Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolfen
Who exactly made Vanguard ship early? Was it Brad that made that decision? Or was it Smed and SOE telling him to launch or else?

If SOE ordered him to release it early, I'd have to give Brad a small break. If not, then he's getting what he deserves.

Had I had the financial resources, ability to place the product later, etc. I would have given us about 3 more months to get more polish in, more high level content in, and to distance ourselves from the WoW expansion.

That said, we knew the launch date for many months before we released. And we made a promise and we stuck to it. I understand why that date was given and why we had to stick to it and I don't blame anyone.

We made our own share of mistakes that took up time that in 20/20 hindsight would have made up for those 3 months perhaps. I do believe, again in hindsight, that we entered beta too early because of the release date we had with MSFT -- otherwise it would have been held off quite a while and a lot of time getting things working first operationally with MSFT and then again with SOE could have been avoided (e.g. would have only had to do all that once). Much of the roughness of our systems would have been worked out before people from outside Sigil and our publisher would have been able to have been addressed under that scenario as well. I've mentioned the pain in learning the hard way how different it is to manage a company of 100 people vs. a team of 23 was. We had a very experienced team, arguably the most, but it was still a team, from the designer all the way up to me, that had only made MMOGs that had lasted 3 years and taken 23 people, or expansions that had lasted one year.

Had I a time machine, I would go back and do a LOT of things differently, but then life doesn't work that way. We didn't repeat a lot of mistakes we'd already made, but made a lot of new ones given the team size, how ambitious the game was, and the fact that it took 5 years, not 3. Switching publishers, while necessary, also took a lot of time. It also took a lot more effort running the company from a non-creative standpoint than I had thought it would. With EQ, Smed and others handled the business side of things and I, my managers, and my team were able to focus on the game.

As Kendrick posted, we did scale back several times and significantly, but again looking back I probably would have scaled things back more so.

I do take issue with the assertion that I promised a bunch of stuff we didn't deliver. I do fully admit my writing style is verbose and I made a significant effort to hype the game, but at the same time I also made a huge effort to manage expectations and let people know what might not make it in release, what was an expansion idea, etc. Sure, that changed as we got farther along with development. You can look up my posts and look at old copies of the FAQ and see the scaling back that took place (both what Kendrick mentioned and other stuff). And thinking back on it, while I posted a lot of these changes, the FAQ should have been kept more up to date.

I will say I think we did a pretty darn good job overall. We released a game that is probably 80% of what we'd originally planned outside of sheer landmass. We did not completely re-design major systems in beta other than diplomacy -- we revised crafting and harvesting and made some tweaks to combat in terms of pace, how complex it became at what level, etc. But the notion that we threw a bunch of stuff out just isn't accurate -- again, some of the perception likely comes from starting beta when the game was really still in alpha. Probably the biggest features that didn't make it in that I think would have been very cool (or some variant thereof): AES fully realized, fellowships, caravans.

Again, had we a few more months I think the game would have been more polished. That is one of the biggest things WoW taught us, the importance of polish, AI, general accessibility, etc. Launching near TBC was nuts, but again something that couldn't be avoided. Switching publishers also took time, but we would have had a LOT less time to make the game had we not done so. MSFT underwent a lot of internal changes and had to focus on getting out the Xbox 360 -- switching to SOE was simply another change that reality dictated during this long 5 years.

I think the biggest things that are hurting the game right now are:

1. Performance. We simply asked too much of the engine. Tech becoming faster and cheaper will help us with this issue over the next 6 months, but that's 6 month's that *might* have been avoided. That, and we would have had more time to polish and fix bugs and get better and more complete high level content in (and maybe even a more workable AES). We did run into this a bit with EQ 1 being one of the first hardware only games, but not to this extent. Ideally, you launch with both a flexible engine that grows with you and also in a tech window that doesn't mean that a lot of your players feel the need to upgrade their machines significantly. Failing that ideal, however, I'll take the more flexible, planned for the long term tech, and bite the bullet for overshooting in terms of tech than the former (undershooting and/or launching with inflexible MMOG tech that isn't easily upgraded over the years to come).

2. Underpopulated servers. The reason we are enhancing the LFG system (other than it's always a good idea in general) is because it's too hard to find a group. One of the biggest reasons it's too hard to find a group is that we were overly worried the newbie yards would be over populated the first couple of weeks post-launch that we opened with too many servers. That's why we are working on better LFG tools, having to seriously consider overland teleports, etc. If a world at peak hours had 4-5k people on it, this wouldn't be nearly the problem it is.

3. Launching so close to TBC. I never thought we were going to, but Blizzard's launch date was a moving target and things could have worked out better there. Again, though, I think a decent percentage of WoW players are going to want a game like Vanguard (or any other MMOG this year) once they are burned out on the WoW expansion, so I think in the next 4-6 months this issue will become less and less as painful.

4. Marketing. There are two groups of ex-EQ 1, UO, DAoC, etc. players out there: the ones that look back fondly on the years they put into EQ 1 and those who don't -- either they're upset or, more often, they simply have had their lives change and they don't have the time to play another EQ 1. So when they heard about Vanguard and all of the EQ 1 people working on it they didn't even give it a chance -- they simply assumed Vanguard would be as hard core as EQ 1 (when it absolutely isn't). We totally underestimated that second group, and I think if we had got the message out that Vanguard was not just another EQ with all of its time sinks, tedium, leveling times, necessary raiding, need for contiguous time commitments, and somehow got that message clearly and strongly through to that second group we would have launched more strongly. This is another issue, however, we will survive, not just by changing the marketing message, but mainly through viral marketing. Those ex-EQ 1 players who *do* buy Vanguard, and enjoy it, *will* slowly but surely let that second group of people know that Vanguard does *not* equal EQ 1 with better graphics in the ways some people look back, sigh, and mutter 'never again', but that it *does* have the elements in it that made EQ 1 a great game (as well as many of the cooler UO/SWG elements, new systems like Diplomacy, greater immersion, etc.)

