Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Vanguard: Why did it Fail?
Kien
Member Posts: 520
For purposes of discussion, let's define "success" in financial terms. To be a success a game must be profitable, and that means the game must maintain at least a moderately large player base. I realize that fans of the game may have other measures to define success, but please keep comments limited to financial success and failure.
Vanguard has only a fraction of the players it had on release. I believe the current subscription numbers are very low. Therefore, Vanguard is a financial failure.
Why did Vanguard fail? There are bound to be multiple reasons, but is there one reason that really sticks out? Here's my opinion:
In the days leading up to release, Vanguard marketed itself as friendly to the "core" gamer. The core gamer is a gamer that would like to be a hardcore gamer, but simply doesn't have time to play 24/7. The core gamer takes the long view, and ends up getting to level 50 by playing a few hours per week over the course of a year. The problem is that many of the core gamers courted by Vanguard didn't have a good enough computer system to run the game. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that the population Vanguard was counting on to act as a backbone to the game wasn't interested in giving Vanguard a shot.
this article discusses the Vanguard population:
http://vanguardvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Editorials.Detail&id=13
Comments
it wasnt that most people didnt have a computer good enough to run Vanguard..It was that Vanguard wasnt good enough to run on Most computers. Vanguard was/ is poorly coded, poorly optimize. It also failed to deliver(and still hasnt) a lot of the features that were its main selling points. The drama with Brad and the liquidation of Sigil so soon after release didnt help either. On top of this all the various layoffs and key Devs quiting didnt help community confidence. The slow updates, the lack of communication and the fact that half of the devs seem to be working under the "old vision" and the other half under the "new vision".
Finaly I see the community itslef as a major factor for Vanguards failure, the Vanatics who attack anyone who voices a concern, the people in the general chat channels that still belittle people and tell them to "go back to Wow" and "you are obviously not mature enough for Vanguard".. the VG community has become a internet joke. They are the games worst enemy.
Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
Lao-Tze
I do not play any MMOs because I do not have the time for them, and Vanguard is the type of game that requires more time than most MMOs on the market. Who has 20 plus hours a week anymore?
Vanguard failed because,
1. The owner of Sigil brought in friends instead of the best talent available.
2. The rabid fanboi base hyped up the game so much and told others what the game should be, even if it was not the direction that the Dev's wanted to persue.
3. Too much hype !, everyone was bound to be let down if this game was not perfect upon release, Vanguard was going to be the " Insert game here" Killer of all time. The amount of trash talk, Dev " vision" and Star power made the game sound great when it was actually a bug ridden cow flop.
4. SoE is trying to get the game in order and I would love to see what has happened in six months. But the gaming experience was ruined for a lot of people that expected greatness and unfortunately they will never return to see how the game has matured.
Either you are talking out your ass or way overexagerating. Firstly, in what game do people not act like dumb asses or belittle others? I don't know a single MMO I have played this hasn't happened in.
The big question though, and I highly doubt you will tell the truth, are you still playing this game? If you are, why are you?
My opinion is the performance problems were the main reason, and actually still are. It is a lot better, but you still have to have a rig at least in the upper mid-range to enjoy the game.
Initially....
performance. If you can't run it you can't test it. From BETA 2 (when I joined) to about 6 months ago there has been improvements, but sloppy chunking and considerable drops in fps with a 8000GTX, 4GB RAM, Core 2 duo and RAID 0 just should not happen.
and then...
content. Most of their time was spent fixing the initial problem, but content still isn't there. Leveling 1-40 is kinda ok (1-30 is very good) but beyond that and the game does show a lack of content.
what i think we'll happen...
it will take another year before VG becomes what it should/could have been. I do believe we will see a serious increase in population and credibility (like EQII) but this is assuming that SOE's investments stay put and competition like WAR and AoC don't steal the market. Some will say you can't compare VG with WAR and AOC, problem is from an MMO market perspective they do compete.
Performance was a primary for me, constant crashes to the desktop (3-5 a day) along with low frame rates, choppiness etc definitely were a huge source of frustration.
But I'm tolerant of that stuff for the most part, so it really came down to gameplay. I chose to roll on the Team PVP server, and I found myself at around level 20 trapped with no quests (other than group based) available to me and my Druid couldn't seem to even solo a same level 3 dot so grinding wasn't really an option.
I always wondered if I would have enjoyed it more had I started on a normal server and played a more solo friendly class.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
People simply don't want to pay subscription fees for a developer to build a game that should have been delivered at the time of purchase. It has nothing to do with marketing, hype, or system specs. The game was broken, and still is to a lesser degree.
Some players bit the bullet and subscribed anyway. The reasons I believe a lot of subscribers left is that crafting is too tedious and diplomacy is just not fun. Since there was no end-game content, they had nothing else to do.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: The game is broken until SOE releases a trial.
Sigil attempted too much, this was the biggest problem because it pushed a philosophy of quantity over quality.
Eventually, they had to release because they were out of money. The game they released was full of bugs, performance issues and above all else, the game was not approachable for the mass amount of players (only the few hardcore people liked the punishing nature of the game). Several parts were tedious and just not fun.
