A Vanguard for the Future

An Interview with Vanguard Developers on What's Next for their MMORPG

Typically, when it comes to MMOs, I’m fairly picky about choosing a game that I know is a completed product and won’t have any sort of issue once I get it installed on my computer. While Vanguard wasn’t totally finished upon release – and every gamer knew this fact – that didn’t keep me from getting into the epic world that Brad McQuaid and the Sigil team put together for me. The reasoning behind their move to release early was evident, but - unlike my own opinion - many community members felt like the game shouldn't have been released in the state it was in.

There have been many questions floating about the web concerning Vanguard, and at GDC 2007, several members of the Sigil team – Jeff Butler,President and Exec. Producer; April Jones, Senior Manager for marketing and PR; and Ryan Elam, Director of Technology – sat down with the entire Ten Ton Hammer team and had an incredibly insightful and extensive discussion about Vanguard’s present and future course while touching upon many aspects of MMOs that are essential to the industry as a whole.

Throughout this write-up, we’ll touch upon changing a team’s mentality as a game goes live, the repercussions of the EVE Online scandal, reinventing games to serve a player population, planning to reintroduce players to the game, communicating with a vocal and active community, growing a launched game, and the secondary market/micro management in MMOs.

Going Live

At the beginning of our conversation, most of the Ten Ton Hammer team was interested in how things have changed since the game went live earlier this year. Besides some of the upper crust of the development team, Sigil had a lot of young faces that were a part of the project and we were interested to see how they had taken the launch.

Jones was the first to answer the question. “A lot of them are amazed,” she said. “They are like, ‘Wow, we’re actually making money from this project!’ While the old timers just sit back and watch.”

But in launching, things aren’t all fun and games. A lot of the process is dealing with the change of mentality, going from an in-development game to a full-on live product.

“It’s really been a switch of mentality for our guys,” Butler said. “One day they’re arguing about possibilities, how the players react in certain situations. The next, when you’re no longer developing a game but running a service, you have numbers that do the talking for you.”

According to Butler, when you go live, instead of debating around tables with colleagues you spend your time in business meetings leading presentations and reading charts. “You’re in a business meeting and you’ve literally got your pointer out gesturing to the white board,” he continued. “We’re here - *he gestures* - we want to be here - *gestures again* - and here’s how we’re going to achieve that.”

But with each change, the Sigil team wanted to insure us that they were looking at every possible scenario before implementing their course of action. Butler noted that they look at how the changes will effect the players depending on whether the changes are made all at once or over time, and whether those changes will influence other aspects of the game as well.

“We’re also keenly aware of the fact that the consumer has put their trust in us,” Jones added. “We definitely take that into consideration whenever we make changes to our game client. In beta, we could just tell the players, “Hey, we’re going to be wiping your characters next week.” Now we can’t do that.”

Along with these changes, the three Sigil staffers talking to us also brought up the incident that occurred with the EVE Online team (for more information on this see our interview with Magnus Bergsson).

“When EVE had their unfortunate situation,” Jones continued, “we actually used that as an example and sent it around to the company. We let them know that, especially for the new folks, that this is serious stuff. You can’t do things (like the EVE incident) in a live game. It’s just something you have to get used too. When we’re in beta, we can let things slide, but we can’t now.”

The example was actually a long thread posted by the lead developers on their team message board called, “Mental Switch.” According to Elam, the thread noted that the team was no longer in development but was a service that focused on the building, improving and iterating of Vanguard.

And Butler was quick to relay the fact that he surmised that one of the Sigil employees would get the axe due to impropriety. “Someone is going to break the rules and there’s no question in my mind that I will be firing someone in the future for some act of impropriety. Statistically it’s going to happen.”

“However,” he continued, “it’s how we compose ourselves before and after it occurs that really effects how the players look at us as a team. What we told our employees, how we built logs to catch things, how we protects the players from this happening; those are all the things that will affect the views of our players.”

Settling the Game Into the Market

When asked what the biggest challenge the team was facing at the moment, one thing sprang to Jeff Butler’s mind: settling the game into the market. “To me, settling a game into the market means that we can look at the game and are able to compare it with what the consumer finds palatable,” he said “We know that Vanguard was always a game that was intended to aim at people who tended to like a more challenging experience than say…World of Warcraft. So without alienating the player who chose Vanguard, we need to discover what elements of Vanguard do not sit well, EVEN with that person.”

“We’re identifying those things, whatever they are, and making either global or iterative changes in the game to settle it into the market. We’re trying to find the rough spots and smooth them out. It’s one of the most important things we can do for the service of Vanguard between the first three to six months. That’s going to set the stage for the game’s success over the long-term.”

Reintroducing the Game to Players

But - I can hear all you gamers out there asking this question - what about all of those gamers that played in the open beta or in the first few weeks of release and were turned off by the gameplay and/or bugs? The Ten Ton Hammer team was thinking that same thing, but Butler and the Sigil crew seemed to believe that there wouldn’t be any problem reintroducing people to the game.

It’s like a new CD, Butler suggested. You play it for awhile but you eventually get tired of it. You stop listening. But then, a little while later, nostalgia kicks in and you try it out again.

“I quit playing World of Warcraft about two months after it launched,” Butler said. “I dinged 60…there wasn’t a lot of content for me and my guild…and – almost to a man – we exited. We went back to Star Wars Galaxies. But after Star Wars Galaxies did the NGE – which was like a nice smack in the face – I patched World of Warcraft and started a new character. Boom, hooked again.”

“We rely on these moments through the lifecycle of the game to reintroduce people.”

For you naysayers, Butler isn’t just pulling this information from the ether. There’s a host of examples where games have done this in the past. Dark Age of Camelot successfully did it, and Anarchy Online is probably the best example out there. The launch of AO was totally botched, but after six months the game was on its feet again, re-engaged the audience, and brought them back in.

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