Ten years after the release of EverQuest — one of the most beloved and revered MMOs of all time — one if it’s creator’s Brad McQuaid has apparently resurfaced. For a while there have probably been more sightings of Elvis and Osama Bin Laden then the reclusive Brad McQuaid.
Due to his bungling and mismanagement of Sigil and their subsequent failure Brad has been portrayed as an arch-villain in the MMO world in recent years. We are a very unforgiving community it seems. Failure is something that rabid MMO fans have a hard time dealing with. We crucify our MMO messiahs when they fail and never let them forget it. Today’s hero is tomorrow’s zero.
The Vision and the Hype
Going back a few years I remember the buzz surrounding Sigil all too well. Many MMO players impressed by the success and impact of EverQuest were hoping for another revolution in virtual worlds with Brad’s 2nd project: Vanguard. Although we appreciated many of the advances of Blizzard’s new WoW, we saw many trends we didn’t like. We felt that MMOs had yet to realize their full potential.
Entire communities, websites and fans were invested both mentally and financially in Vanguard and they followed its progress with fanatical interest. My wife and I even ventured down to Las Vegas to attend a fan event called Fanguard where I wrote one of my first articles.
At that fan gathering in Vegas I was fortunate enough to meet Brad, Jeff and the team. Little did I know of the chaos and turmoil that was really going on at Sigil. Years later after reading my article I admit that much my praise and fervor was due to my own hopes and enthusiasm for the genre that I had projected onto Vanguard and the people at Sigil.
Later in 2006 at E3 I visited periphery of the SOE booth — the actual inside of the booth was by invitation only and for the “press”. Outside the booth I managed to track Brad down and spoke with him just briefly; this was right after they sold Vanguard to SOE. He seemed on edge and perhaps too preoccupied to talk to me at length.
Months later after Sigil started to fold and I found out what happened it dawned on me that that at the time Brad was on a sinking ship and embarrassed to talk to a real fan (and then novice game designer) who had posted quite frequently on their forums and had even written a favorable article about Vanguard.
Needless to say that what resulted was a disaster of colossal proportions. I hope someone writes a book about what really happened.
It’s Time to Clear the Air
I do agree with Chris over at I Has PC — Brad needs to come clean and make some form of official apology and mea culpa for what transpired at Sigil. He owes it to the people who gave years of their lives to work on his “vision” and the thousands of fans that lent their support:
You sunk a game and the hopes of thousands who followed it. You should probably address that. Not addressing the opiate accusations? Hey, deny, deny deny (or at least explain). If a person in his standing and past accomplishments truly wanted to resurface and try something new your first post is an apology, with a thorough explanation, filled with candor and honesty. What is presented at the new Brad McQuaid blog is less than fluff.
One of the most important exercises that game developers can ever do is what’s called a postmortem. Game Developer magazine routinely does these and they are very helpful in giving their fellow game designers insights into the pitfalls of creating a video game. As a matter of professional courtesy and for his own conscience, there is really no point for Brad to go forward until he analyzes and admits what went wrong. Much can be learned from the mistakes that Sigil made.
The Price of Failure
The demise of Sigil and Brad’s misfortunes raises an interesting question: what is it about this industry that we can’t tolerate failure? A times some in the MMO community remind me of James Bond super villains who kill their henchmen for even the slightest failure.
In the real world failure is a part of life. Ask Thomas Edison who failed 1,000 times to invent the incandescent light bulb. Ask Donald Trump who’s gone bankrupt and failed many times. Ask any successful person. Rarely can you ever succeed without failing.
If everyone who ever failed just quit their occupation it’s probably that we’d still be living in caves. I think we need to more tolerant of failure. We need to give people 2nd and 3rd chances as long as they are willing to admit their mistakes.
The Root of All Evil
I suspect the real problem is that even to this day MMOs are damned expensive to make. It’s a risky gamble after all.
Not only do MMOs require the investment of millions of dollars but they also demand the blood, sweat and tears of the people involved in making the game. The human tragedy of the failure of Brad and his partners was the terrible impact it had on the lives of those Sigil employees who lost their jobs. Thankfully some of them were hired by SOE and if you look at the credits for Free Realms you’ll see many of them working there now.
After the debacle of Sigil many MMO investors will rightly think twice before they invest their money and opt to go for the safe bet — the WoW clone. It’s a sad twist of fate that because of Brad’s screw-up that MMOs that try to offer something unique and revolutionary will have trouble getting funding in the future. He should do all he can to ensure that the dominant MMO design philosophy which is currently enslaved to the plodding banality of Blizzard — in part because of a lack of innovative competition due to his past sins — won’t be his ultimate legacy.