The community was also pretty bad at launch, they were horrible to anyone who voiced a concern in any aspect of the game. Those who were ready to follow that sinking ship to hell.
It also didn't help that they released next to WoW's expansion.
But... I think they are in a different position now. When I left, the game was a flaming wreckage and now they are picking up the pieces and I am actually having quite a bit of fun. My only concern is getting to attached to such a financially unsuccessful game, to have it pulled out from under me (I also keep hearing the game sucks after lvl 30). I hope with their trial set to launch in '08, they also launch an ad campaign and almost relaunch the game in its entirety.
There a so many reasons Vanguard failed but here are a few off the top of my head:
The bottom line is that VG is simply not any fun. It is work. Although there are some people who want to replace real life with the game and like to not have fun. The majority of people play video games to have fun. Vanguard is not fun, hence it is a failure.
Brad McQuaid
Why....
1. Brooken and Unbalanced:
Quest.
Classes.
Grafic/ Helm.
Crafting.
Loot.
2. Bad at the time been:
Upen pvp/ Eq look alike.
Game historie not used. .. ect.
Beta:
GW, WOW, AOC, DAOC, DOD, L2, VG.
Playd:
GW necro msx, WOW never maxd, DAOC reaver-paladin-cabalist-vamp max, L2 never maxd, VG never maxd.
Play:
Daoc - Paladin. Classic.
Defining vanguard or any other SOE mmo's success in financial terms is in itself flawed. How so? Its simple , station access pass. Most subscibers to soe games dont subscribe to just one of the games they take the package deal.
Yeah, Vanguard was marketed towards the "hardcore", "core" and "casual" player. This complicated things a lot.
Mainly because in the MMO market, only "hardcore" and "casual" exist by Sigil's own definitions. They knew that, but had no interest in creating an MMO that appealed to those two crowds, which was pretty dumb. Instead, Sigil created the fictitious "core" audience which was supposed to be mostly 1st generation MMO players who didn't enjoy 2nd generation MMOs.
Really that could never work, because most 1st generation MMO players were CHANGED by 2nd generation MMOs. It was impossible for there to be many, if any players at all out there who haven't touched an MMO since 1998-2002. Even a player who's only ever played UO and EQ1 has been changed by a bunch of patches and expansions that'd transformed those games to adopt 2nd generation standards.
So me for example, even though I loved rampant PKing in UO back before the turn of the millenia, standing still infront of a forge for a month to increase my blacksmithing, so on and so forth...games since then have changed me and gave me new standards.
Certain MMO conventions were set since then, standards that Sigil wanted to wholly bypass in hopes that "core" gamers would ignore the inadequacies of Vanguard. Death penalties, no instant travel, bare minimum of a map, lack of instancing, etc. While companies like Mythic, Funcom and Blizzard saw these as a lack of features in 1st generation MMOs, Sigil thought of these as actual features.
I'm sure a lot of players felt they could be "core" players as well and put up with all of that, most noticeably the EQ1 cult that slowly but surely quit the game months into it's release.
People chased nostalgia, that first kiss, but in the end Vanguard was like visiting an old highschool where a lot good memories came from, but no one in their right mind would want to relive again on a day to day basis even though they thought they were down for one more round of gym class.
That said, I think Vanguard was a failure because it was both BUILT for an audience that doesn't exist, and marketed towards an audience that doesn't exist. The only saving grace it had was that it at least tacked on "hardcore" and "casual" as minor crowds the game would attempt to appeal to...so we got things like quest indicators overhead, minimaps, raid mobs and etc...and now SOE is abandoning that whole mythological "core" crowd completely in favor of facilitating the only two that actually exist..."casual" and "hardcore".
Too little too late though. Sorta impossible for 15 people to completely fix and redo what took 100 people 30 million dollars and 5 years to mess up.
If Microsoft gives you $30 million and 4 years to make a game, then it's important to design a game within those parameters instead of putting out a half-finished game that would cost $50 million if fully completed.
I think you can pretty much pin the failure of Vanguard on one patch, the one that increased EXP by 20% across the board. (think it was during beta phase 4?). By doing that they made it to easy to lvl and people blew through the lower lvl content ( the best part about that game) and in turn making it imposible for them to churn out the higher lvl content fast enough.
They needed to keep most people in the "most finshed" part of the game not help them pass it by.
Defining vanguard or any other SOE mmo's success in financial terms is in itself flawed. How so? Its simple , station access pass. Most subscibers to soe games dont subscribe to just one of the games they take the package deal.
I'd love to see some factual proof behind this.
This is very, very true. And it was a hard lesson for the folks at Sigil-- Brad in particular-- to learn.
There is absolutely no reason these days to pay subscription fees for an MMO that is unfinished, unoptimized and unpolished at the time of its release. With so many other games to choose from, you either bring your A game to the launch, and offer a compelling game right out of the box, or you fade into obscurity quickly, no matter how much work you do to fix your game after that. The window for gaining an audience is very narrow now. It's all about a strong product at launch. If your game doesn't install, patch and play with a minimum of hassle, and if you don't offer something that draws an audience in from the start, your game will die a quick, nasty death. Period.
