Vanguard Post-Mortem: Brad McQuaid

[Morreion]

Vanguard: Post-mortem Part 1: Get Everything in Writing

Vanguard: Post-mortem Part 2: The All-Star Team

Vanguard: Post-mortem Part 3: The Downside of Being a Geek

I’m going to spend the majority of the time on mistakes we made in development and then what I’d do differently in my next project (e.g. the point of this is to learn from the past and share what I’ve learned here in the hopes that this information would be helpful not just to me going forward, but also to anyone else working on an MMOG). So the finger pointing is mostly going to be at me, not at our partners. I received a lot of email asking about what went wrong and what I’ve learned and how I’d apply that knowledge going forward with a new game. I’ve discussed most of these issues with others who were on the Vanguard team, and we don’t always agree. Sometimes the disagreement is about the issue itself, and other times while we agree on the issue, we disagree on how bad the issue was or to what degree it affected development. So take everything with a grain of salt and please realize this is my perspective and not necessarily anyone else who was involved.

Interesting series of posts. Brad focuses on contractual disputes with Microsoft, personnel conflicts, and the decision to make a high-tech-requirement game. Tons of comments to read as well.