So a lot happened in the almost 5 years it took to make Vanguard. We made our share of new mistakes, we were a bit too ambitious in terms of world size and feature set, we were definitely too ambitious in terms of performance, we lost some time switching publishers, we still could have used another 3+ months of dev time, the market changed in general, we did lose some time learning how to organize and manage a 100 man team, and it would have been damn nice to have not launched almost right on top of the juggernaut that is WoW's expansion.

Certainly none of the above mistakes were planned for. Many/most were unexpected. Some of the mistakes were directly our fault, and some more indirectly and some totally beyond our control. I could write another one of my missives going into a lot more detail and maybe one day I will, but I will spare you my verbosity tonight. No matter what ,however, I was CEO and the buck stops here. None of the above do I use as an excuse as if life was unfair to us. We made some bad calls and were put into some bad situations. But I should have known better, planned better, and reacted better, so I take full responsibility. Most assuredly I cannot stress how proud I am of the Vanguard team, past and present, and all of the hard work, sweat, and tears that were put into the game. The team was and is incredible and it was an honor working with them. So regardless of screw-up or mistake, I take responsibility and apologize. The team should feel nothing but pride and a great sense of accomplishment.

That said, I still believe very strongly that we planned many or even most things correctly and that we launched a game that was 80+% the game we had planned to launch (again, other than totally reworking Diplomacy, tweaking some systems later in beta than I would have liked, and shrinking the world a LOT). And again I humbly but strongly stress all of the hooks and stubs that are in the engine, gameplay code, tools, etc -- they *will* pay off. While Vanguard stands on its own as a fun game, despite the bugs and performance issues that we all know exist and have been talked about in this thread and others, it's also set up such that we have years and years of cool features, content, land masses, etc. planned out in detail that will make the Vanguard of 2007, as cool as it is, pale in comparison to the Vanguard of 2008, 2009, etc. Relatively quickly, player run towns with an RTS element, ship and mounted combat, Diplomacy expanding to become more integral with factions, organizations, etc., user generated content, and so much more are really going to make this game shine. That, and even though it does require a lot of horsepower in terms of tech today, those issues will become less and less relevant as time goes by, with PCs getting so much faster and cheaper, RAM and bus speeds getting so much faster, graphics cards getting faster, physics cards, DX 10, utilizing Unreal 3.0 tech more and more, going into expansions with tools and tech that while still could use a lot of improvement are finally at a point where a lot of R&D won't be necessary and that time will be much more efficiently spent putting in content, features, etc.
And finally I still feel very strongly that going seamless will really pay off as the live team adds efficiently to the existing world, databases of items and such can be updated en masse to slow MUDflation and at the same time refresh the world and make it feel more dynamic, ship travel and exploring vast archipelagoes becomes more integral, planes with unique physics models appear miles up into the sky, non-Euclidean Portal technology is used to build unheard of dungeon layouts, Underdark-style 'chunks under chunks' are added, the ability to load any art asset anywhere is more fully realized, and yes even the controversial 'unibody' system allows us to create *that* many more item & armor sets, adding even stronger visual variety to player characters in such an item-centric economy... I still feel firmly that even if we were early and our system specs initially high that all of this tech will pay off big time, especially in the mid to long term, given a genre that thrives on newness and patching, that demands a game world that remains interesting and compelling for year after year.

Anyway, the pages and pages that I posted promoting Vanguard, to get the word out, was the truth as best as I knew it at the time and I updated it as soon as it was obvious something would work differently or not make it in by release. And anything I did miss was unintentional, but the buck still stops here. Where I wasn't clear, or where I failed to manage expectations -- all of that was my responsibility. So while apologetic wherever and however we failed, overall I have no regrets looking back at the 5 years Sigil has been around and look to the next 5 years with even more anticipation. A lot of new mistakes were made, but we took notes and have long memories.

In summary, had a lot of the above not occurred then I think Vanguard would be nearing 300k or 400k and not 200k. A lot of the above caused the game to start out more slowly than I had hoped, anticipated and planned for. But still looking at both sales and retention, the game is doing well, even if in a more ideal world it could be doing even better. The team continues to work their butts off, fixing bugs, optimizing, putting in content, tweaking and balancing, and we have our first expansion and where we want new live content to go planned out for when the timing is right to begin that endeavor. So while all of the above, this post-mortem of sorts, may come across as critical and looking back negatively (and not by accident -- much of this thread is doing just that, so this post is certainly not off topic), Vanguard is still far, far from a failure by any means. Few PC games, MMOGs or otherwise, do more than 100k units, and we surpassed that in a couple of weeks. So even with regrets, some kicking myself, and a lot of 'dammit, if only...' coming out of part of me, the rest of me is damn proud of what we have accomplished, and what we will and are accomplishing, and most importantly extremely honored to have worked with such a team and that so much of that team continues to march onward. Ultimately I am very grateful to God, MSFT, SOE, EQ, and so many other people and products for the opportunity to have been able to do this again. Few get to make even one successful MMOG, much less two. And fewer still given $8M to make the first one and over $30M to make the second.

*humbly bows*

ps. Glad many of you like Nino's style -- he is definitely more cut and dry than me and probably could have said all of this in one paragraph. I hope he and other dev team members are able and willing to continue to post.

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