Brad McQuaidFollow

Kind of huge news.

It is interesting that it went down so low key and under the radar.

I will be looking at that game in a couple of months to see what he/they can do with their second chance.

http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/newsArchive.vm?section=News&month=current&id=1425

Sony rehired him.

Since Reyla posted it in the EQ forum and did not state which game I thought he may be coming back to EQ.

But now that Vanguard is going free to play I may have to check it out.

I don't understand what he could possibly have to offer. He didn't design most of the best features of the game. In fact, after Microsoft dropped them, he didn't do much of anything but sit at home because he was "depressed". He hasn't been an actual game designer in like 15 years.

I've read his blog and seen a lot of disparaging stories but it's a little hard to know what's true and what's not. What he always had was the "vision" that made EQ and VG the hardcore and group oriented games they were in the past. Even if he brings nothing else to the table, he brings an element of anti-WoW-ification that games need to counter the rampant dumbing down we've been seeing the last 5 or so years.

I've heard a lot of stories as well, and I'm not discounting them out of hand. Clearly VG had issues, both technical as well as interpersonal back then. But it has always been a game that I wanted to get into and now with it going F2P as well as being much more polished now, there is no longer an excuse to ignore it.

I have a very hard time sustaining interest in games that provide instant gratification, that are not challenging, or coddle players from starting zone to end game. But I do recognize that these "features" are needed for mass market appeal. There's nothing wrong with that at all. We are blessed with a broad selection of games to choose from nowadays, unlike back in 1999. In my book, having options is always better than having none!

With respect to McQuaid himself, I think what I am trying to say is, if you have a design meeting to decide the spawn timer of a boss dragon, I think it's a good thing to have someone like Brad there to shout "7 days!" when the guy who cut his teeth in MMOs playing Aion says "45 seconds?" Assuming that compromises and agreements can be reached, having dissenting ideas can result in a richer tapestry. There are a lot of design decisions in original EQ that I hated, including the group orientation of the game - but I'd still not toss the bath water out with the baby just because it's a little dirty :P

I think there's still a lot Brad could bring to the game. As far as Vanguard is concerned, the game is very different now than the one he released. But he still knows the ins and outs of the design and where they wanted to go. It looks like he's back as a designer, not as the producer, which is a big plus to me. I think from that aspect, he can add value.

I agree, it's a low risk, high reward kind of move. Should be interesting to see.

Years ago at the Vanguard launch I bought the game, logged in and spent literally hours trying to move around the spawn point of my racial hometown...it was such a frustrating experience I never logged in again.

I thought then and still do that it was my outdated computer causing the extreme lag. I then resolved to play eq and not worry about new games, I had been playing since late 2003 at that time.

About three years ago a friend from work talked me into playing his favorite mmo his catch line was

"it's free to play!"

So I downloaded it, did some research and built a toon. It was a ton of fun in it's anime-ish style toons, the spell effects were amazing. I like the seamless nature of the world, but the more time I spent in it I realized that it was missing the depth of game-play and the back-story.

I spent two or three evenings a week for a month playing the game with my friend and his guild. With my eq background I mastered the market and made a few billion coins, then showed my friend how to do it and he showed his guild how to do it.

Long story short...my friend had health problems, couldn't play anymore and I came back to lady eq after a month of cheating on her.

The name of that fun but comic book style game was Archlord.

Now to the point...I logged into Vanguard yesterday for the free- to play launch and I was totally in a deja vu lock up.

Not because of my previous attempt at Vanguard, I never saw enough of the game to remember...

No, I thought I was back in Archlord...the spell effects, game mechanics, even the in game info/help. I mean...even the spell bar and bag storage.
The game targeting.
The game fights, the fight mechanics and action.

hmm. What was McQuaid doing for all those years he wasn't with eq or vsoh?
Someone copied something here...

This guy goes from one headline to the next...he leaves each game in the state of a sinking ship...

Im not sure what implication you are trying to make but archlord was out nearly 2 years before VG. I dont see the similarities you do either but i guess thats a matter of opinion.

That said all the MMO sites picked up the "wonderful" news that mcquaid was back with EQ and i just dont get all the sickening amount of love the guy is getting for it. The only thing he has done that was not a massive failure was EQ and lets be completely honest here, EQ enjoyed its success because there was literally no competition for years.

Just remembering the crap he pulled with VG alone makes me wonder why anybody would be happy to have him messing around with their game.

Well, based on Touchin's use of the word "years", that implies at least two years. I don't think any of the titles you mentioned were released sooner than about 3 years after EQ came out. So I think that point still stands.

Tat

OK, so only Asheron's Call. DaoC was more than 2 years.

So one counter example, I'd say Touchin was basically correct.

Note, I'm not saying EQ was ONLY successful because of lack of competition, but it certainly was a factor in their favor.

Tat

Diablo was released for the pc in 2000. No idea how many people played it. I knew two personally, which was one more than the number of EQ players I knew personally.

Vanguard was a great game. It crashed and burned because of poor marketing more than anything else. Rumors of it's incompleteness and buginess at launch were rampant, but the game really wasn't bad at release (at least compared to other mmos). Sure some of the features hadn't been released but the game was complete, diverse and very playable . There was no attempt by the marketers to counter those any of these claims at all.

The bigger issue though was the necessity of a fairly high-end computer - or at least a high-end processor and graphics card. The game producers knew about this all along and never dealt with it. WoW had just the scene with it's cartoon graphics that you could practically run on a tandy.

Vanguard had the prettiest most explorable world of any mmo I've played - still (I'm hoping Elder Scrolls will be comparable). Their were lots of class/race varieties, the combat was challenging but not too frustrating, the combat quests were run of the mill. The faction system seemed more relevant to me than it ever did in EQ. The crafting and tradeskilling for that time period were cutting edge. I remember sailing around on a boat that a guy had crafted himself. It really worked! So yeah, McQuaid got a little heady, but I don't think it was his developer skills or lack of them that caused Vanguard to fall into the toilet.

Anyway, McQuaid can't do much damage to the game at this point - right?