Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Brad McQuaid admittedly made his share of mistakes during the development of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and on his newest blog post today titled "Vanguard: Post-mortem Part 1," Brad talks about those mistakes and how he will learn from them and apply that knowledge to any of his future projects. The post covers one big mistake that hindered Vanguard's early development with the issues at Microsoft that eventually landed Sigil with Sony Online Entertainment.

The first mistake that would have a serious impact later in development was the verbal agreement with Microsoft that Vanguard was to be a first rate, AAA title.  In other words, we were going to get the funding we needed to compete with other AAA MMOGs, and that we would periodically evaluate the competition and adjust Vanguard’s budget and/or release date if it made sense to us and Microsoft.  And as time past by, we did increase the budget as games like WoW were released with very high development costs and a ton of polish.  But then there was a regime change at Microsoft, and the people with whom we had this understanding and commitment were no longer there.  The new hierarchy did not have the same perspective and commitment to Vanguard and when we needed more time and more money, the general reaction was that we were screwing up management-wise.

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