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Brad we need a new game
Arclan
Member UncommonPosts: 1,550
We all know Vanguard...
1. was too ambitious
2. shipped 12 months too early
3. was forced to undergo WOWification prior to launch
So the game flopped, but if you take out the WoWification I think more would be playing it today.
So I'd really like another original Brad game; like EQ. I know I know, EQ was the result of a lot of very talented people working their tail off; not the 9 to 5 jokers we have today. But Brad had a big influence on major gameplay decisions.
On Brad's web site, he mentiones joining the EQ1 team two months ago. If so, that's cool. Hope he works on EQN, too, because I get more jaded every day and doubt EQN will be anything other than the flavor of the month.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
Comments
Wait .. you want a game from a guy whose best work is a flop?
How do you know his next work won't be
a) too ambitious
b) shipping too early,
c) forced to be wowified?
Is he a boss now?
They left out "a".
Because he has "a" boss rather than being one, there's a huge difference.
That one letter changes the whole sentence.
Where have you gone Joe Dimaggio
our nation turns its lonely eyes to you
woo woo woo
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
edit
I'm pretty sure that's the SOE business model.
I don't know whats wrong with people here. Cant you see what the OP is trying to say.....He is looking for a real mmo....
1) A real mmo
2) Brads vision was good
3) Brad WAS rushed, politics got the best of the making Vanguard
4) Even if people don't like Brad, how about if some other developer takes the ball and run with it.
Can't anyone understand what the OP is talking about, without twisting things up. We need a new core group of posters here !
A creative person is motivated by the desire to achieve, not the desire to beat others.
Vanguard was boring as hell, even when the players deemed "this is how it should've released". I didn't find anything new or exciting in it. t was so generic.
Strict holy trinity combat, uninspired quests, grindy as hell, re-occuring abilities (Fireball I, Fireball II, Fireball III -syndrome), seemingly arbitrary level-cap which caused the classes to have "filler level-ups" from which they received essentially nothing, fragmented player base across many starting and leveling areas, annoying mini-games for crafting coupled with pretty standard resource gathering both made "bot resistant" because they were so unappealing you actually wanted to use one, very poorly optimized and ugly with characters that looked like they were made from plastic.
That enough?
Even if it had had the funding to release in the state it was intended I doubt it wouldn't have made much of an impact at all. Why would anyone thing Brad is some sort of a messiah?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
That was 2007 or when ever, Thats how mmos were made. Its now 2013....Do you think a new mmo would be made like that ?..I'm having a hard time trying to figure you people out !
i have no idea what is this brad thing.... is it bread?
History lesson? Is it time for a history lesson, dear? *holds rubber duck to ear* IT IS.
Brad McQuaid. A brief history.
Once upon a time, there was a boy named Brad. He represented the creative vision which defined the era of greatest success for the original Everquest. He was loved by many, hated by a few, but respected by all. Time passed, and EQ1 lost its sparkle. People began to move on. Y'know, because death to the Midgardian dogs, long live Hibernia.
About then, EQ2 and WoW slammed against each other, launching nearly at the same time. And the two games began to borrow from each other. It was pretty awesome to watch them both take turns copying each other's QoL changes within one month. Oh, the joys of innovation. And many of the EQ diehards began to comment, "This porridge is too WoW." Actually, that part never happened. As I recall, and I do recall pretty well, most of the complaints for early EQ2 were about terrible performance on even high-end rigs, inability to solo even while questing, and overly harsh dungeon lock-out mechanics.
But the masses cried for something different! And by masses, I mean a tiny minority of dissatisfied EQ1 vets.
God, where the Hell am I going with this. *holds rubber duck up to ear* Explain what they really wanted? I thought they were just bitter and didn't move on when the genre did . . . Oh, there was more?
Oh, right. One day, their savior returned! Brad McQuaid, waving a feathered hat (I think he did that a few times), at the helm of now-defunct Sigil Games. Come, Brad said, come my faithful followers, and I will take you on a wondrous journey. POLITICS. EXPLORATION. DUNGEONS. BOATS. DID I MENTION BOATS. IT'S 2013, AND STILL NOBODY HAS GIVEN US BOATS. EVEN DARKFALL PROMISED BOATS. GOD DAMN IT.
Where was I? Yes. People wanted many of these features. I would have been all in if the boats thing materialized, but what people mostly wanted was this:
Wait, I think I need to explain to you what many newer players don't get. Many of EQ1's "features" were nightmarishly frustrating by today's standards. You had to run back to your body naked (while Karma Chameleon played in the background. OK, I made that part up. What, you've never heard of it? L2Spotify) to get your gear from your corpse, for example. And if you didn't, you eventually lost your gear. Joy. You also had to compete for rare spawns with different players in the same (originally) completely non-instanced world. Oh, did I mention the random aggressive mobs roaming leveling areas which completely destroyed you in the space of roughly seven seconds? Newer players look at a game like that and wonder, "How can anybody be nostalgic for that kind of experience?"
But this kind of design had a few benefits. It smashed the playerbase together in a way that newer games didn't. The danger and potentially crushing penalties of the game forced people to rely on each other. In the name of avoiding frustration, many newer games essentially let players play the entire game either solo or with their guild, avoiding the random intermingling. That's what these players really wanted: a game with a sense of community, bound by shared struggle. A large world full of exploration was icing.
