Released Too Early?

ThriceShy

Note: This is not a flame, just a dicussion, i do not wish to turn this into a flame Post/Conversation.

I'm just wondering about this, this game i belive has so much potential to be an Breakthrough MMO, but, is it already to late? I belive Sigil released this game way too early, i don't know the reason why, or how this became, but i think they did, I've played Vanguard with a bunch of my buddies, and we thought it was alright, and yes, we do have a high quality PC. I don't really think an High Quality PC, should only be the way to run Vanguard, i mean seriously. Some, but not all gamers have a high quality PC. Vanguard should have the option of running on a Low/Med quality PC, but won't have all the graphical benefits.

I personally belive Sigil was too lazy to fix all the bugs, they released a very flawed game, and they shouldn't have. When your game is on the market, in stores, or digital download, and people are paying monthly for this, you should have top-notch service. Sigil missed this by a long shot. People want good gameplay, they don't get it with all the bugs crawling around. I'm guessing Sigil is working hard on this for a Better quality game, but i think they should have done it a long time before the released it. I think sigil did a good job on races, classes and gameplay, but not in bug fixing.

Vanguard brings back good gaming, but does it really? Yes, this game has alot of freedom, but doesn't WoW, or Lineage II? In a advertisement i saw for Vanguard it say "Freedom", ok..nothing new about that, MMOs have tons of freedom, if it's with Characters, Maps, or Skills you have freedom in every MMO. Is there a differnt in quests? Is they're the same old "Kill X amout of monsters, to receive this reward?" Every MMO has this whats differnt? I mean, shouldn't quest have an unique backgroud, to how it happened, or why it happened?

Sigil, did a great job on graphics and gamplay! But did they over-due it? What is your perspective on this?

What do you all think?

 

 

 

gdrivas

Not trying to flame you, but you've never ran your own business have you? Vanguard has cost $20,000,000 over the past 4 years. The company has not made a single cent in that 4 years.  We don't know what is going on with the company as far as their financial status. They have many people to pay and a whole lot of bills. A company such as Sigil is rather fragile. Something like waiting 2 weeks later could of been the end of the company.

gauge2k3

for 4 years of development time....i mean how many hours a day were they working 1?



if that statistic is true 20 mil, then this game is more of a failure then I previosly predicted, and they may well actually lose money on it.

Markaj

You are very right about the game being too early! It has been pointed out by many times in maybe hundreds of posts. There were warning signals in beta, but they were not paid much attention.

The reason for the early release is that Sigil wasted 5 years of development with wrong management decisions, sub-project cancellations or diversions and/or design rescratches.

As a result, what we have is a subpar mish mash of past games, an untterly uninteresting lore, a generic huge world which is sadly empty, hastily scractched barbie doll characters without "character", gross bugs and terrible performance. If they have come thus far in five years, how long will it take until this game is actually fun and working?

Mars505

Finacially , Leaving microsft was one of the worst ideas. Not only did they waste time , but also money in buying back the rights to the game.



Why would sony care how this does, It is running all the Eq games as well as FF and Matrix, for them this is a god send, to come and buy off yet another game from a struggling company. This is how sony operates , they are the ninja of Entertainment. With that said, every ninja dies a merciless fate. Ps3 Bombed, PSP adverts Blew up all over the intraweb leaving many such as myself to play who is who on any gaming forums around the world, They lost subs for the current mmo's do to WoW, and now Sigil just release something that is just not being as successful as everyone thought.



I don't hate sigil and I think they have a better game in them, If I was them, I would sell the game to sony make a frsh start with what ever money they have and get back to what makes games great. If they would take the ideas they had , graphically with the current world and had a story as rich as some other games out , they would of had a great game.

Reform the core Development around Mcquaid so that nothing is left un turned, frankly can't see him actually knowing what his people where doing while he was out P.R.ing,  Who ever was project manager, Gone./ Leader animation design+team Gone/ Leader Artistic director : Gone



. We all talked so much snuff on mr. Mcquaid and reality is , he doesn't deserve it. When you are a ceo , most of the time you just have someone saying :everything is fine" Who ever was saying everything is fine : Gone.



My opinions which aren't represented by the whole .

Tallyn

Of course it was released way too early. Was Sigil being lazy? Saying something like that just shows that you have absolutely no idea what goes into making an MMO game, or any A-list video game these days.

At least they owned up to it.

---

Snippet of a Brad McQuaid interview by Gamespot before Vanguard's launch.

What is Vanguard’s launch date?

January 30th, 2007.

People are saying Vanguard is being rushed out before it is finished, is that true?

We don't want to rush things but like I said we have a solid launch date. People are crunching and working long hours but the financial reality is we need to launch commercially, and soon.

I know that is not the answer you want to hear, nor I, but it is what it is...

I promise you we are doing the best we can with the time we have, even though we all, the players and Sigil wish we had more time, but like I said, there are financial realities. We are still I believe the 2nd most expensive MMOG to-date after WoW and that is something, despite the desire to have more time, I have to be grateful to both MSFT and SOE.

-Brad McQuaid, CEO

---

Some of us can stand to see our dreams and hopes of a perfect MMO come to shape even though we have to pay for it now, some others, obviously, cannot.

OnlineBoyo

Yes it was released early.  Everyone can tell it was released early, they admitted it was released early, and they explained that they needed to release it early.  Yes Vanguard has bugs.  Yes, a lot of the criticism is true.



