Same day as Half-Life 2. I guess they were literally waiting for HL2 to be released. I’m a little torn between which to pick up first, but I’ll probably still go with HL2. Vampire may actually drop down $10 or so within a month, where HL2 probably won’t.
Well seeing as I’ve already got HL2 just waiting to be unlocked I guess I’ll be leaving Vampire as well. Good to see we won’t be waiting months for it though.
There goes another $60…
Honesty I wouldn’t buy anything from Troika on first day of release. I’m going to need to see a few reviews first.
Andrew has a point. All of their games have had fatal flaws at release.
But the release date is questionable. Surely, they are cutting into their own sales by releasing with HL2. Why would they do that? Do they just REALLY need the money?
I can only presume that Activision decided: A) we need to get this out before Thansgiving weekend and B) what other RPGs are launching this season anyway?
Thankfully the testing and gold master process on Vampire was pretty much the exact opposite of ToEE, so I’m optimistic although I haven’t played the final game yet.
But isn’t the audience different?
I would think the core audiences are fairly different, though the fringe audience has some good overlap.
Frankly I think one should probably wait a week or so and see how it turns out. There’s enough bad first-day history in Troika titles to warrant enough caution.
— Alan
I think it’s both – publishers would rather get the game out and start selling ASAP than lose a week of the valuable holiday season, but there isn’t a ton of competition on the PC RPG side at the moment, either.
Is it me, or has it been a slow year for PC RPG’s?
When was the last fast year? :)
— Alan
Well, 2003 had KOTOR, Temple of Elemental Evil, Gothic II, NWN: Hordes of the Underdark, Deus Ex IW, and probably a few others I’m forgetting.
This year, it’s been Beyond Divinty, Sacred, and …? I mean, I can barely think of any. It’s all MMOs now.
Supposedly vampire has been done and ready to ship for over a year so one can hope it’ll be less buggy than usual.
Then again arcanum was gold for 3 months (insert sierra flame here) before shipping and it was buggy as hell. So who knows?
Incorrect, while Activision never made a ‘gold’ announcement, Vampire didn’t wrap until last month.
Yeah, a gamespy or gamespot report from a month ago actually stated that they were only in the final stages by cutting the multiplayer aspect so it definitely hasn’t been sitting on some shelf.
I would preorder it, but I’ve become addicted to gogamer’s 3-games-for-$10 overnight shipping option and you can’t preorder more than one game that way. In any case, this is ahead of HL2 on my shopping list so I’ll be grabbing it as soon as it comes out.
I don’t think Bloodlines has been finished for year (who started that rumour?), anyway…it’s a must-buy for me. Can’t wait.
Goddamnit. Here’s to hoping that Activision supports it long enough to get the multiplayer added back in…
Goddamnit. Here’s to hoping that Activision supports it long enough to get the multiplayer added back in…[/quote]
I’m glad they took it out. Arcanum would have been a lot better if they didn’t try to cram multiplayer in.
I bet I could count the toes on my hands the number of people who actually played multiplayer arcanum.
Holy Grail of computer roleplaying = co-op through the story line in first person view.
Okay, so that’s my holy grail ;-)
All the previews from the last media event have been pretty glowing…huge amout of content, side quests galore… and it looks pretty slick.
I have the $ for HL all lined up… hopefully Vampires will drop a bit and I can justify that as well.