Yes, yes we all get it, you purchased Vanguard at launch and it was kinda shit. Lets just put this out there, if you didn't like the core of Vanguard, then you wont like this new development.
However many of us did actually like Vanguard at its core, and would love to see a second attempt to make it you know, actually playable.
I am personally interested to see the information he is going to release, then everyone can make an informed decision about whether to back it or not.
The way you guys carry on anyone would think this is his 5th attempt or something.
The irony is that in the end the only thing Vanguard actually accomplished was making companies more careful about funding risky games. AKA Vanguard ended up actually paving the way for even more WoW clones then originally intended.
He worked on original EQ. Didnt see this go to hell.
And he worked on Vanguard. That was overly ambitios and was first of AAA MMOs that failed.
It was a big shock at the time. But than every other new AAA MMO failed too. And Vanguard proved to be the LAST real MMO attempted. In fact if his company was not closed and Vanguard sold to SOE , who kept it on ice so its not competing with EQ. Vanguard would probably be best MMO around.
That being said - Braid is good designer , but horrible producer. He should not be in charge of the game , just its design.
Are you serious? Where you even around during launch?
If SOE didn´t step in and throw in an extra 25 million in funding, the game wouldn´t have even been launched!
As Microsoft saw Braid was just burning Money and pulled out half way during Development!
If SOE didn´t step in 5 months after launch and bought up his studio + game, Vanguard would have been shut Down 5 months after release!
And in SOE´s defense. The first year and half they put quite a decent size dev team With experienced devs on the game and managed to fix most of the serious issues, like continious rubber banding issues and constant hanging when you crossed chunks! They also added quite a bit of content to make the game more Complete.
But no one came back and the server pops continued to decline, so at a given point SOE stopped throwing Money at it and removed most of the devs and put it on life support.
That is just the blunt releality of current day economics! You get one shot With Your games today! At launch and when you fail, you´re done for! You cannot expect SOE to just keep throwing Money at a game that didn´t attract any players but the hardcore few.
Their last attempt was to create a New centralised experience With the Isle of Dawn to bring New players together in one big starter zone and even that didn´t help.
At one point, enough is enough.
SOE simply doesn´t have the funds like Square Enix has to completely redevelop the entire game and release Vanguard 2.0.
It´s too risky, especially in todays economic climate.
For SE it turned out a success With FFXIV:ARR, but it could have easily tanked and caused a severe Financial blow to SE.
I was around at launch and for 8 months after, and i can confirm that your entire post, is in fact, bullcrap.
Sony spent all of 1-2 months doing actual work on the game before they abandoned it again. Almost all the work that was done fixing bugs was done post release, by sigil, before SOE bought it out. The idea that SOE buying out the game somehow "saved it from imminent failure" is the biggest pile of garbage ever foisted on the public i've seen.
Oh wow, you played at launch and that makes you an expert. Sorry, you have your facts wrong as usual. I was personally friends with several sigil employees, their office was right next to mine. Well before the purchase SOE had a team down at Sigil and they called all the shots. Most of the work being done at Sigil was stopped immediately. Most of the content they were working on was also stopped. It become a fix the bugs directive for the people left. Everyone at Sigil knew at release the engine was far from ready , but there was no money to keep going.
Originally posted by asmkm22 How is this guy still getting funding for his ideas? Seems like anything he touches goes to hell.
Wel he was fired from SOE so now he has to find another way to make his money. ie Scamming Kickstarter.
End point he couldn't do it back then with a HUGE budget (ie Vanguard) He won't be able to do it now with tiny budget (What kickstarter will bring in compared to 40+ million in Vanguards day) Those that Say they Like Vanguard and want to see more seem unaware how little Brad actuatly had to do with it. (He was mostly away trying to get more funding while the team that actually came up with the ideas and design in Vanguard was fired in the parking lot shortly after release.)
Sadly this train wreck money grab by Brad will leave a black stain on future Kickstarters.
Quite amazing that a game can survive with nobody developing new content. That shows that there is compelling content in the game and it has the ability to keep people playing 5 years after SOE has let it die.
I will always be upset at SOE for forcing Vanguard to die as it did. There were still thousands of subscribers when they did this too, so dont go telling me that it was because there were no subs. They just didn't want competition eating into the lesser games EQ2... which just never was as compelling as Vanguard.
Anyway, it's all over now. Future games are where it's at, and if SOE can pull themselves out with EQN or it's Brad and his new IP, then I'm all for it. Just stop the little F2P crap that nobody even looks at anymore. Please bring out some good stuff.
Humm your statement simply lacks so much logic it boggles.
