Interview with Tim Cain on ToEE

In a three part interview with Tim Cain, he talks about ToEE for about 2 minutes in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4XVW6qcuzM

Forward to minute marker 6 to get close to the beginning of the ToEE section.

 

How did I miss this thread?! Very interesting. I am very sad inside when he said that the city of Nulb was more along the lines of Sodom & Gammorah but they were forced to remove all the potentially offensive stuff, which naturally means all the good stuff. It was also cool to learn that they turned this game out for manufacture in 20 months. I thought games took longer than that.

 

Made me realise just how much I love TOEE.
Hearing Tim looking back on it as some sort of failure.

I think TOEE is actually my favourite game ever. I mean lasersquad, xcom, GTA, street fighter etc.. all seem to pop foremost when i think of all time classic games.
Yet TOEE is the one game I have re-installed and pumped many hours into repeatedly. Dragon age/mass effect are rpg's i really enjoyed but both barely limped through a second play through. TOEE i reinstall, plan out a new party and I get that little spark of excitement again.

All of those at Troika who worked on TOEE and also all the amazing fans who carried the torch forward should be proud of their achievments imo.

 

It's a damn shame about the unreleased patch.

 

ToEE was a step in the right direction for cRPGs while NWN was a step in the wrong direction. Too bad they're still going the wrong way.

 

ToEE needed another 4-6 months before release. No game should be released with the bugs and problems it had. That's old news but at least the modders did a good job to keep it around.

 

Yes ToEE is a great turn based game. Wonderful diversity in monsters and even details, like not all the bugbears looking like the same three copies. OMG, NWN monsters look so stupid compaired...ettins for example look much more fearsome then the comic ones found in NWN.....still the fact that the mod builder is easy to use in NWN makes that game one of my favorites too...

Perhaps someday they will release a turn based DnD game that has a easy to use mod builder....that would be awesome and I am very confindent that it would generate a huge following fast.

 

Yes I would love something turn based and unflinchingly PnP faithful.

I had some fun with NWN but it always felt 'inspired' by D&D rather than faithful.
And I really, really tried with baldurs gate etc but I just got so frustrated by the combat. I had a look at that Knights Chalice and I can see it looks good but the whole 80s graphics thing really turned me off.

I agree that the only real hope would be a small developer or team to work on a solid engine with a decent module builder. Just focus on the engine and leave the content to everybody else. And maybe have some form of license scheme to support content devs along with the engine authors.

If they could just get an engine running like TOEE I would be very happy. And I would certainly be more than willing to purchase new modules. And if it was feasible multiplayer would totally rock.

TOEE could have been so much more

 

My faith was restored when I heard Tim Cain say they had fixes available, but Atari would not let them release them.

Personally I think Tim Cain is a GOD among insects!

 

No seriously, don't.

With good QA and project management, game-breaking bugs should've been avoided and found very early in the process. Abusing your customers as beta-testers is *really* bad practice (although much too common in the game industry :-/).

 

I agree 100%, but Tim said in his interview that Atari had given them 18 months to create the game.
They were 2/3 done when 3.5 rules came out and they had to scramble to remake the rule engine to meet the deadline.

When they asked Atari for more time for QA and fixes they were given 2 months.

He also said he was very frustrated that he new there were bugs and they had fixes ready for most of them, but Atari had already gotten rid of the QA team and refused to let them release the patches.

So, I stand by my fanboy status of the honorable Mr. Tim Cain. :Being_a_s

 

And the question I have to ask: Was that *really* such a good idea? Look at BG, they sticked to 2.0 with some custom additions even after 3.0 was out.