I’m not going to bullshit you with worthless phrases like “the game has potential”. I don’t care about Vanguard’s potential, you don’t care about it, nobody cares. A game is either worth wasting your time on or it isn’t. It’s binary like that. Besides, whatever potential Vanguard might have, it’s going to take a whole hell of a lot longer to make it happen now, with half the dev team fired.
One reason I’m still playing is that there are no alternatives that appeal to me. I’m done with WoW, it was fun while it lasted, but raiding and retarded guild drama burned me out. I tried LotRO during open beta but the overwhelming feeling of sameness to WoW was an instant turn-off. People seem to like it but it isn’t what I’m looking for. Return to EQ and ruin the fond memories I have of this game? No way. EQ2? Three times is enough. EVE? Never managed to get into it and that’s not for the lack of trying. Age of Conan and Warhammer Online are still months away.
I’m actually having fun in Vanguard. It is possible, even with all the apparent flaws. I kill stuff, I get equipment upgrades, I get to see new content and I’m doing it with a static group of great people and an active guild. That’s all I need, and Vanguard provides it. At some point the question of whether it all could be better becomes irrelevant. That’s the main reason I’m still playing.
Broken content pisses me off. Crashing and corrupted textures piss me off. Rogues being complete gimps pisses me off. Boring-ass faction grinds and mind-numbingly long collection quests piss me off. Collect five dusts to make one powder that can be combined with a vial to produce a beacon of which you need 15 to make a boss mob spawn? Fuck that.
Playing Vanguard can be an infuriating experience, but going on an old-fashioned dungeon romp with a good group in a non-instanced dungeon simply outweighs it all. Before Vanguard, I didn’t realize how much I’ve been missing this style of gameplay. WoW’s instances, while well-designed and fun, are very linear and heavily scripted. It’s just not the same thing, and after WoW’s success and Vanguard’s failure, we’ll never see this type of old-school MMORPG gameplay ever again. Vanguard is probably the last chance to experience it. And that’s my final reason.
I usually try to avoid commenting on stuff written by other people. It’s lame and a sorry excuse for not coming up with content of your own. Yet, I’m doing it for the third time within one week, simply because these things are too relevant to be ignored. So here it goes:
F13.net has posted an interview with the man himself, Brad McQuaid. There is a heavy focus on the history of the Sigil / Microsoft relationship and Brad basically blames Microsoft while insisting that he doesn’t blame Microsoft. There is a followup over at the Silky Venom forums.
Being forced to produce milestones that are completely disconnected from the work that needs to be done is something I’ve experienced myself in the past. I don’t know whether Brad’s side of the story is accurate or just more bullshit but it does sound plausible to me.
His excuses for not being around on launch day and at the “firing party” are a bit pathetic. He was the CEO of Sigil and the executive producer of Vanguard. The alpha dog. Elsewhere he wrote: “I do not compartmentalize well and don’t handle these situations very well“. Cleary, the guy isn’t manager material and has no business in a position of responsibility.
There is stuff that’s new to me, like the falling-out between McQuaid and Jeff Butler and the nepotism involved in Sigil’s hiring decisions. Interesting, to say the least. He also offers a somewhat plausible explanation for the lack of QA personnel.
I think at this point we have a fairly good idea of what went wrong. I’ll leave it at that. There’s no point in commenting on it any further, I’d much rather focus on the game itself.
F13.net has an interview with an ex-Sigil employee. It’s a morbidly fascinating read. Some of the sad high points:
Ex-Sigil: There was input all around, but at each level, that input was simply discarded by the decision makers. Basically there were a handful of people who made decisions, regardless of input from anyone else.
[...]
Ex-Sigil: [...] The designers on Vanguard did amazing things with the horrific tools and systems in place [...] but there was no scripting language for example, even though nearly everyone wanted one except for the people who decided if we got one or not.
[...]
f13.net: How hands off was he [Brad] by this time?
Ex-Sigil: He was playing a lot right through about Beta 2 but then he vanished.
f13.net: As in, just outright disappeared?
Ex-Sigil: Yep.[...]
Ex-Sigil: QA was one person up until about November… ONE.[...]
f13.net: Who are these people who took over after Brad and Jeff disappeared. Who can we pin the tail on?
Ex-Sigil: Dave Gilbertson, Bill Fisher, and Darrin McPherson… Ryan Elam too, but he spread himself thin by trying to do too much. [...] Let’s just say they refused to listen to anyone on how to fix what was broken [...] they were so pig-headed and arrogant that they believed we were all wrong and they were right.
[...]
f13.net: And what was the attitude by the team towards Brad and Jeff by now? Surely Brad’s disappearance absolutely wrecked morale.
Ex-Sigil: Not really. When he was at work he was more an obstacle than a help. A lot of people wanted Brad to just go away.
Only one QA tester. Horrid developement tools. Decision makers who were either absent or incompetent. Or both. There are more gory details, tons of them. Particularly enlightening is the stuff on how Brad and his accomplices ripped off Microsoft.
OK, this is clearly a disgruntled ex-employee talking but I think the current state of the game lends credence to his accusations. Five years of developement, funds in excess of $30 million. Something must have gone wrong and the explanations offered by this ex-developer sound plausible.