If SOE wanted Vanguard dead all they had to do is not buy it and let it die. It was doing very good dying under Sigil and nobody wanted it. Brad pulled some strings with Smed and it got saved (Well put on life support anyway) Otherwise it wouldn''t have survived even 2 years let alone the amount it has now.
I agree with you on the F2P stuff though isn't EQN supposed to be F2P (Landmark is anyway)
I am probably going to be the most blunt commenter on this particular thread.
Vanguard was a fail plain and simple, I dont care if this guy developed it or was the ceo whatever.. EA got ahold of it and low and behold didnt improve it.... They had EQ so why bother right?
Now all we got here is a title.. well folks heres the bluntness:
All the AAA MMOs out right now are out of date lame linear questing model instanced trash games.
Feel free to argue any of those points above I dont care since its the truth. However there are a few games in development that pique my curiosity and whether they can pull off what they promise or not is for the future to reveal.
But just giving a game name tells us squat and leads me to rate it at a complete 0(zero) interest announcement.
So I believe today is the day the KS will launch. For those who swear Brad off, it's on him to convince you guys otherwise. For those who want that old school feel in a modern MMO, hopefully you'll donate. Been too many years of lackluster MMO's.
Originally posted by asmkm22 How is this guy still getting funding for his ideas? Seems like anything he touches goes to hell.
Seeing as how his ideas are at least vastly different from each other and shows a progression of vision and development ideas, one has to actually wonder how Frior got funding for DaoC2,erm......TESO.
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
Originally posted by Convo So I believe today is the day the KS will launch. For those who swear Brad off, it's on him to convince you guys otherwise. For those who want that old school feel in a modern MMO, hopefully you'll donate. Been too many years of lackluster MMO's.
This is no date.. I just have a really good assumption it will be today. I could be wrong but based on Brad saying it would be days not weeks last week I get the vibe it's today..
He worked on original EQ. Didnt see this go to hell.
And he worked on Vanguard. That was overly ambitios and was first of AAA MMOs that failed.
It was a big shock at the time. But than every other new AAA MMO failed too. And Vanguard proved to be the LAST real MMO attempted. In fact if his company was not closed and Vanguard sold to SOE , who kept it on ice so its not competing with EQ. Vanguard would probably be best MMO around.
That being said - Braid is good designer , but horrible producer. He should not be in charge of the game , just its design.
I certainly made some errors with Vanguard. But the biggie is we needed another 6 months to polish and optimize the game. The game actually sold well (250k copies right away) but then most people quit by level 3 because of the bad lag and bad all around performance. When MSFT, after the regime change, told us no more funding I went to Smed and asked for help from SOE. That saved the game -- we would have had to launch 12 months early, not 6 months, had we not received additional funding from SOE.
Why couldn't SOE keep us going for another 6 months? I don't know the details, but Smed told me the money just wasn't there, and I trust what he says. He is and always will be a good friend of mine.
So while I did make mistakes, I was also Producer and Project Manager for EQ 1 and the first couple of expansions. They shipped on time and were ready to play (there was some bandwidth issues the first week or so on EQ 1 -- there actually wasn't enough bandwidth coming into San Diego at that time. We got that dealt with right away).
I would, like other's have posted, try Vanguard out now. The client and server have been optimized and the game runs well. It's under populated, but still very playable. Please do this before you adopt an opinion that they game itself was a failure, because I don't think it was. Bottom line, it's a great game that was released too early.
I've learned a LOT from being part of the Project Management with Vanguard and being the Producer of EQ. But there's still a lot to learn -- right now we're learning, and fast, about how to work Kickstarter as efficiently as we can. One of the big challenges is reaching people who don't use twitter, don't read forums, and may not even know what Kickstarter is. That's where I could use your help -- please reach out to your old guild mates, friends, etc. and let them know how to get to the Kickstarter site: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/508681281/dcs-wwii-europe-1944/posts/616474
Thanks!
-Brad
--
-------------------------------------------------------------- Brad McQuaid CCO, Visionary Realms, Inc. www.pantheonmmo.com --------------------------------------------------------------
Comments
Yes, yes we all get it, you purchased Vanguard at launch and it was kinda shit. Lets just put this out there, if you didn't like the core of Vanguard, then you wont like this new development.
However many of us did actually like Vanguard at its core, and would love to see a second attempt to make it you know, actually playable.
I am personally interested to see the information he is going to release, then everyone can make an informed decision about whether to back it or not.
The way you guys carry on anyone would think this is his 5th attempt or something.
