Post by Morreion on Aug 1, 2014 17:11:30 GMT -5
'Vanguard was sort of the end of innocence in the genre.'
All screenshots in this post were taken on July 31st 2014, Vanguard's last day, by me.
This was the location I had planned on being when the game shut down- one of my favorite views. But the devs had a special treat for players at the very end.
Norrathian Notebook: Saying goodbye to EQ 2.5 aka Vanguard (Massively)
Vanguard continues to be the go-to game for folks wanting to face a real EverQuest-style challenge in their gaming. Nothing is handed to players on a silver platter. Not everyone likes the work-hard-for-your-money mantra, but for those who do, the earn-it-yourself progression of Vanguard is not really found many places. And the crafting and diplomacy systems definitely aren't found elsewhere! If you want to see a crafting system that is the antithesis of clicking a single button, you have to come try Vanguard's.
Flying a griffon and seeing the sights!
The Daily Grind: I'll miss you, Vanguard (Massively)
Hey Vanguard. I wish you could stay longer. Yeah, you've been hanging around my hard drive since 2007, but that first year was a mess. You launched right next to The Burning Crusade, which would have been the kiss of death even if you hadn't debuted with a bunch of bugs.
SOE eventually fixed you up, and the result was a niche and highly enjoyable MMO world of the kind that no one wants to make any more. You were vast, you were an explorer's dream and, stutter-step chunk lines notwithstanding, you were seamless. You had more races and classes than I can remember, though I will remember the Dread Knight and the Disciple quite fondly.
I wish more people had given you a whirl. I wish more devs would copy your crafting. I wish all MMO quests were as fun as that lengthy, lovely unicorn mount chase. I'll probably get in trouble for saying so, but I wish your labyrinthine code could've led to an emulator. Most of all, though, I wish you weren't leaving. You were the first themepark I actually enjoyed, and that's no small feat.
I went to places I'd never been before, like the roof of the Dwarven city.
The Think Tank: Saying farewell to Vanguard (Massively)
I have some specific epic memories that I will cherish all my gaming days, even though my words can't do them justice. The first is from the very beginning, when my partner had to travel across Thestra in order to begin the game with my Shaman. Even though I wasn't the one running the land, I was right there with him and felt the adrenaline rushes of the close calls when coming face-to-face with new dangers, the disappointment when the close call didn't end in his favor, and the achievement when he finally made it. It took hours! Throughout the game there were other epic journeys like that, including the quest to obtain the unicorn mount. And each time, you knew you earned the reward through effort, skill, and sometimes even perseverance.
Another is when our little guild banded together to build our first guild tavern. Not only were we group harvesting to get extra materials, but we had to decide who wanted which crafting profession and throw ourselves into the crafting in order to cover getting all the housing pieces made. On top of that, we had to do whatever we could to earn enough gold to buy the plot. Hey, back then 10 gold was a fortune! Our combined efforts finally got us that little one-room house on Kojan where we threw parties. I even created a special in-game dice game for gambling nights! I still remember the heartbreak that happened when our server merged and someone beat my login by seconds to claim our specially chosen plot.
The last 30 minutes of Vanguard saw 2 devs teleport anyone who wanted to an unfinished raid area that had never seen the light of day- The Nexus.
Five Things Other Games Should Copy From Vanguard (Random Waypoint)
The offensive/defensive target split. This is such a small but immensely useful innovation. It’s easily the thing I want to see every single MMO have. There is no excuse not to. Being able to target an enemy for offensive actions and, at the same time, an ally or yourself for beneficial effects makes so much sense. From the top of my hat, I can think of only one other game that has this, and that’s TSW. (Oh, there are probably more, no question.)
Sailing Into The Sunset : Vanguard (Inventory Full)
And so we come to the the undisputed champion: best race I've ever played, best class I've ever played, best character I've ever played. Stand up, my Raki Disciple. Oh, you are standing up...My memories of him are manifold, his adventures and exploits multifarious, but I like to think of him best sailing his blue sloop Foxglove along the rivers of Qalia, following the shoreline of Abella Cove, where the domed home he built and rebuilt with his own paws stands. He always did like to fish. Now he'll have all the time he needs.
Rest well, old friend. All my old friends. Though the gates are barred to us may your roads roll ever on.
Vanguard – All Sagas Must End (The Ancient Gaming Noob)
While the genre seemed to be moving towards WoW at the time, there was a theory that was widely held in certain parts of the fanbase that WoW was but a stepping stone and that all those WoW players would, one day, desire a deeper, more fulfilling, and necessarily more hardcore MMORPG. WoW was merely the training ground for a mass of “real” players. If you dig around blogs and forums from the time frame, you will find that theme recurring over and over.
