Moorgards Eulogy and Tribute to Vanguard
Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2014 4:59 pm
[quote]At 6pm PST on July 31, 2014, the servers for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes went dark. I wasn’t on the team that originated the game at Sigil, but I served as its Creative Director for a number of months upon my return to SOE in 2012.
It was a series of unlikely events that led to me working on Vanguard. I’d just spent the last five-and-a-half years on Copernicus, which was built on fresh tech and the best art assets an MMO had ever seen. After four months on the job hunt, I’d accepted a design job at a studio focused on console and mobile titles when I got the call inviting me back to SOE. Though I was looking forward to trying my hand with other types of games, MMOs are my first love, and the idea of reuniting with old friends in San Diego was a big draw. I knew my ultimate destination would be the EQNext team, but I was asked to first help with an attempt to revitalize Vanguard. After weighing my options, I returned to San Diego determined to do my best for a game with one of the most storied histories in the genre.
Working on Vanguard was never easy. It was an aged title by the time I got to it, and although faster PCs allowed it to run better than it had back at its 2007 release, it was still plagued by technical problems resulting from architectural decisions made early on. Its content was a mess, ranging wildly in quality from inventive to abysmal. There were significant bugs everywhere, many of them years old. And while the design tools put a lot of flexibility into developers’ hands, its many idiosyncrasies intersected with a database awash in the detritus of years of half-finished work. Every bug we fixed seemed to come with an unintended side-effect. Change the name of an item and some unrelated field would get zeroed out. Adjust one stat and other variables would be altered without telling you. Lack of version control meant you had to hunt through screen shots or ask players what an item used to be like before it got unintentionally nerfed. There were a lot of days when I would literally sit with my head in my hands, flummoxed at how some feature or another could possibly have been implemented in such a convoluted way.
And yet, I grew to love the game.
This was due almost entirely to the small but passionate group of players who managed to look beyond the mess and find the beauty in Vanguard. I don’t mean how the game looked, although Vanguard did have some of the loveliest vistas you could find in an MMO thanks to its sprawling open world (environments generally looked better from a distance than they did close up). No, these players found beauty in the challenge and adversity that had quickly whittled Vanguard’s audience down from respectable box sales to a small crew of diehards.
These hardy souls stuck with the game through long periods of neglect when literally no new content appeared. Sure, they had their moments of bitterness, and rightfully so, but their bond with one another outweighed the negatives. They did their best to recruit new players to the game, but poor performance and lingering bugs meant not a lot of those visitors stuck around.
The free-to-play renaissance gave Vanguard a chance. A team was built up and the game was dusted off. Work was done under the hood to support the FTP model, and attention was paid to the starting experience in order to make new players coming in a bit more welcome. Veterans became hopeful–or at least cautiously optimistic. I came on board after the game went free and some content updates had already rolled out. We had a tech director who knew his stuff, a veteran producer, a talented art director, and a team of people who wanted to see Vanguard succeed. Many of them had been there during the Sigil days and had long wanted to give the game the chance it deserved.
For a time, our chances looked good. Being on Steam brought us attention and some new faces. The in-game store had periods of decent sales. We had a promising trajectory to build upon.
Sadly, it didn’t last.
In the years that Vanguard languished, the MMO landscape had kept moving. When Vanguard was released, there were still only a handful of active MMOs on the market, but it didn’t take long before new massively multiplayer titles were crawling out of the woodwork. Players had more and more choices all the time, many of them taking the genre in different directions (or at least featuring significantly higher production values) while Vanguard stood still. It was hard to attract players when there were so many newer, shinier alternatives.
Ultimately there were just too many gaping holes to patch. A major revamp of the network code came too late to help build an audience. And with the state the game was in, adding polished content was simply too costly and time-consuming given the size of our audience. The team shrank as most of us were shifted to other games, and I joined the team making EQNext and Landmark.
While sunsetting a game is inevitably going to cause hurt feelings among players, the truth is that SOE gave the game a lot of chances. Most other companies would have pulled the plug after the initial downturn in subscriptions. Instead, the game was kept alive for over seven years, and fans who wanted a challenging open world MMO had a place to call home for an awfully long time.
By any objective benchmark, Vanguard was never a great game. But the love we have for MMOs isn’t about benchmarks–it’s about heart. And the game’s promise, its potential, took hold in the hearts of a core group of fans. They loved the experience despite its flaws, and found those moments of beauty to cling to. In the end, Vanguard was about community and camaraderie, about pride in overcoming adversity together. And it’s that kind of abiding passion that makes me so proud and excited to work on MMOs, because no other type of game has quite the same potential.
I’m pleased to say I logged in for the game’s final hour. I helped summon people to an unreleased zone to show them a bit of what might have been and got the chance to say farewell to many friends. It was bittersweet, to be sure, but I choose to remember the sweet.
