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Brad McQuaid Site Updated
Urael
Member UncommonPosts: 39
"After the sale, Brad decided to take an extended break from games development and is currently pursuing his hobbies and spending time with friends and family. That said, as of late, he’s starting to get that itch again..."
I thought some may actually be interested seeing this.
Comments
oh good lord. I hope he just buys a cream for this new "itch" and stays far away from and MMO development.
Why, he single handedly created this genre' ..!
Vanguard is a great game, ATI/Nvidia and Microsoft didn't come threw on time for that game to perform respectively. I bought an 8800 and it ran Vanguard great.
Performance is what killed that game. Brad was too ambitious about the "realistic" style of VG. To me, that was the only mistake he made. If he's getting back in the game, I'm going to contact him... as I have a $12mil/month revenue game in my head! (gauranteed)
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
Damn, he'd have some balls to come back and try to helm a project.
I'd like to see it for the entertainment value alone, and not in a mean-spirited way. I wish him and everyone that survived Sigil well including Vanguard and its community, but naturally it'd be a fiasco worth watching. I mean one thing about him, a lot of the original founders of this genre come back and try to half-ass a new product built on their legacy, but Brad has enough cajones to throw triple A money down to the last dime towards what he believes in; flawed beliefs or not.
Sometimes when you have nothing to lose and only up to go, that's the best time to do something.
MMO development should do just fine, can't that be something to be agreed upon. It's the company management skills that is subpar. He is the kind of a person that needs to have a boss, not be the boss.
What I find most interesting on that site was the "Made on a Mac" part.
I'm so broke. I can't even pay attention.
"You have the right not to be killed"
In a sense if he do come back and helm a new project that would deserver some credits of it's own. But maybe there is a better way to pursue his itch.
I'm so broke. I can't even pay attention.
"You have the right not to be killed"
Please Brad, do not let Salim Grant/Silius work on your new project. He is the of death of creativity.
I don't really know *that* much about the VG saga, but I know enough to surmise that the fiasco was due to mismanagement and not meeting deadlines.
I find Vanguard - the game itself - utterly brilliant. If the 3D system wasn't so sucky and it was run by a business that wasn't equally sucky (SOE), it would be the ultimate current-day MMORPG, IMHO.
Most of us learn from our mistakes, hopefully if BM learned from the various mistakes made on VG I am extremely interested and excited to see what new game or concept may come next.
EDIT: I also found the "made on a mac" logo at the bottom of his page interesting. Probably put there by whoever he paid too much to design the page for him. Sigh, mac fanbois.
He probably made it on a Mac himself using iWeb (or whatever it's called). Pretty sure that app sticks the "Made on a Mac" logo at the bottom by default.
Current: None
Played: WoW, CoX, SWG, LotRO, EVE, AoC, VG, CO, Ryzom, DF, WAR
Tried: Lineage2, Dofus, EQ2, CoS, FE, UO, Wurm, Wakfu
Future: The Repopulation, ArcheAge, Black Desert, EQN
I think that Brad is a great creative force and has a lot of good experience in MMO games. He isn't however a good CEO or Manager as can be seen by sigil. Hopefully he has grown from the experience and recognizes his limitations. That said I'm excited to see him looking to get into a new project. He loves designing games and is very pasionate about it.
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Ethion
No investor in their right of mind would give him another $30mil to make another title. Now, if he's willing to shed some ego and step down a notch to settle with the title "producer" or executive creative designer, then I have no doubt people will still give him a chance.
Vanguard was a story of lost money and time for investors all around. Not many people get a second chance because what happened to Sigil/Vanguard will always be on his resume.
EQ1-AC1-DAOC-FFXI-L2-EQ2-WoW-DDO-GW-LoTR-VG-WAR-GW2-ESO
I hope he returns the fold and uses his many talents and abilities to produce an epic game. I am actually playing Vanguard right now (free time), and I think it is a great game. In fact, I think it is a shame it was released in the condition it was.
I am a firm believer in using your God-given talents. Always do your best. Life has ups-and-downs. I was just reading in the Wall Street Journal today about how gaming sales continue to decline. I have been in business a fairly long time, and I have seen great successes that were unanticipated and great failures that were unanticipated. You try to plan, prepare, analyze, and so forth . . . but there are always unseen factors.
If anything, I suspect he has learned a great (great) deal from Vanguard. Speaking for MYSELF, I have learned more from my failures and mistakes in life than my successes.
Brad's vision (tm) of game design was always right.