Oh wow, you played at launch and that makes you an expert. Sorry, you have your facts wrong as usual. I was personally friends with several sigil employees, their office was right next to mine. Well before the purchase SOE had a team down at Sigil and they called all the shots. Most of the work being done at Sigil was stopped immediately. Most of the content they were working on was also stopped. It become a fix the bugs directive for the people left. Everyone at Sigil knew at release the engine was far from ready , but there was no money to keep going.
Wel he was fired from SOE so now he has to find another way to make his money. ie Scamming Kickstarter.
End point he couldn't do it back then with a HUGE budget (ie Vanguard) He won't be able to do it now with tiny budget (What kickstarter will bring in compared to 40+ million in Vanguards day) Those that Say they Like Vanguard and want to see more seem unaware how little Brad actuatly had to do with it. (He was mostly away trying to get more funding while the team that actually came up with the ideas and design in Vanguard was fired in the parking lot shortly after release.)
Sadly this train wreck money grab by Brad will leave a black stain on future Kickstarters.
Humm your statement simply lacks so much logic it boggles.
If SOE wanted Vanguard dead all they had to do is not buy it and let it die. It was doing very good dying under Sigil and nobody wanted it. Brad pulled some strings with Smed and it got saved (Well put on life support anyway) Otherwise it wouldn''t have survived even 2 years let alone the amount it has now.
I agree with you on the F2P stuff though isn't EQN supposed to be F2P (Landmark is anyway)
I am probably going to be the most blunt commenter on this particular thread.
Vanguard was a fail plain and simple, I dont care if this guy developed it or was the ceo whatever.. EA got ahold of it and low and behold didnt improve it.... They had EQ so why bother right?
Now all we got here is a title.. well folks heres the bluntness:
All the AAA MMOs out right now are out of date lame linear questing model instanced trash games.
Feel free to argue any of those points above I dont care since its the truth. However there are a few games in development that pique my curiosity and whether they can pull off what they promise or not is for the future to reveal.
But just giving a game name tells us squat and leads me to rate it at a complete 0(zero) interest announcement.
Played: UO, LotR, WoW, SWG, DDO, AoC, EVE, Warhammer, TF2, EQ2, SWTOR, TSW, CSS, KF, L4D, AoW, WoT
Playing: The Secret World until Citadel of Sorcery goes into Alpha testing.
Tired of: Linear quest games, dailies, and dumbed down games
Anticipating:Citadel of Sorcery
For what Brad did in the past and for all the great times I passed in EQ I wish him the best for this project.
Seeing as how his ideas are at least vastly different from each other and shows a progression of vision and development ideas, one has to actually wonder how Frior got funding for DaoC2,erm......TESO.
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster
http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
Where did you see a kickstarter date?
Also, if it is up, do you have a link?
"Read Less, More TV." - Dr. House
This is no date.. I just have a really good assumption it will be today. I could be wrong but based on Brad saying it would be days not weeks last week I get the vibe it's today..
His blog has an inactive link to the KS. http://www.bradmcquaid.com/Brad_McQuaid/Welcome.html
Probably easier to follow the game on twitter.
I certainly made some errors with Vanguard. But the biggie is we needed another 6 months to polish and optimize the game. The game actually sold well (250k copies right away) but then most people quit by level 3 because of the bad lag and bad all around performance. When MSFT, after the regime change, told us no more funding I went to Smed and asked for help from SOE. That saved the game -- we would have had to launch 12 months early, not 6 months, had we not received additional funding from SOE.
Why couldn't SOE keep us going for another 6 months? I don't know the details, but Smed told me the money just wasn't there, and I trust what he says. He is and always will be a good friend of mine.
So while I did make mistakes, I was also Producer and Project Manager for EQ 1 and the first couple of expansions. They shipped on time and were ready to play (there was some bandwidth issues the first week or so on EQ 1 -- there actually wasn't enough bandwidth coming into San Diego at that time. We got that dealt with right away).
I would, like other's have posted, try Vanguard out now. The client and server have been optimized and the game runs well. It's under populated, but still very playable. Please do this before you adopt an opinion that they game itself was a failure, because I don't think it was. Bottom line, it's a great game that was released too early.
I've learned a LOT from being part of the Project Management with Vanguard and being the Producer of EQ. But there's still a lot to learn -- right now we're learning, and fast, about how to work Kickstarter as efficiently as we can. One of the big challenges is reaching people who don't use twitter, don't read forums, and may not even know what Kickstarter is. That's where I could use your help -- please reach out to your old guild mates, friends, etc. and let them know how to get to the Kickstarter site: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/508681281/dcs-wwii-europe-1944/posts/616474
Thanks!
-Brad
--
--------------------------------------------------------------
Brad McQuaid
CCO, Visionary Realms, Inc.
www.pantheonmmo.com
--------------------------------------------------------------