And in the midst of all of that strode Brad McQuaid. I called his a “name to conjure with” back when he was kicking off Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. Back then he was a force to be reckoned with, the keeper of the secret flame, the spirit of what made EverQuest great, and the hope for the salvation of the genre. Having left SOE in alleged disgust over the direction the company was going with EverQuest and EverQuest II, he struck out with a few like-minded individuals in order to re-imagine the MMORPG genre, steering it back to its more satisfying and hardcore roots.
That sounds like a lot of smoke, but I recall night after night being on Teamspeak with my Knights of the Cataclysm guild mates, a group made up mostly of people from EverQuest or TorilMUD… both training grounds for hardcore purists… and hearing them go on and on with Dorfman-like “this is going to be great!” enthusiasm as to how Brad McQuaid… Brad, who understood us and who rejected easy death penalties and instancing… and his game, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, was going drain players from all of these other pretend, pre-school MMOs.
Frogs who leveled you up to max level were available
Last moments in Telon (StarShadow)
People were gathering at the Khal docks for a screenshot for the Castaways of Telon so I went along to take part in that. Whilst there, we could be ported to have a look round The Nexus (an unfinished raid zone) which was an interesting experience. A boat flotilla had been organised and people were making plans for where to end their adventures in Telon. I chose Tawar Galan to say my farewells, as it’s possibly my favourite place. The chat channels were busy with players (and devs) saying their goodbyes, sharing memories and making plans to meet in future games. At 6.00 pm (PST), we had a reprieve of 15 mins and (I think with some dev magic), we ended up watching the sun set in Telon as Vanguard was sunsetted.
Good Night, Vanguard (The Grouchy Gamer)
I’m having a ton of mixed emotions to be honest. Vanguard was the game where I went from being just another gamer to just another gamer with a fansite. The time that I spent on that site was incalculable. I was working at a job that kept me on the road a lot and whenever I was in an airport, or a restaurant, or a coffee shop, or a hotel room I was working on that damn site (vanguardcrafters.com). There were volunteers that I was never really able to do much for if anything who put in that kind of time too. Moderating, writing, and managing was my job. The volunteers also did a ton of moderating and also maintained the always-under-cyber-attack wiki. Vanguard was going to be my next game home. At it’s peak the site had about 60,000 users. Even after the game was obviously failing I kept the site open for a while and it was one of a small handful of sites still running farther into Vanguard’s life.
The stuff that happened with Brad McQuaid is well documented both here and elsewhere so I won’t beat that dead horse again. That is, other than to say that it floors me that there were still people throwing money at his Kickstarter campaign in spite of what we know about his business challenges. Thankfully for them, there wasn’t a critical mass of people foolish enough to get it funded.
The time that I did get to spend getting to know a lot of folks at Sigil really was a highlight of my gaming life in a lot of ways. I really believe that without that experience I wouldn’t have ever come to work at Blizzard, even though what I do isn’t related to game development. Those countless volunteer hours prepared me for how to work with, and how to speak to game developers. I’m thankful for all of the access that I was granted to the developers at Sigil and for the opportunity to work not only around them but also with them in many ways. I went to E3s (the old ones) and lunches and dinners with my friends at Sigil.
That team has long since been scattered to the wind.
To all the folks in community at Sigil (Cindy, Nick, and James in particular), and all of the development folks (especially Salim and Justin) I thank you. You guys were always open, friendly, inclusive, and fun. Those experiences literally changed my life.
As of this past June I have been working in the game industry for 4 years. My career wouldn’t have been possible had it not been for my Vanguard experience. So thanks to all of you who have read my rantings or my news articles or my fansite. I miss you guys. And I’m thankful for being able to spend all the time together we did.
My last screenshot
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For those of you who wish to go over the rise and fall of Vanguard, here's some links:
he Game Archaeologist: The rise, fall, and rescue of Vanguard (Massively)
From my observations, Vanguard was rescued twice.
The first was the day after the parking lot firing. SOE announced that it had acquired key assets to Sigil, keeping the doors opened while it hired back 50 to 75 of the 150 people fired the day before. McQuaid, surprisingly enough, wasn't let go, but he was demoted to the position of creative consultant...
However, SOE rescued Vanguard for a second time several years later. In mid-2012, the studio announced that Vanguard would not be shuttered (as had been expected, along the lines of EverQuest Online Adventures) but would undergo the free-to-play conversion that other SOE titles had received. On top of that, Vanguard was given its first proper dev team in years. With a rejuvenated playerbase, F2P access, and actual content being developed after being in perpetual maintenance mode, Vanguard was able to walk tall after being hunched over in shame for so long.
The Long and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online: Interview Edition (F13.net, Web Archive)
f13.net: Doesn't the complete and utter failure, in hindsight, seem like a self-fulfilled prophecy though with only one QA member?
