Black Isle Studios is BACK

Interplay is resurrecting it.

Although not involving people at Obsidian...

edited 22nd Aug '12 9:28:48 AM by onyhow

Well, can't wait to never hear about them again.

Well, essentially Interplay owns those Black Isle I Ps now.

Remember, Chris Avellone has been dropping hints about a Planescape Torment sequel...

The box shot for Baldur's Game: Dark Alliance II just appeared.

Dark Alliance III' anyone?

Why exactly would anyone be interested in sequels to Black Isle's I Ps that don't involve original Black Isle developers?

I mean, its new studio with name of old one

Because, Scotty, fresh minds, young ideas, be tolerant.

Yeah, but they might as well not call themselves Black Isle Studios then By doing that, they are trying to follow on old legacy or something like that

Happens all the time. I only care that the IPs are being resurrected.

^ Then they HAVE to be good...Like Eidos Montreal seems to be doing good with Deus Ex, and Firaxis seems to be shaping up to do good with X-COM (though pending in that case)...

edited 22nd Aug '12 10:17:53 AM by onyhow

@JAF: the last time we had "fresh minds and new Ideas" we got pre 1.04 Diablo 3. (and 1.04 is just basically "lets bring back everything we deleted from d2 and insisted the game was better for lacking)

edited 22nd Aug '12 10:34:02 AM by Midgetsnowman

Huh... nonetheless I'll remain a bit cautious about this. Interplay has been in financial dire straits for quite some time now, from bad business decisions to losing the rights to a Fallout MMO. Reviving the old IPs are a plus though...

I'm calling it now: it'll suck. Why? Because Interplay sucks. Everything that made Black Isle games worthwhile has gone elsewhere. Besides which, what are they going to revive? An in-name-only Diablo clone that doesn't even have anything to do with actual Black Isle games?

Uh, anyone who played Dark Alliance knows it's awesome.

So every game named Dark Alliance that is in same series is automatically awesome?

No, I'm saying the two Dark Alliance games I played were awesome and I'm looking forward to a third in the series.

By people who weren't involved in the original 2 games' development and likely won't know what made them so good.

Yeah, sorry, but without the original devs this doesn't seem like this is anything to scream about.

It's entirely possible the games this new Black Isle make will be great, but as it stands it's no more exciting than a brand new studio with no games.

That's kind of a blanket statement. You mean, there won't be any former developers working on it, or they've never played either game before, or they're so rock stupid they've never held a gamepad before?

I guess Firaxis working on XCOM is EPIC FAIL!.

Firaxis has reputation with Strategy genre, new Black Isle Studios has reputation of being named Black Isle studios

Reputation isn't everything. I always say give people a chance before deriding them as being incapable of creativity and skilled design by default.

To be fair. its also not a reason to give them a free pass. Blizzard got a mostly free pass with Diablo 3. The result was we got a game that was fundamentally broken past Nightmare difficulty and hemmoraghed players.

More importantly, the reputation of the people who *own* them, Interplay, is. . . "the company who took a great studio, and destroyed them, in order to make cheap cash-in IP spinoffs." And whatever quality as Diablo clones the Dark Alliance games may have, doesn't take away from the fact that they were created as a way to cash-in on the Baldur's Gate name, without actually having to be in any way like the Baldur's Gate games.

Without the same devs its just In Name Only

Waitwaitwaitwait! Just get this straight:

Interplay still exists?