He saw everything that was going wrong with modern anti social solo quest grinders a long time ago, well before the current zeigeist of thinking, and he was shouted down for it because his thinking wasnt in line with the fashion of the time.
A lot of things went wrong with VG's development, Sigil as a company, and Brad's life at the time, there is no denying that at all, and the game obviously needed more then he was capable of giving it as a project leader, but that has nothing to do with his core ideas and philosophy of game design.
Now it has matured VG from a technical PoV it is, imo, the best traditional fantasy co-op mmorpg out there, bar none. That to my mind stands as vindication of what he stood for.
If I ran a dev house I would be glad to have Brad on board as a Creative Director.
Brad's problem is the same faced by Raph Koster and Richard Garriott.
The people most qualified to make the game are not the people most qualified to run the company that makes the game.
And the people who run the company think that gives them the experience and expertine to shape the game.
I couldn't have said it better myself. His visionary work has always been dead on with the wishes of this player. It's a shame what happened to VG which could have been a great sequel to EQ. Something EQ2 never was.
A lot can be said about the man but his vision for the genre is most welcome in these trying MMORPG times.
Yes!
He has to let other people have creative lease on his vision(TM).
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
Maybe he do it better this time.
For me, just the fact that he had a certain vision was enough to give him props.
So many people do by-the-numbers work in games that seeing someone look at all the different aspects from an overarching perspective, a sense to how those traditional pieces come together is becoming increasingly rare. I appreciated the drive.
Granted, I did not think the vision for Vanguard was groundbreaking when compared to Everquest, but it still was an effort for the refinement of many ideas that drove EQ. And while Vanguard is now not exactly true to the initial vision in its particulars, it still has that certain appeal that keeps players like me coming back to it now and again.
And something else: Creators are usually remembered by their masterpieces and not their failures. That's because failure happens very often in creative work. I also would agree it's really how you learn, so you should just gather the resolve to shrug it off and keep on so that you can get back to the good stuff
What I've never gotten is the claim that Brad's a bad manager/CEO and that was his only fault.
It seems to me that business was the only part he largely got right; tens of millions of dollars in investment, Microsoft and Sony as publishers during two different periods, independent investments in-between those two, four or five years of development plus and the game still made it out of the door.
You gotta account for his business successes, which all totaled to ":the second most expensive MMO ever" as he called it.
Brad was a great business man. When someone is the utmost creative authority within their company with five some years to spend 30 million dollars and a bad product is produced, well I'd personally probably examine how good of a designer he is rather than his business knack.
Brad needs to stay retired. Too many stories of explicit office affairs, mismanagement, missing CEOs, and drug abuse. Ask anyone at Sigil and they will tell you they never seen Brad after the SOE acquisition and that was May 2006. The game went Gold in Jan 07. Brad got lucky with EQ1 and it was a great game no doubt, but I wouldn't give him a penny for any new titles.
The reason why he was able to build those relationships is because of his past experiences. Microsoft, it has been said, it not in the business of MMORPGs. MFST creates awful software and releases it early. I THINK --speculating-- MFST was determined to do that with Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and Sigil resisted it. MFST pulls out, unable to secure financing to continue development, Sigil partners --joint venture or acquisition or whatever the form-- with SOE.
The product is released too early. I have been playing Vanguard just about every day since the free time, and I think I will write a re-re-review of the game. I really wish it were released in the way it is now. The game has a richness, depth, breadth, and complexity to it that most mainstream MMORPGs lack.
Business partners go flat all the time. I apologize if this sounds mean, but I think SIGIL, under Brad's leadership, did suffer from bad management from financing to marketing to just coding Vanguard. The vision, on the other hand, is most impressive. In fact, I think there is a big market for the "vision," but it is costly, timely, and difficult to properly execute. Vanguard, I think, approaches the "complex" (deeper crafting, diplomacy system, diverse range of Quests) and "challenge" (deeper dungeons, death penalty, less hand-holding) and "community-oriented" (grouping, crafting-economy, etc.) and "exploration" (enormous world w/ ship travel) experience that many of us want.
I have worked in many tech startups and some that went on to become large businesses. What I've learned in the last 30 years is that the guy that startes a business is the guy with a big idea. The idea and presentation of the idea is what gets investment. Passion is what gets the business off the ground and gets it started. These guys are idea men with a passion for their ideas. Investors and the people around them inherit their passion making for an exciting start.