Looking to the Future
While it’s a positive development that Brad has resurfaced, I think the best course of action for him– if he has any hope of ever redeeming himself — is to actually produce something of worth and only then discuss it. Talk is cheap these days and we’ve been burned one too many times in the video game world by excessive hype.
Love him or hate him but the fact remains that Brad McQuaid has accomplished more in the realm of MMOs then most people — especially his critics. Despite some that would label him a huckster and charlatan, I’ve always regarded him as one of the most eloquent and passionate spokespersons for virtual worlds and MMORPGs. Hopefully Brad has learned from his mistakes and come to terms with his limitations — he’s got a lot of respect and credibility to recover and it won’t be an easy time climbing out of that virtual mud.
Given the staleness and cobwebs that have crept into the psyche of the MMO industry since the arrival of WoW we could use someone like Brad to shake up the status quo. Who knows, the third time may even be the charm?
-Wolfshead
I wish Brad every success if he is trying to get back into game development, especially in this market. It’s been pretty brutal for some other experienced people I know.
But, hoping that one of the creators of EverQuest who is also the guy who wanted to make a hard-core version of the game later will breathe new life into an industry that has more or less continued to clone EQ? I’ve seen stranger things, I guess.
People are indeed very hard to Mr. McQuaid. A lot of the flames directed towards him are VERY personal, not discussing the matter. Nobody doubts that he made mistakes as designer and also appeared in a very bad light as Sigil went bankrupt, his attitude towards his employees for example. I guess this is the downside of a familiar and passionate atmosphere at work if something totally fails.
I personally do not need a “mea culpa”, but it could not hurt either.
Today is the 17. June 2009, your Fanguard/Vanguard article from August 2005 already stated what is amiss in modern MMOs:
Brad is not the first MMO heavyweight/founding father to fail. Talk about Richard Garriott and Bill Roper, they also failed with Tabula Rasa and Hellgate: London.
There seems to be no guarantee that a big name guarantees success. The stakes are high, a lot of money is involved in creating a MMO. The chances for success, on the other hand, are pretty slim. ArenaNet’s Jeff Strain (Guild Wars) stated at the Games Convention that people usually settle for ONE big AAA MMO, so how many AAA MMOs can co-exist when they draw their players from the very same pool of people who get attracted to MMOs?
They could also go the Blizzard way and activate player resources from shooters and RTS games, people who did not play MMOs at all so far.
And now you are asked to deliver the old experience to veterans. Who are quite spoiled and demanding. They might even be asking for the impossible.
Still, we need people with a “vision” trying. Or we will go on as usual and consume disappointedly the boring stew of modern DIKU MUD rehashes with tons of slightly different flavors.
You asked him what he envisioned Vanguard to be. His answer is fantastic. And if he really is a dreamer, a man with a vision… forgive him that he has failed. All power to dreamers who make their dreams come true, it is for the better of all gamers.
This is what Brad McQuaid answered:
It is easy to say things like that, of course. But at least he tried to make it come true.
Please, try again, Brad. Let us give the man a chance, he got already burned badly enough with Vanguard, Sigil and the ugly mess it left behind.
BTW, Brian is quite right. I am not a fan of the EQ formula. Trying to improve it would probably not result in Brad McQuaids “vision”, whatever it might be. The vision might be blurred by nostalgia.
To Brian and Longasc, the question is this:
Is the WoW formula the end all and be all of MMO design? Are we stalled on the MMO super-highway?
If the answer is “yes” then please let me outta here. I’m done with MMOs and virtual worlds.
If the answer is “no” then where are we headed?
If we don’t go hardcore then is it to make MMOs even more accessible till we end up at Bartle’s prophecy where newbies have reduced virtual worlds into virtual soothers?
Perhaps the hardcore/casual terminology is all wrong too. Maybe the real question is playtime duration and how much time to you have tonight to devote to this MMO?
I still think it’s possible can have a rich and deep MMO experience in 30 minutes, 60 minutes and longer of course. If we aim for that then we can still grow the MMO demographic. 🙂
I am afraid that the first answer is indeed right… but I still refuse to accept it. 🙁
Bartle’s virtual soother is no longer just a theory, it coined the mindset of the current MMO player generation:
“YOU DIED!
Achievement unlocked: Death
+1000 Gold to lessen the traumatic experience!
