A bunch of truly fantastic news and features have gone across WoW Insider and Massivley in the last few days. I had to share me some love:

• A wrapup of the pounding that cross-gender ‘research’ took at the hands of Bartle and the Freeman.  I particularly liked the comments on Raph’s blog; almost nothing from him and several really nice retorts from the peanut gallery.
• Will Dobson put together a fantastic look at the Spring Festival going on over in LOTRO. It’s not only interesting and informative but a great chance to show off our new gallery software. Nice!
• The WoW Insider team headed to the Tourney test realm and came away with some amazing stuff. Amanda Miller has a writeup of the events, but you really have to check out the gallery of their experiences. I want to ride a giant Raven Lord!
• A FANTASTIC announcement from NCsoft as they unveil the beginnings of Issue 12 for City of Heroes. I really love the sound of this content - definitely going to have to check it out. In fact, talking it over with the EQ2 group, it sounds like CoH might be our next destination once we hit max level sometime near the end of this year.
• I remember seeing the flying mounts at the end of Vanguard Beta over a year ago now, and only now are they getting put into the game. A little sad, but still great news for the players who have been waiting patiently for this content to drop. Game Update 4 is live!

1 comment

People often talk about what’s important in Massive games. While I tend to find discussions of elements like storytelling, graphics, or theme interesting, much of that is missing the point. Why do people play Massive games? People. It’s as simple as that. While some titles make great single-player experiences too, the fundamental component of any MMOG is that second M.

Raiding, guilds, and chat elements, then, tend to get a lot of attention. And rightly so; the guild is the fundamental unit of any Massive game. Raiding is the ‘thing people do together’ in many titles, and the chat component of the game allows the whole thing to happen in the first place. There’s a missing level of granularity there, that I think is far too often overlooked: the single static group. Static groups are, in my mind, just as important as guilds to the success or failure of a game. Incredibly common, they’re one of the most joyous things about massive games. Tabletop gamers will recognize the static group, that band of comrades, immediately. That’s where my group came from, after all - a player of mine wandering away from the table (and the state).

Static group recognition, in my mind, isn’t just a nice optional feature; it’s an important concept in online gaming that goes regularly overlooked.

Read more

3 comments

The death of Vanguard, or rather its slow decline, is a noteworthy point in a number of 2008 prognostications around the blogosphere. I tend to think that’s a freaking shame. If as nothing more than as a testament to all those newbie designers, I really like the idea of Vanguard sticking around. So what can be done at this point?

What can put the brakes on this game’s freefall? In my mind, I think about the only thing left is an influx of new players. A sufficient parachute of players might make this game’s time in the air a little longer - and certainly more interesting.

Read more

6 comments

Almost exactly a year ago I put down some predictions for the year in Massive games. It’d be cheating if I didn’t grade myself, so that’s what I’m going to do here, looking back at my 2006 MMOGnostications. This will be a pass/fail test, class … pens at the ready!

Burning Problems - The launch of the expansion to World of Warcraft is going to cause Blizzard bigtime headaches.

Buzz! Bigtime wrong. The launch went almost flawlessly, and despite the huge impact it has had on the life of raiders WoW rolls along unbowed and unbroken. I always thought the expansion was going to be good, but I expected Blizzard to have problems similar to the game’s initial launch. Instead, big blue learned its lessons and scored a customer relations coup.

That Not So Fresh Feeling - At least one of the MMOGs slated to launch this year is going to end up being kind of a stinker.

Ding! This was kind of one of my ’safety’ options, but it came very much true nonetheless. Vanguard was a huge letdown for expectant fans, and the SOE team is still doing overtime work to make the ship sail in a straight line.

Read more

7 comments

Update: It’s official now. Smedley’s post on the forums gives up most of the details. The official press release says that the game sold about 200,000 units since launch.