Another interesting bit of information is the subscriber number: about 90k. And then, there’s this:
Ex-Sigil: Co-publishing, with Sigil retaining all IP rights… is what we were told.
From SOE’s press release:
In May 2006, SOE acquired the title’s rights [...]
Either the press release is wrong or Brad not only lied to VG’s fanbase but also to his employees. Not that I’d mind if SOE had bought the IP rights back in May 2006 but it might be yet another example of how McQuaid bullshitted just about fucking everyone.
Details on SOE’s acquisition of Sigil are slowly emerging. It doesn’t look pretty but it could be worse. From Smed’s posting on the official forums and his interview with GameSpot:
- Staff will be downsized from about 100 employees to 50
- The remaining developement team will be approximately the size of EQ2′s developement team
- Dave Gilbertson will be responsible for operative management, as far as I know he has been for a while anyway
- No major gameplay revamps are planned
- McQuack will become an external “Creative Advisor”, whatever that means
- There will be official forums
- In the long term, the Carlsbad studio wil be subsumed into SOE San Diego, some devs will be moved to other projects
Some interesting points from the official press release:
- Vanguard sold almost 200k units
- “In May 2006, SOE acquired the title’s rights” - interesting. This is in direct contrast to what McQuack told the community back then.
From various sources:
- The crafting team was cut in half (see here)
- The class developers are gone, except for Talisker (see here in the comments section)
- The diplomacy team loses at least one (see here)
- GM Keejay didn’t make the cut (see here)
- Todd Masten and four others will move to a different position within SOE (see here)
- The Community Representative is gone (see here)
- Two more Associate Game Designers gone (see here and here)
No one knows who else had to go, most developers were never in contact with the community and I assume some of those who were, understandably, just don’t bother to post.
From Todd Masten’s posting at the FOHrums:
I hope those truly responsible for the deep rooted failings of the company lay in bed tonight and relive the events that transpired today in their heads, over and over. For not ONE of you is without your job come tomorrow morning.
Great. So those who were responsible for fucking up Sigil and Vanguard still have their jobs while the little guys got shit-canned. If there is one lesson to be learned, it’s that in the corporate world, your contribution is rarely rewarded. No matter how much you bust your ass, in the end you’re just an expendable ressource and you will eventually be treated as such.
This sucks. It sucks for the people who got fired, it sucks for the employees who still remain but lost friends and colleagues, it sucks for the game and it sucks for the customers. But it was probably unavoidable, thanks to the idiots who mismanaged Sigil.
F13.net reports of mass-firings at Sigil, Grouchy Gamer corroborates it. Ugly businiss, especially the fact that the people who busted their asses for Sigil and Vanguard are treated in such a manner. It’s not awfully surprising in a socio-economic climate in which employees aren’t seen as human beings but as resources to be used (up) and discarded on a whim.
An interesting bit from Grouchy Gamer:
I have heard that Brad is worthless for anything important, and a lot of people probably found him an irritant.
Sounds awfully like that anonymous forum posting that appeared back when Brad quit SOE:
Kelly Flock spins off redeye/verant basically to give Smedley an object lesson– surrounding yourself with talentless friends leads to ruin. Brad McQuaid was, and is, one of Smedley’s talentless friends.
[...]
Brad himself had basically done no work whatsoever since Everquest’s release, and many (including Kelly Flock) think he didn’t do anything *before* its release.
[...]
Some were “promoted” off the team. Like Brad McQuaid. He was moved because they were “borderline ready to revolt”. They “hated Brad so much they wanted to puke and constantly bitched about him.” Now the EQ Live team is “busy hating Jeff Butler with a passion”. Butler is a “major Brad lackey”. The factions are split “more like 90:10 on the hate Brad/Jeff vs. like Brad/Jeff side. It was BAD.” He is “so hated at Verant that out of a team of 60 people less than 10 would go with him. Probably closer to 5.”
[...]
Brad and Smed get flustered, some words are thrown around, accusations are made of Brad being a no-talent weenie, and Brad decides on the spot to leave.
An ex-guild-mate of mine who used to work at Verant told me that the content of this posting was more or less accurate back in 2001. When McQuaid and Butler announced their new company he predicted that Sigil would turn out to be a failure because Brad supposedly was too incompetent at managing teams and that Brad’s good reputation was largely undeserved. I didn’t lend it all that much credence back then, but turns out he was right.
Vanguard’s failure carries all the hallmarks of bad management. Over-optimistic goals, faulty planning, bad resource management, wrong priorities, abysmal execution… you name it. Add the various game design atrocities and you have an epic failure.
Brad thought he could take a bunch of experienced developers, license a shitload of middleware and developement tools and then churn out a massive amount of quality content, completely skipping the process of building a technological base for his product. Evidently, content creation never worked as efficiently as planned, the licensed middleware had to be customized heavily and a lot of their kooky game concepts didn’t work out (like the ill-fated original combat system).
I hope this debacle doesn’t spell the end of Vanguard. The most likely scenario is probably that Vanguard will be maintained by a skeleton crew and developement will slow down. Maybe SOE can turn things around. They did a decent enough job with EQ2 lately. Hope may spring eternal but right now, I don’t think that Vanguard has much of a future.