Rest well, Vanguard. You’ve earned your place among the stars.[/quote]
http://www.mobhunter.com/?p=822
It was a series of unlikely events that led to me working on Vanguard. I’d just spent the last five-and-a-half years on Copernicus, which was built on fresh tech and the best art assets an MMO had ever seen. After four months on the job hunt, I’d accepted a design job at a studio focused on console and mobile titles when I got the call inviting me back to SOE. Though I was looking forward to trying my hand with other types of games, MMOs are my first love, and the idea of reuniting with old friends in San Diego was a big draw. I knew my ultimate destination would be the EQNext team, but I was asked to first help with an attempt to revitalize Vanguard. After weighing my options, I returned to San Diego determined to do my best for a game with one of the most storied histories in the genre.
Working on Vanguard was never easy. It was an aged title by the time I got to it, and although faster PCs allowed it to run better than it had back at its 2007 release, it was still plagued by technical problems resulting from architectural decisions made early on. Its content was a mess, ranging wildly in quality from inventive to abysmal. There were significant bugs everywhere, many of them years old. And while the design tools put a lot of flexibility into developers’ hands, its many idiosyncrasies intersected with a database awash in the detritus of years of half-finished work. Every bug we fixed seemed to come with an unintended side-effect. Change the name of an item and some unrelated field would get zeroed out. Adjust one stat and other variables would be altered without telling you. Lack of version control meant you had to hunt through screen shots or ask players what an item used to be like before it got unintentionally nerfed. There were a lot of days when I would literally sit with my head in my hands, flummoxed at how some feature or another could possibly have been implemented in such a convoluted way.
And yet, I grew to love the game.
This was due almost entirely to the small but passionate group of players who managed to look beyond the mess and find the beauty in Vanguard. I don’t mean how the game looked, although Vanguard did have some of the loveliest vistas you could find in an MMO thanks to its sprawling open world (environments generally looked better from a distance than they did close up). No, these players found beauty in the challenge and adversity that had quickly whittled Vanguard’s audience down from respectable box sales to a small crew of diehards.
These hardy souls stuck with the game through long periods of neglect when literally no new content appeared. Sure, they had their moments of bitterness, and rightfully so, but their bond with one another outweighed the negatives. They did their best to recruit new players to the game, but poor performance and lingering bugs meant not a lot of those visitors stuck around.
The free-to-play renaissance gave Vanguard a chance. A team was built up and the game was dusted off. Work was done under the hood to support the FTP model, and attention was paid to the starting experience in order to make new players coming in a bit more welcome. Veterans became hopeful–or at least cautiously optimistic. I came on board after the game went free and some content updates had already rolled out. We had a tech director who knew his stuff, a veteran producer, a talented art director, and a team of people who wanted to see Vanguard succeed. Many of them had been there during the Sigil days and had long wanted to give the game the chance it deserved.
For a time, our chances looked good. Being on Steam brought us attention and some new faces. The in-game store had periods of decent sales. We had a promising trajectory to build upon.
Sadly, it didn’t last.
In the years that Vanguard languished, the MMO landscape had kept moving. When Vanguard was released, there were still only a handful of active MMOs on the market, but it didn’t take long before new massively multiplayer titles were crawling out of the woodwork. Players had more and more choices all the time, many of them taking the genre in different directions (or at least featuring significantly higher production values) while Vanguard stood still. It was hard to attract players when there were so many newer, shinier alternatives.
Ultimately there were just too many gaping holes to patch. A major revamp of the network code came too late to help build an audience. And with the state the game was in, adding polished content was simply too costly and time-consuming given the size of our audience. The team shrank as most of us were shifted to other games, and I joined the team making EQNext and Landmark.
While sunsetting a game is inevitably going to cause hurt feelings among players, the truth is that SOE gave the game a lot of chances. Most other companies would have pulled the plug after the initial downturn in subscriptions. Instead, the game was kept alive for over seven years, and fans who wanted a challenging open world MMO had a place to call home for an awfully long time.
By any objective benchmark, Vanguard was never a great game. But the love we have for MMOs isn’t about benchmarks–it’s about heart. And the game’s promise, its potential, took hold in the hearts of a core group of fans. They loved the experience despite its flaws, and found those moments of beauty to cling to. In the end, Vanguard was about community and camaraderie, about pride in overcoming adversity together. And it’s that kind of abiding passion that makes me so proud and excited to work on MMOs, because no other type of game has quite the same potential.
I’m pleased to say I logged in for the game’s final hour. I helped summon people to an unreleased zone to show them a bit of what might have been and got the chance to say farewell to many friends. It was bittersweet, to be sure, but I choose to remember the sweet.
Rest well, Vanguard. You’ve earned your place among the stars.[/quote]
http://www.mobhunter.com/?p=822