Flagship Studios - Shipwrecked

I'd add one more reason: the game just wasn't good enough. It wasn't that folks expect more now than they did back in 2001 or that FSS dared invoke the name of Diablo or that they didn't write some wonderful, mind-bending story. HG was not as fun as Diablo. Period. It was just... OK. When expectations are as high as they were with HG and you dain to charge folks a monthly subscription, "just OK" is gonna get you in a heap of trouble.

The flip side is had the game been great and a ton of fun to play, all the other problems would have magically disappeared. It would have flown off the shelves and they'd had the money to fix any of the problems they had.

When a bad developer of PC games dies, it's a good day for PC gaming. Hope the devs learned their lesson and either switch to consoles or make proper PC titles in their new companies.

Yeesh said:

As you can see, story doesn't really play too great a role here. I wonder what your top 10 best selling games are?

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To take a real-life example :

People won't visit museums in masses.

Plus, this would destroy the sense of a museum, after all. And the items there, of course as well (bacteria, sweat = butyric acid, etc. ...)

But - : People DO visit museums in masses on certain occations.

For example when there's a Rembrandt exhibition. Or Picasso. Or any well-known name as well.


What i begin to see is that we need more "mature" games in the same sense as museums are "mature", too. Kids won't visit museums, and most people don't as well.

However, the economy-driven layout of ANY cultural thing leads into leaving out which "doesn't sell".

If we had book-keepers and accountants rule the cultural world of our towns, museumswould either be instantly closed (not enough profits) or ONLY cater the masses (maximizing the profits).

There would simply not exist any niche-museums at all.

There would be only "museums for the masses", because that's it what brings profits.


Same goes for the gaming induustry : It is completely business-oriented. No culture at all. All hail to the money !

Som new rumours:

I'm hearing from sources that the developments over the weekend aren't as bad as they are being made out to be. Apparently there have been layoffs but there are still people working at Flagship. Sadly I don't have any direct corroboration of that to back it up, all I have is grapevine stuff.

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The disappointment of HG:L is really no worse than countless other over-hyped AAA titles (Oblivion, anyone?), so I wonder why so many people are frothing-at-the-mouth pissed with Flagship. And I'm really being serious here--I honestly don't understand why so many people are so irate compared to other stinkers.

Arma said:

Sorry for breaking it up to you, but ... the current verdict is that free to play, pay real dough for perks models is alive and kicking, the world has already said that it is OK, and that's that.

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The east perhaps ... I wouldn't say the world by any stretch and definitely not mainstream games/gamers ...

Ya no kidding...show me proof of where "Free to play, pay for perks" is alive and kicking...besides the east. Long gone are the days where a company puts out something New and Good..now its Rehash and Crap.

shagwoodtm said:

...besides the east.

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This is the point.

Overseas, this is still "alive and kicking", as you implicitely admitted.

However, in the "western culture", so to say, it might be different.

I think this might've something to do with our "consume" culture.

Actually, have you played online, browser based games, be it strategy, RPG, or something else? 99 % of them are microtransaction based, and not all of them are eastern imports. Actually, none of them are eastern based. So we can't say that the model is not popular with western audiences. And that's for starters, there's tons more stuff that falls in the same cathegory.

The other way round. They wanted to make more than was possible with their AAA budget. Two complete games (SP, MP), marketable MP server technology, etc. . All developed in-house. It was simply too much. Maybe it would have worked if they had licensed Unreal and a reliable MP server kit. Or scrap the SP mode altogether.

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Yes, I guess you are right. But Diablo was always one MP and one SP part, and they wanted to use this word diablo in futuristc environment. I do not think the SP costed them that much resources or time to be honest. Even if they focused only on MP I do not think it would have been better. As far as technology goes, they wanted to build an engine with a lot of randomly created content. Most engines at the market today, works best with static or pre-defined content.

To explain what I mean with that let me give a short example, if you build a model in 3ds , you'll use the exporter of the engine, to make a .mesh ( this name varies for each engine ) file. Which optimize the model, textures, and vertices to work in an optimal way with this engine. For physics you also need to create a second set of the same model, but with physics exporeter, which makes calculations and saves another version of the model, which is much lower res but has more physics information, springs, joints and etc etc. If you want to make a lot of random environments with random environments you have to think in a different way.