And next, all of the talent anybody cares about leaves the company?

[A Black Falcon]

Neverwinter Nights.

Oh come on GR, we all know that I'm talking about the overall market, not saying absolutely that there were no US or Canadian-developed PC titles after 2001... overall I think that there's little doubt that, since 2002-2003, the PC industry has moved hard into (mostly lower-budget) European-developed titles or online-only games. Since 2002, there has been a long string of major changes -- Blizzard went into MMOs and hasn't released anything other than WoW since 2003's addon to 2002's Warcraft III (though SC2 next year will change that, the MMO thing has clearly changed the company). Interplay/Black Isle abandoned computer games after 2002's Icewind Dale II and then pretty much died in 2004; Black Isle's successor Obsidian has so far made one console RPG, one PC RPG, and is working on a console RPG and perhaps another unknown title. Bioware went into console games and hasn't published a PC-only title since 2002 either, though like Blizzard they are working on one in Dragon Age their obvious corporate focus is on Mass Effect (console game) and they're also getting into MMOs and handheld games. Troika went out of business probably because they didn't make that same shift into either MMOs or console games that all of their competitors in the PC RPG industry did. Bethesda got into console ports too with 2001's TESIII: Morrowind. Epic's gone hard into console games in the past few years, as Gears of War proves; it's not just engine licenses anymore... etc, etc, the list goes on. Part of the problem is lengthening game development cycles, of course, so teams don't make as many games as they used to, but consolization and the MMO focus are a huge part of it... even Ensemble Studios (Age of Empires series) is going console with Halo Wars!

Of course, Interplay, Bethesda, etc. had made console games before 2002. The difference is that those games were mostly not PC ports. The PC and console titles were separate, and any console games that did exist were ported later on by external companies (think WC2/Diablo for the PSX and SC for the N64 from Blizzard; Blizzard's probably the one company that actually backed away from console development last gen... though they did work on SC: Ghost for years, it was console-exclusive and never came out anyway.). That's a dramatic difference from how things are now.

As for the Europe thing, it is partially explained by the fact that Europe has a long history of PC game development -- in the '80s, computers were the main gaming platform there for the most part, not the NES or SMS, for instance, and now in some European countries (particularly Germany) PC gaming dominates. It's just that with the massive dropoff in quantity of US-developed PC games, the ratio of European to North American PC games seen in the Northa American market has, I believe, changed dramatically in the last few years. The main exception to this is, as I said, online-only games, where the US and South Korea (another PC-only market of course, and heavily focused towards online games) are responsible for most of the most popular titles. This is, of course, not an absolute or anything, though, so sure there will be a few major PC exclusives from the US and Canada... just not many, outside of casual games of course.

Neverwinter Nights? Well, it does have a single-player campaign, but the focus of the game was clearly on the multiplayer mode, not the mediocre-at-best single player side of things. It had a much more prominent online mode than any previous Bioware game, a fact that wouldn't have been a problem if there'd actually been a good single-player campaign to go along with it, but there wasn't. Sure it wasn't a MMO or online-only, but it was online and an RPG... and it was also the worst RPG released by Bioware or Interplay/Black Isle since before Fallout 1. NWN1's really in the middle ground between online RPGs and single-player ones, and isn't as good as dedicated games on either side from everything I've seen of it, though of course I don't own the game.

Now, I know that NWN2 came out last year, and was good (I have it), improving on NWN1 in a bunch of ways (most importantly, the single player campaign has real parties again and is actually done decently). The NWN2 expansion came out this year, and was even better according to reviews (I don't have it yet), and they are PC-only RPGs from Obsidian. NWN2 is one of or perhaps the only such game of any significance to come out in the last five years... Vampire: Bloodlines maybe, but that's half FPS. And while NWN2 is less dumbed down than NWN1, for sure, it's nothing like the Infinity Engine or Fallout titles...