So. F13 has the news:

At approximately 4:30PM [April 14th], Sigil employees were told to meet outside. At which point they were terminated. On the spot. By whom? Doesn’t seem to have been Brad McQuaid, if it was, nobody is talking. But that doesn’t seem like something he’d do. But I suppose the executioner is irrelevant since most folks secretly want it to be SOE and it wasn’t. As it stands, people were told to come back tomorrow to do their paperwork and some may get hired by SOE.

Actually, we know for sure the McQuaid wasn’t the one to do it. Grouchy Gamer reports that lord-and-master of Vanguard Brad McQuaid hasn’t been in the Sigil offices since last year. You know, since before the game shipped? Just in case you think that’s some crazy guy on a website, I’ll go on record as saying I can verify most of what he’s saying. I too have heard from ’sources’ who say that the hard workers, the guys on the ground at Sigil, were fucked over by a gent who tipped his toe into the ‘running a company’ pool and decided it was a wee bit too nippy for him.

One of these ’sources’ has been suggesting I look into this further, talk to some of these guys and write it up. And I will say: if there’s any ex-Sigil employees looking to talk my email address is right here on the site. Update: F13 has a talk with one of the ex-devs and lays it all out.

But the reality is, I haven’t dug very hard because the whole thing depresses the hell out of me. How can a guy like McQuaid, who was there at the very beginning, care so little about the project he started? This wasn’t some green schlub out of college: he helped to make one of these things when ‘catass’ wasn’t even a term yet. Hell, he helped make the game that spawned the term.

Krones has a few insightful things to say about this over at Plaguelands, but the last words go to Grouchy:

I should tell you that I’m pissed that I wasted 2 years on developing a community at my site for a game that is nothing more than a steaming pile of shit. I’m pissed that the good people (and good developers) that I care about at Sigil are now in the street, and Brad still has millions and Jeff Butler a job … In the end, this game may someday be good. Tomorrow, when this news is announced a lot of the SOE haters will just jump ship, whether SOE had anything to do with this game failing or not. Fact is, it has (failed.) And fact is, it’s not SOE’s fault. The blame for this one falls squarely at the desk where the buck should stop. The CEO’s office. The empty one in the corner.

10 comments

Update on the future of Sigil and Vanguard coming soon…

It’s all ultimately good news, but complicated enough to justify one of my verbose postings :)  I should have my first Sigil/Vanguard update up tomorrow and then look for regular updates as to the future of the game here and on the affiliate sites (probably weekly or so, depending on what’s going on).  I will post here first and then immediately copy the post to a set of the Vanguard affiliate sites.

thanks,

-Brad 

No comments

While I’d like to once again register my belief that honesty is something to be lauded … I’m going to step back and agree that Brad McQuaid’s commentary hasn’t helped at all.

A press release totally unconnected to Massive games actually convinced me of this. The release that changed my mind was a recent missive from Palladium Books. Palladium is a publisher of table-top roleplaying games, and is helmed by a gent named Kevin Siembada. I dunno if things have changed since I followed tabletop closely, but back in the day he was regarded as a right proper ass. My nose wrinkled like I was smelling something foul as I read his dripping message to Palladium customers:

My goal and the goal shared by every Palladium staff member, as well as our freelance artists and writers, is to create some of the most dynamic, exciting and fun role-playing games and sourcebooks on the market. Not just for our own survival, but for the survival and advancement of the role-playing game hobby. We are disappointed by the low number of RPG products being released by other game companies. All of us at Palladium Books know role-playing games have a bright future, and we aim to prove it. In addition to RPG sourcebooks and games, you will soon see an offering of three, new T-shirts, Rifts Postage Stamps, the John Zeleznik Art Book, and a new product line I think is fun, different and something you and ALL fans of sci-fi and fantasy artwork will enjoy. I’m sure some of our detractors will shake their heads, but we think it’s something people will enjoy and use.