It's why both WAR and Conan ended up delaying their launches and extending their betas around the time that Sigil imploded. They saw what happened to Vanguard and don't want the same thing to happen to them.
Defining vanguard or any other SOE mmo's success in financial terms is in itself flawed. How so? Its simple , station access pass. Most subscibers to soe games dont subscribe to just one of the games they take the package deal.
Nothing flawed about it considering Sigil itself spelled out exactly what Vanguard needed to be "successful".*exhumes Sigil*
http://forums.vanguardsoh.com/showthread.php?s=caef2e4fedead824eee33bf562b603fb&p=1125162#post1125162
So at launch Vanguard needed 200k subscribers or more by his estimates (often flawed when it comes to money and how far it can take something...).
You're right though, it's difficult to predict what Vanguard needs NOW in a wholly-owned SOE subsidiary position.
I'd still call it a continued failure though, considering the development staff continues to shrink, the chief thing subscriber money is supposed to pay for. The 15 or so people left aren't even numbered enough to simultaneously work on the card game of Diplomacy; so how the heck could there be an expansion team...something critical to a live MMO?
An MMO isn't a "success" just because it's still running, nor is it a "failure" only when it's dead. It's a failure to me when it misses and continue to miss goals set for it by the company that owns it. Vanguard failed Sigil obviously, and SOE doesn't seem to believe it's particularly a success when guys like Hasium are X'd out and the staff cut moreso than it was when initially bought.
Once we receive news of Vanguard development sounding like something other than an activity dwindling into a tree-house hobby, we can start discussin' whether it's "succeeding" in any way. Right now though looks to me like it's still failing all things considered.
The game didn't keep its initial subscription/box custom because it was broken.
A top game now needs to release polished. The fact that VG wasn't even released WORKING is not going to do it any favours. If it had released in the condition it now is, subription numbers would have been a whole different story but still not excellent.
It's strange to think that there are few (I can't think of one) single player games that would dream of releasing in the condition VG was in, yet many mmo's do. Bottom line is, they ran out of money and had no option but to release a game that wasn't going to do anything but dissapoint and crash players pc's.
Imo it's one of the changes WoW has had on the market both directly and indirectly. If Devs want to get in on some of the new mmo players whose first game was WoW then they need to release like WoW anything less will not be tolerated. This has filtered through to some of the older gamers too who have seen Bliz do it so expect all to, if they want their money. All the time remembering that all these players including WoW first timers will be writing reviews across the forums based upon what their expectations are.
Gone are the days of expecting to fix up core parts of the game after release using subbers as testers
-----
The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
I think you are right. WoW has had that effect on the industry which is good for Gamers. WoW set the bar very high. On the contrary Vanguard has set the bar as low as it can go. In that case it has had a positive effect on the industry. Nothing will ever release as bad as Vanguard.
Not enough funds to finish the game, releasing the game knowing it wasn't finished, Dx10/Vista has too many issues with gaming codes. Vanguard could have been something pretty good but I guess lesson learned when releasing something that wasn't even finished. I know VG put out some patches but most times gamers are not so forgiving. Good first impressions mean everything.
Question: How does a trial "fix" a game?
Answer: It doesn't.
If a game is broken, then it's broken. No kind of free trial can fix it.
What a free trial can do is entice people who don't want to cough up a month's worth of subscription fees to try out a game (or try out a game AGAIN). But while many potential players are waiting for a free trial, many others are playing VG and seeing that it has vastly improved from last spring for them and are now having fun.
Just because one person hasn't played and experienced the improvements doesn't mean the game is still broken. It just means that particular person should not be reviewing the game's current state.
By the way, I think that improvements still need to be made to the VG code to fix bugs, optimize performance, etc. However that is true with every other MMO I've played even years after release.
I would say based on my in-game experience that more people who try it now would have fun than those who wouldn't. The great majority will not experience game stopping issues. To some of the naysayers out there - not being able to see helms IS NOT a game stopper unless you are extremely knitpicky or just grasping at straws for reasons not to play the game.
Sure there is a long wish list of things I'd like to see in VG... or any other MMO. Sandbox. Skill based. Player run merchant shops. Less emphasis on loot and gear. Fully customized housing. The list goes on. I'm not getting any of that in VG... or any other upcoming game it seems (unless Darkfall or some small title surprises me). Strangely, even without those types of things, VG is fun... as fun as most other quest based, gear focused MMOs are.
Playing WoT now.
Favorite All-Time Games: Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Lord of the Rings Online
Games was released too soon, too many bugs and performance issues. Most ppl that have tried it out and gave up wont ever get back again. Besides that there are still other ppl like me that didnt like it because of other aspects like classes, dynamics, customization, animation, etc.
Brad McQuaid killed Vanguard. Thankfully he will not work in the industry again. Too bad he made away with millions by defrauding Microsoft and Sony.
Question: How does a trial "fix" a game?
Answer: It doesn't.
Exactly.
Let me state it very clearly in a way that isn't open to interpretation. SOE will release a trial when they think the game is fixed enough to persue new customers. Until that day comes, it's safe to assume the game still needs much work.
Now, back to the discussion of why VG failed.