Ex-Sigil: The reasons for failure are too numerous to list, but can all be summed up by a lack of management. Brad, for all his faults at least made decisions. So did Jeff. Right or wrong, they took a shot. The people in charge now were so afraid to make the wrong decision that they made no decision at all.
f13.net: Surely members of the team that weren't decision makers read forums and knew Sigil was doomed. Did people just blissfully ignore this stuff? I mean, comeon, the writing was on the wall.
Ex-Sigil: Oh, people knew. The only people that didn't know seemed to be the people capable of making the decisions to change it.
A Vanguard Retrospective, Part One (The Grouchy Gamer)
On my visits to Sigil (I made several of them) I noticed that Brad was hardly ever there. “Working from home.” out at some other place, I didn’t think I was going to meet him. Eventually I did. We were on the way out of the building to lunch and we came across Brad. He was gracious and he went about his business and we went about lunch. On one of the visits, I had the opportunity to have lunch with Keith Parkinson. He was a great guy, funny, quiet. Looking back, it was pretty evident that he was ill at the time, although I had no idea how ill he was. He signed a bunch of Vanguard posters for me, including one that said “Never trust Nick, Best, Keith,” a reference to something we had been talking about at lunch and his son Nick, better known to many of you as former community manager for Sigil (Glip the Gnome.) He took time to tell me about some of his old D&D exploits, his characters, and his life in the business. Unfortunately, Keith passed not too long after that visit.
A Vanguard Retrospective, Part Two (The Grouchy Gamer)
One of the recurring themes on my visits was this: I’d ask them if they had thought about making a change to something and they would say; “Yes, we’d love to do that if we could get code support.” For those of you not in the development business code support=programmer time. Many of the things they wanted to do were impossible because they didn’t have enough access to the resources they needed. I understand the need to budget programmer time, but it seemed they were hamstrung in their efforts to get the game done. This wasn’t the programmers being difficult either, just a lack of accessable tools for the entire team and the reported desire of the programming management to basically rescript everything in Unreal Engine so that it was all their code and none of Epic’s.
A Vanguard Retrospective, Part Three (The Grouchy Gamer)
A few months after launch I had the opportunity to visit Sigil again. They knew there was trouble and this was probably my most interesting visit. During lunch outside the office I volunteered that I had bad luck, always visiting on days when Brad wasn’t in the office. The response shocked me. “You’d have a much lesser chance of visiting when Brad WAS in the office.” I asked if he worked from home a lot. “You could say that” was the response. When pressed, the people I was with let me know that Brad hadn’t been in the office since November, except to “pick up Hero Clix from his office to take home and play.” Our Gamer God had checked out 2 months before launch. Launch party? Never happened. Pep talks or moral support? Not forthcoming. I still had a lot of people I consider friends working there, so I didn’t break the story at that time. This was the tip of the mismanagement iceberg, as it turns out.
The Inside Story of How a Major MMO Went Wrong (IGN)
McQuaid: I started reaching out to private investors, venture capitalists, and angel investors. I also reached out to Smed and said, "Look, here's what we got. Here's what's going on. We need help." Sony came back and said, "We can fund you. We'll work something out with Microsoft." I don't know what happened, but Sony was able to get the publishing rights from Microsoft. Sony then came to us and said, "We can fund you for six more months but not the full year."
And I'm like, "Oh my gosh. It's still not going to be ready!" I mean, it might have been playable and six months early was certainly better than a year, but it wasn't going to be optimized." That's why I went out again and kept looking for funding. Unfortunately, during the last six months of development, I wasn't there very often. I was out on a road trip talking to investors and seeing if they wanted to come in and fund us so we could get that full year, but that didn't work out. I think it was just too much: the project was too far along, the deal was complicated with Sony having the publishing rights and working out things with Microsoft, and us having the IP. It was just a mess, so we weren't able to get that additional funding.
We ended up launching Vanguard in January 2007—six months early. The game sold very well at retail. Around 250,000 units just blew out of the stores. But the game wasn't optimized, the client wasn't optimized, and the server wasn't optimized. The vast majority of people who played it early on left by the time their characters hit level two or three. We knew that was a performance issue because you don't know whether you like an MMO by level two or three, right? You'll stay longer than that. The only thing that would actually drive you away and make you quit that early was that you couldn't even play it. Some people stuck with it. They saw the potential. But the majority couldn't play it at a quality level where it was actually fun. Even at the lowest settings, people had a hard time. Their frame rate was horrible. The latency was bad. It was just a pain in the butt to play.
Later on, Sony ended up buying Sigil and Vanguard. Sony kept the game running, but they just recently decided to shut it down. Vanguard ran for seven years. I'm proud of that, but it wasn't really in their business plan to put a lot of resources into it. While they were eventually able to optimize the client and the server, by then Vanguard was old news. It has a really strong player base. They're very devoted to it. But it's a small player base. The word just never got out. When you lose momentum, it's almost impossible to recover.