However these same people are the people that kill most companies right out of the gate. The problem is idea guys are visionaries. They imagine something and think that it is obvious. They think everyone is passionate. They also tend to surround themselves with people that adopt their viewpoint without question, ie worshipers.
What happens is the company devolves as it grows into chaos. You see it becomes too big for the vision guy to be everywhere and the vision guy thinks everyone shares his vision. Where the reality is the vision guy needs people that can tell him NO. People that can manage day to day development. Basically nuts and bolts people. Vision people that run successful companys don't run the company at all
they recognize that they lack that ability and put themselves in the possition of chief visionary or CTO etc, and they bring in a nuts and bolts guy to run the company and be CEO. Unfortunately most of the time these vision types have too much ego and are too detached from people to notice that they are failing till it is too late. I remember one CEO like this I advised. I said we need to have you hold a moral meeting and spend time kinda rallying the troups. His response was that was a waste of time. People knew what to do and just need to do it.
Anyway Brad is a classic idea man that is great at starting something but without a CEO partner ends up loosing control, becoming disillusioned and fails. Vanguard is a fantastic vision and everyone will admit that it has awesome potential. Vanguard could have, if it had been executed properly, been the next big thing for 5-10 years.
I'm hopeful that Brad will return to the MMO world and having the experience of Vanguard under his belt, learned and grown from it, so his next venture will be an awe inspiring success
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Ethion
Well said ethion. I think you nailed everything spot on.
Brad is fantastic at creating games, but lousy at running a business. I've worked with someone very similar for ove 20 years and without someone there to keep the visionaries grounded projects will implode.
If brad allowed someone to keep things in line things could have turned out fantastic for vanguard.
I would rather have seen Brad and Sigil get their hands on something like the Hyborian IP that FC butchered; heck they might even have done a better job with WAR than Mythics dismal effort. It would be interesting to see him take a shot at something new and big, it's not like there is anything much out there to look forward to now....
I have worked in many tech startups and some that went on to become large businesses. What I've learned in the last 30 years is that the guy that startes a business is the guy with a big idea. The idea and presentation of the idea is what gets investment. Passion is what gets the business off the ground and gets it started. These guys are idea men with a passion for their ideas. Investors and the people around them inherit their passion making for an exciting start.
However these same people are the people that kill most companies right out of the gate. The problem is idea guys are visionaries. They imagine something and think that it is obvious. They think everyone is passionate. They also tend to surround themselves with people that adopt their viewpoint without question, ie worshipers.
What happens is the company devolves as it grows into chaos. You see it becomes too big for the vision guy to be everywhere and the vision guy thinks everyone shares his vision. Where the reality is the vision guy needs people that can tell him NO. People that can manage day to day development. Basically nuts and bolts people. Vision people that run successful companys don't run the company at all
they recognize that they lack that ability and put themselves in the possition of chief visionary or CTO etc, and they bring in a nuts and bolts guy to run the company and be CEO. Unfortunately most of the time these vision types have too much ego and are too detached from people to notice that they are failing till it is too late. I remember one CEO like this I advised. I said we need to have you hold a moral meeting and spend time kinda rallying the troups. His response was that was a waste of time. People knew what to do and just need to do it.
Anyway Brad is a classic idea man that is great at starting something but without a CEO partner ends up loosing control, becoming disillusioned and fails. Vanguard is a fantastic vision and everyone will admit that it has awesome potential. Vanguard could have, if it had been executed properly, been the next big thing for 5-10 years.
I'm hopeful that Brad will return to the MMO world and having the experience of Vanguard under his belt, learned and grown from it, so his next venture will be an awe inspiring success
very nice Eth
What killed the game was that Brad must have taken some bums or old beer buddies as programmers, SOE fired tham all at launch it it took them 2 years to get the game running acceptable.
Vanguards general ideas works well but the programming team and some of the art is really bad. Brad should learn to find someone who actually knows what they are doing instead of the first guy he talks to.
You know really why Wow is so succesful? 2 big reasons: Strain who did the initial programing and basic work, he is a genius (Diablo, Warcraft 3, Guildwars) and the Kaplan who did the rest. Awesome guys and if Vanguard had one of them it would be a success now. Of course Blizz also had a huge fanbase but a competent head dev who actually can program himself is a must for a MMO.
So if you planning a new game, don't bother unless you can get a great head programmer, all badly programmed games have failed even if the content is great.
I don't really blame Brad for VGs failure but he really should pick his team better.
And EQ didn't create the MMOs, not even the 3rd person ones, a game I played called Meridian 59 did that. It did refine them and made them fun to play however.