so that the content was *only* available iif you paid $40 *AGAIN*.

I reviewed the CE here.

I'm glad I never bought the game. Fortunately I saw the red flags go up in the forums before I had the chance!
From the previews I've read it seems that "Neverend" is about the same way.

Well, I've had word that my G3 CE is on its way from New Zealand. The only problem is I'm now hooked on Need for Speed Carbon. I have definitely noted some flaws in the game, and a tad bit more buggy than what I'm used to from the likes of EA games. Still, the game is just brilliant in many respects. If you like NFS titles, this one is the cream of the crop. :cool:

OK, time to put my helmet on…

DL is actually a LOT of fun. If you like good, fast action, involved combat, nice monster and dungeon design and a slightly different take on character development, you'll like this one. It has some problems still with being incomplete, even in the CE. But, imho, it's definitely worth a discounted purchase of $20-$25. Plus, if you've got local LAN buddies (IP and Gamespy are too unreliable), it's a great party romp with friends.

The tricks to enjoying it are:
1) Don't expect a deep, explorative RPG - it's basically hack 'n slash with a few extras
2) Do see it for what it is: a title made by a small, overreaching developer (read: incomplete and a little unpolished)
3) Don't pay full price

Hey, it could have been a great game. HOWEVER, the game I bought was NOT the game advertised. It was not even the game outlined on the box, or in the manual!! On top of that, it was never patched up to the game I was promised, UNLESS I shilled out another $90 (That's what games cost here). Yes, I did enjoy parts of it and I thought it had some great new ideas in it, but it was still an unfinished, bug infested mess of a pre-beta which should not have been released in the state it was in!! I do a lot of beta testing, but I don't expect to have to pay full price for the experience and then pay full price again for the finished game!!

If you think the combat or dungeons are great, that's fair enough -- but the character development system is unmitigated crap. Sure, I can create a "different" (and nonsensical) character, such as a Knight/Samurai/something/something but it has the depth of a rice cracker. Leaving aside the fact that half the Heraldries never worked, let's just say I wanted to specialise as a heavy fighter (no, not some bizaare combination of heavy fighter/jujitsu expert/rogue/mystical mage….just a plain 'ol heavy fighter. You get two melee combo attacks by level 5…how many skill options open up for my heavy fighter by the time I'm, say, lvl 30?

Not to mention if I had listened to Mr. Hardcore cRPG legend Bradley "I've been making these for 346 years so I know what I'm doing", I would expect more than just some action combat against random spawns in empty rooms missing the furniture.

Sorry if that had a little too much vitriol. :)

No arguments there. :)

Just because the system doesn't support your desire to specialize to that extent doesn't mean it sucks. Same for the fact that it wasn't to your tastes. I found it fun with good twists and combinations and it kept my interest while remaining simple, which was in-line with the overall design: simple. Regardless and, ironically, in spite of DW's delusional claims about the game before it came out, I found it's simplicity and straight-forwardness part of it's appeal. Kind of a stream-lined Action-RPG with very little fluff. Also, I tend toward building generalist characters, so I'm sure that contributed to my enjoyment of the DL system.

No apology necessary and, again, you'll get no argument from me there.

Let me be clear: I am most certainly not defending the biggest beefs I think the gaming public had with the game: being mis-represented as a deep rpg, being delivered half-finished and then the final insult of the CE. I'm just saying now that all that's passed, I have no problem recommending the game to my friends, with the appropriate cautions, if they can get it on the cheap. I think if you didn't get screwed like the some of us did at release, and the type of game it really is appeals to you, it's definitley worth a look.

Hehe … nice one chamr - good way to stir up a discussion.

I think I rated DL pretty high with a 3/5 for both the original and CD. But ultimately I had fun playig then *despite* all of the significant issues, and I did think that the dungeons were well done. I had just finished DL CE when Oblivion came out and read praise for the Oblivion dungeons and thought how much better the ones were in DL … about the *only* thing though.

But as I say in the Dark Messiah review, there is a clear separation between 'fun' and 'good' …