But I have fun playing it.  Thats why I bought it.  If I have fun in a game I will not leave just because of bugs unless the bugs are game breaking.  For me, they are not.



*edit* I didn't notice that the OP said sigil was too lazy to fix the bugs.  First, sony forced them to release.  Second, they are working on fixing the bugs now.  Calling them lazy I think is crazy, seeing how much work goes into creating and maintaining a mmorpg. 

Mars505

As for the lazyiness, i think is lack of experience of the staff, that was not able to recognize and ressolve errors in the code becuase the game is so big. Can you even imagine how much code is written ? They should beable to get into the guinesse books for  total length of code for a game.....

mwbreur

What i am wondering is, who would want to play a game that's 'far from finished' and pay for it? I know i wouldn't.

Also i can't imagine with 'all' the people paying atm would make up for the 20 million invested/spend (wasted?).

It's true the game had great potential if they put in all the things they were planning to put in, and not scrap those.

I also think because they rushed it, their code has become flawed and fixing their code is taking up most of the time before they are able to fix the ingame problems/bugs (their flawed code causing the most bugs?). Also in previous experiences when a game isn't finished and gets released it ruins the game for 'early adaptors' and eventually they will leave, and post reviews of the game being bad and a waste of time. If the game hasn't died yet and progressed alot (look at EQ2 for example) people meight come back, or attract new players. Imho they should let some real programmers look at their game and fix it and then move on to fixing/adding their intentional features and then do the commercial release.

Also if they had to release this game premature because of money problems/bad funding i think there's something terribly wrong,  how in the name of god have they left M$ and went to $OE, if you ask me they had a bigger chance if they stayed with M$. I don't really know why they left, but i'm quite sure they didn't have to commercially release the game just yet. Not saying i'm a M$ fan but still...

But we'll see what happens, maybe V:SoH will prosper, or die a slow and quiet death.

And about the system requirements, i honestly don't really care what would be needed to run this game (If it's reasonable). Still most people can't run EQ2 at it's highest quality settings not due to bad programming but all the features they put in (Realtime shadows f.e.) truely they really need to clean their code which would give a pretty good performance boost, offcourse this will take time and most importantly cost them money.

I can run V:SoH at 1280x1024 at pretty much at highest possible settings, but EQ2 runs a bit better at these settings.

Amd 3700+ @ 2.6ghz, 2gb ddr400, Radeon X1900XTX, 2 x Raptor 150gb @ raid0.



I recently uninstalled the game because it didn't really offer anything 'new' to me, and because they decided to go release it now maybe i'll give it a try in a few months from now if it's still there. I truly hope they are able to 'finish' their game as they intended.

 

-Ellessar-

Yeah the game was released early.  I don't think anyone is claiming otherwise.  Do I care?  No not really.  I do believe that this game has far more potential than any other game currently out there.  From my perspective there certainly isn't anything better for me to go and play.  So I'll stick around and make the best of it. 

The big problem I see for this game is whether or not enough subscribers will hang while the game's bugs are worked out.  VG has gotten a fair amount of negative press.   Whether or not it can recover from it, even if the game becomes great, is anyone's guess.   

Midaveg

If SoE isnt that greedy, VoSH wont be at this stage with bugs bite and people flaming around how bad is Vanguard is. I hope VoSH will turn out well after a month or two of updates and fixes.

Rule #2210 : Never treat a released product as beta version and potential paying customers as beta testers.

Jackdog

After the time and money invested it sure should have been in better shape but you gotta release sometime. I am not a SOE defender but it appeared to me that Sigil was not making a lot of progress in closed beta, I think that is why Microsoft dumped them.

Just my opinion but I think McQuaid got too ambitious. He should have introed the game with half the landmass, half the races , and half the classes, got those polished to perfection before release and then addded in more later as either free or paid expansions. It would have been half the work and twice as polished with twice the content,

airhead

Originally posted by Jackdog


Just my opinion but I think McQuaid got too ambitious. He should have introed the game with half the landmass, half the races , and half the classes, got those polished to perfection before release and then addded in more later as either free or paid expansions. It would have been half the work and twice as polished with twice the content,

/signed.



Too ambitiious. Sitting down, dreaming up the world, creating the product.... that's just HALF of the task. The other half is understanding your limitations (money and time) and making your dream fit what you can achieve. "running out of money" is proof that this second half wasn't done that well...

boojiboy

Originally posted by gdrivas

Not trying to flame you, but you've never ran your own business have you? Vanguard has cost $20,000,000 over the past 4 years. The company has not made a single cent in that 4 years.  We don't know what is going on with the company as far as their financial status. They have many people to pay and a whole lot of bills. A company such as Sigil is rather fragile. Something like waiting 2 weeks later could of been the end of the company.

I agree with this post.  The decision to release this game early was strictly an economic decision by the company developing it.  I have no idea what the development, personnel, design, facility, etc. costs where.  But the decision to release early was obviously needed financially to start the revenue stream going in order to keep the company viable.

A lot of people of conspiracy theories of one sort or another, but they're not true.  It's simple economics.

But you know what?  I'm glad it is out early because I'm having a lot of fun.  Knowing that it's still a work in progress helps me tolerate some bugs and/or unfinished content.  I wasn't expecting it until summer and I've been pleasantly surprised at how good the game actually is.