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Old 08-03-2005, 03:38 PM   #2
Borodin
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Medina, United States
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I'm afraid you leave me confused. Sierra Online no longer exists; hasn't, for years. So they're hardly promoting these days (much less over-promoting) Betrayal at Antara through the re-release of Betrayal at Krondor. I don't know who owns the rights to Antara these days, but it might be UbiSoft.

Just for the record: John Cutter at Dynamix made Betrayal at Krondor. As soon as it was released, a VP at Dynamix (who shall remain nameless, though he was a slime for a variety of reasons) fired the entire team. He then assigned a bottom-level programmer with no previous experience in game design to make a followup. That became Betrayal at Antara. It was trash: completely linear, terribly written, and proof that shoving "more of the same" at players won't work if the people doing it don't have any ideas about the product. The VP left Dynamix shortly after Antara was published, to almost universal pans.

Return to Krondor was farmed out by Sierra to a different team with only strategy experience. Feist was heavily involved in the project, unlike the previous ones, and frankly responsible for many of the least creative aspects of it, such as forcing a return to an AD&D style magic system. It wasn't the bomb that Antara was, but it was decidedly less successful and innovative than BaK. A shame Sierra didn't grab Cutter back.

If I were to detail all the various companies and people that tried getting a piece of the Krondor software pie after the original game's success, it would take a book. An amazing tale lurks there.
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