But problems . . . so many problems. It's a big, long, hard, agonizing, painful jump from the world of designer/producer (even lead) to CEO. Ask Bill Roper. A big problem is that you have these people with great design or production chops. And then, while their own talents get wasted, they struggle (often unsuccessfully because this isn't part of their skill set) to appeal to investors to garner continued funding, etc. etc. And y'know what? Maybe the guys who actually do end up leading production or design aren't that good. Happens . . . a lot. That's what happens when you have a great designer create a strategic vision as CEO, then entrust it to people with a tiny fraction of their experience to implement. In the many post-mortems that examined Vanguard's early collapse, failures of leadership ranked high.
Here's a little hint. Vanguard was in production forever-and-a-half. I think the final tally was a lil over five years. Out of that, nearly the entire game which people played at launch was made during the last ohhhh . . . I think around 20 months was the number I recall. They had that much wasted development time. I wonder how good the game was when it launched . . .
I'm boring them? *puts rubber duck to ear* Cut to what chase? Why are you such a backseat poster?
Ok, lets fast-forward. IT LAUNCHED. And OH GOD, THE HORROR. I would list the myriad agonies of the Vanguard launch, but . . . well . . . nahhh. "Terrible performance and ten-million bugs" will be your short version.
Long story short, Sigil Games was gone in a few months, and almost all of the players left. And SOE took it over. And people didn't come back. And SOE made it playable by slowly fixing most of the bugs. And people still didn't come back. And it went F2P. And people still didn't come back. And every few months, some blogger writes about why they play Vanguard. And by play, they mean "have played for the last two weeks". And two weeks later, they've stopped playing.
But for reasons beyond the comprehension of mortal men, some people still hold out hope. Their whispers in forgotten tongues can still be heard on the wind,
"The Brad shall save us."
"The Brad shall rise again."
And secretly, I think, the Brad thinks to himself, "I'm much happier clocking in, being a designer on someone else's dollar, and going home. Leave me alone, crazy forum-posters. And especially you, crazy redditers."
But once every second full moon, he retires to a room warded by the forbidden symbols of the heretics, and he mutters to himself, "I hear your whispers, my loyal followers. The children of Marr shall rise again!" And his girlfriend hears him muttering from the laundry room, and she almost wishes she had dated Mark Jacobs instead.
May the Brad forgive me.
Just a little heads up............This was hard to read !
WHAT. IT WAS HARD TO READ. TRY WRITING IT.
bah dum tsh
Awesome post Kurush. I don't think I've ever read such a succinct, clever, and articulate history of MMO development. If more users like yourself posted on this site perhaps the forums would feel less an endless circle jerk.
Ill take the trinity any day of the week over say what GW2 has done with combat making ever class basically a clone of every other class. Everyone's a DPS everyones a healer I feel like im part of some giant ant farm sim when I play that game.
Being needed and having to depend on other players for things is an important part of an MMO, more and more games are removing this element completely, you just have a bunch of people moving about in herds all doing the same thing but not communicating at all, its like the borg.
I would LOVE a spiritual successor to Vanguard. I think the design concepts were way ahead of their time and unfortunately, the technology and the time/money weren't there for the project... an argument can be made for talent as well though that is easy to understand when you're sort of pioneering and doing things that haven't really been done much before.
BOYCOTTING EA / ORIGIN going forward.
Sorry, not history. Fiction.
Just need to correct this, as well as one of the points in the OP
Brad wasn't rushed, his company ran out of money. It was either launch unfinished or not at all.
And as for the OP saying Vanguard was forced to be wowified, thats also incorrect. No one forced Sigil to do anything. Whatever was done before the SoE acquisition 9as owner, not as publisher) is all on Sigil. And while SoE have made some changes that move it closer to WoWishness, they werent that drastic. It certainly hasnt been big changes, just a few minor tweaks here and there (like the Riftway system)
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Sony-Online-Entertainment-RVW2506268.htm
good luck guys
About vanguard.
The idea of diplomacy was awesome, but how it turned out as a minigame was a joke.
Crafting was not too bad, although I still find eq2's craftng the most fun I have tried in any mmorpg.
Combat mechanics in Vanguard is still the best and most fun I have ever tried, just the way classes supported eachother that was a stroke of genious.
My problem is that I can not play a mmorpg no matter how good, that will never get expansions or serious continuous development. It was kindda obvious early on, VG would not get the attention required. EQ2 and VG has the same target audience and SoE had to let VG die because of that is a conspiracy theory that is absolutely false, seriously who came up with that idea it doesn't add up unless you use logic, so let me be clear I don't think it was the case .. no no no.
Im trying to get to like GW2 right now with a free weekend code, and its combat reminds me a bit of VG in a way. 10 years later, and VG combat still beats anything - Stop there gwtroll, it is my personal opinion, and again totally wrong.
Where was I ?
I say we need a St. Quaids day, did anyone send in a petition yet ? And if anyone could fund a top game, it would be the Catholic church..., does anyone know a Bishop we can blackmail ? They might have issues with the all different gods, but maybe if we made paladins OP ?
On a more serious note. Did you listen to [link incomming] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt-MEgLXKXs about eqnext ? If I weren't such a cynical person I would say they learned from teh Brad and Eqnext might not be completely screwed up.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0