No, I think you misunderstood a few things.
Ikarion was developing Armalion.
About 80 % from release they went bancrupt. No-one wanted to give them money.
Ascarion bought the remains.
First, they just wanted to complete this game, more or less, without the official Dark Eye RPG license.
Second, they turned at one point and did an action RPG out of it - Sacred, as we know it today.
And about asking foreign companies : Who actually knows the Dark Eye RPGs ? Aldso, they should have a license then.
Of course other companies could've developed it, too, but seemingly no-one wanted to.
Oh it was Ascarion who was playing it safe, then. And sorry about the confusion. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
Damn... 80% from release. Why didn't they just cut out some things and thin down stuff a little? Would that not have been an easier thing to do? At least the game would've been released. Though it wouldn't have been the best, yet the product is out on the market.
Then again, there're tons of games which're always shown at ,say, E3 and some have had lots of work being done at that point. After a while, you never hear about them again which is a typical scenario of many companies: work is done on product but company or sub-company/project runs out of funding and goes bankrupt. They'll go "but it was like 95% from release date. If only we'd more time and money!"
Hmmm... you're right about foreign companies not wanting to invest since they haven't heard about the game. So, does this mean there wasn't much international PR being done before the game was completed? Hmmm... that seems kinda fatal. These days, even certain indie(commercial and freeware) games try to generate as much press as they can muster. Especially for a commercial project, you always run the risk of running into financial difficulties, no matter how well-funded you might be. So, a lot of visibility won't hurt.
Well, given that the market (at that time?) was mainly geared towards action-rpgs, I can see why other companies refused to lay their hands on it. Btw, what do you mean by "Aldso, they should have a license then."? I thought Ikarion owned the game license before they went bankrupt?
