Different setting, made by a new and then-unknown company, came out a couple weeks before 9/11 (this did make a difference to game sales), and came at the tail-end of the isometric RPG boom and in the era of 3D games. I really don't get why you have to ask the question as to why a relatively obscure (even contemporarily) isometric 2D CRPG didn't sell very well in 2001.
Fair but even then it has really good writing and world building I'd atleast expect some kind of spiritual successor to pop out of it but there's nothing. not even a peep.
There are many wonderful peices of media with fantastic writing that have gone unnoticed or received poor sales.
Bugs I guess?
All Troika's game feels rushed in that regard, like they got complete plot and quests and everything else, then glued it together somehow.
Then they asked publisher "release date when?" he replied "Now".
In addition, the combat was spastic and barely controlled, it was heavily imbalanced in favor of either full supermage or full knife throwing techie (which is weird but true), and it's not as clear or easy to figure out compared to even something like the gold box games or Baldur's Gate.
9/11 itself caused a cultural shift that lasted years and massively changed the tastes of the average consumer for a long time afterward. It wasn't a one-day event for the US, and your comment of Europe is blind to the fact that the US was the biggest market for Troika's games, as a whole throughout their existence.
Don't forget also relative sales compared to other RPG's in the prior years. Baldur's Gate 1, released in late december 1998, had sold over a million copies by late 1999. Fallout 2 was regarded as commercially unsuccessful in the UK, where it sold 50k copies. Arcanum, by 2005, almost four entire years after the game's release, had sold a total of only 234,000 copies. Arcanum's bad sales relative to other more RPG's of the time and even some modern RPG's probably just turns away most publishers. Even now the game is still quite obscure despite often being regarded as a great game.
I can't speak for why the game did so poorly, but I can say that's probably got something to do with why we haven't seen a sequel. Same with Vampire TMB
VTMB is a whole different kettle of fish.
I only heard about it by word of mouth months after it released. I can vaguely recall some magazines add for it, but nothing that caught my eye beyond generic fantasy. And no game magazines of the time were talking it up. Years later I realized it was a very early true open world (though with lots and lots of nothing between any points of interest).
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