I read this, I recalled Siembada’s asinine plea to fans to keep the company afloat (which obviously worked, unfortunately), and I can’t help but think of Brad’s comments to the Vanguard fanbase. Yech. They’re honest, yes, but as with Siembada’s drooling exhortation to buy more of their crap to ‘advance the role-playing game hobby’, they’re essentially penitent excuses laid at the feet of the gamers who are subsidizing Sigil’s existence. “We really really tried. We tried so hard. I know it’s not as good as it could have been. Also: please keep giving us money!”

Moreover, and this is what has been weighing on me, they’re far too little too late. Yes, money was tight. Developing a game on your own often is. Yes, SOE forced them to launch sooner than they were ready. That happens when you let an older boy play with your toys - they might get broken. The bottom line here is that McQuaid and Co. had FIVE FUCKING YEARS to make this game. The official press release wasn’t until 2004, but Sigil has been around since January of 2002. They’ve had that long to get with the times, make changes, realize they were making a horrible mistake, or at least … you know … fix the bugs. The stink is rising from the shambling carcass that is Saga of Heroes, and already the vultures are beginning to take strips of flesh:

Kageru: Meanwhile I have no idea what happened with the game coding. The code seems to already have reached an unmaintainable state where bugs just can’t be fixed. I can’t imagine how else the act of forming a group, or not falling through the world, can still be so flawed. Meanwhile the rate of introduction for new bugs is scarily high.

I honestly can’t see the game holding enough subscriptions to fund the development it needs to be decent.

That, of course, is now the question: Will SOE buy Vanguard from Sigil? There has been lots of discussion on the subject of just what went wrong, and folks are on both sides of the fence. Is it worth saving? Is there any player interest? What does Brad think? (You’ll note he’s been fairly quiet on this particular front.)

My two cents: No, it’s not worth saving. But yes, if SOE can swing it they almost certainly will.

The reason it’s not worth saving? When I talked about throwing a MMOG and no one coming back in Summer of last year, I was talking about Auto Assault. From everything I’ve heard, even though there’s no one (really) interested in playing it … the people who *are* playing it are having a blast. It’s very different, it’s a little hard to understand, but they went out there and they tried something really different. And they fell on their faces. Which happens sometimes. Just like Pauly Shore - at least they tried. Vanguard, on the other hand, is a five-years-in-the-making retread of a game released in 1999 that isn’t even as good as the original game. Yeah, you can make ships and fly cool mounts etc. etc, but the metric shit-ton of content SOE has crammed into EQ over the years makes those extra features look like chump change. The diplomacy game is really neat. I’ll totally give them that. But em … what else is there to get excited about? LOTRO’s got Hobbitses and fancy titles … and you’re offering me a glorified card game?

Now, all that said, SOE is definitely going to buy it if they can. The reason: Because they can. They’ve already got their foot in the door by publishing the thing, and I’m going to take a wild guess and say that Vanguard would probably be pretty cheap to pick up right now. Poor dealings with Microsoft in the past and awful subscriptions rates in the here-and-now have to be making it hard for those guys to be making payroll let alone focusing on future development. So SOE slips some cash in a few pockets and bingo-bango: a 95% complete Massive game that just needs a few months of work to get the kinks ironed out.

Yes, it’s a lot like their two flagship products. Yes, it’s leaving a really bad taste in the mouths of gamers right now. Yes, people are going to yell at them and call them mean and nasty names for ‘butting in’ to ‘Brad’s sacred realm’. All those are good reasons not to. But, as I’ve tried to point out in the past, at the end of the day the Massive industry is a business. From a business standpoint, there’s a wounded competitor lying at their feet. You pick him up, dust him off, and soon enough he’s working for you. Why let the guy die when you can turn misfortune into an opportunity for profit?

(I’m mentally picturing Ferengi rubbing their lobes right now, so consider that as you mentally say the word ::profit::)

All this is just conjecture of course, but why not? Hell, it’s SOE’s money to throw away, not mine. At this point I wouldn’t invest in Vanguard with um … a twelve foot pole.

You tell me, though: What’s a real and honestly good reason for Sony Online Entertainment not to purchase Vanguard?

2 comments