+1000 XP, dying is an experience, after all
– Mobs involved in the kill got leveled down
– Your items have been restored to you
– a spectral taxi is ready to bring you to the place of your death in next to zero time
– you are immune to death/damage for the next 10 mobs”
Or… you looked at a NPC! -> +5 Levels, uber-sword. You get +10 Tokens that you can exchange for welfare epics.
There are no safer places than virtual worlds nowadays. Imagine a MMO designer re-design “Pacman”…. :>
Darkfall was unfortunately NOT the right answer to this downtrend! 🙁
ooops… sorry for the many typos. I am off now, there is real work to do. 🙂
Hardcore/casual terminology is indeed wrong. So is the “gametime spent” approach, and every market-oriented approach to any game.
I play games because they are fun and exciting. I’d imagine all gamers play for similar reasons. Even the most hardcore gamers became hardcore, because at the beginning they were intrigued and entertained by a game.
And to make an entertaining game you need a man with a vision and with passion, not a salesman.
SsandmanN, well said! I fear a game is doomed the moment you first think about the market and economical considerations and not the GAME itself.
I wrote 3 blog entries and did not mention Mount & Blade. I recommend everyone to google and download and play Mount & Blade. It is not a MMO, but it is an indie game that just rocks your socks. And you can play the first few levels for free, though this game is about player skill, not player skills and levels! Yeah, it is awesome. Because it has a VISION, hear, hear! 🙂
I tell you what, if Jesus would be reborn, we would criticize and frustrate him enough for what he did wrong during his first time on earth so that he would crucifiy himself and not return for a long time. Give Brad McQuaid another chance. 🙂
What concerns me is that anything I’ve read about Brad’s vision seems squarely focused on polishing the past, rather than presenting anything new and interesting. Polishing the old can provide success, but it also means “more of the same”, which tends to have diminishing returns pretty quickly.
There’s a market for EverQuest New, though. I wish him luck with it.
Given the reality of mass market MMOs today and the failure of Sigil, I think it’s pretty obvious that Brad will need to revise his “vision” to make it more commercially acceptable.
From what I undertand that Vanguard was a failure of excecution and management more then it was a failure of ideas.
Reading the accounts of the designers who worked there was scary. If I worked there I would have stormed into Brad’s office and put him in a headlock until he agreed to at least commission the creation of proper tools for the designers. The careless disregard for how their project was managed and produced was shocking. There is lots of blame to spread around for the other people that were in charge at Sigil.
If you ask me Vanguard wasn’t really bold or original. It was basically an artistically bland, unpolished, unconvincing version of EverQuest with diplomacy thrown in.
I agree with Tesh. I’m willing to give Brad another chance, but I don’t know that we’ll actually see anything new out of it.
I wonder if the MMO future will mirror the MUD past? Are we going to get to a point where everyone and their mom is running an MMO, and they’re all essentially lookalikes copying a handful of original successes? (Are we already there?) On our community sites, we’ll bicker about legal issues and whether a given idea is truly innovative or whether it was stolen from someone else (think rec.games.mud.* in the mid-90s). Our iconic developers will vanish. Then at some point, there will be a conjunction of elements, and something new and innovative will be born.
I wish Brad the best of luck and I’m looking forward to seeing what he does next. I know people don’t like him after the VG shambles but I think it takes a lot more than 1 person to screw something like that up and he shouldn’t be responsible for it all. Of course, I wasn’t there, that’s just my general opinion.
The sad thing, at least to me, is that the whole Sigil affair made it cool to hate on Brad. Those of us that had disliked him prior were now just part of the “in crowd” and no longer in the vanguard of hate (crappy pun, yeah).
The issue for me was never Vanguard, it was “the Vision.” Everyone remembers EQ fondly and attributes it all to him. The truth is that Brad was forced out pretty darn early in that game. A lot of the “fun” came from him being gone and SOE eased up on the “Shut up players, we know what is best for you.”
I guess folks don’t remember how strong “the Vision” was when it came to game to design. If the Vision made something boring or dull, too bad. Brad wasn’t going to change. He was, in essence, a nightmare to deal with as a customer. Everything had to be “as he saw it.” He forgot that the players had say too. That is why I disliked him.
I don’t expect developers to bow to every player whim but when a huge community expects a change and they get “No, its how I want it” well… that guy doesn’t need to have decision making power.
Brad is an exceptional ideas man and designer. I’d be glad to see him in that role again. He should never, however, be given any decision making power or any job that contains the words supervisor, manger or lead.
I think my problem with some of the “big names” is that they hita lucky spot in the evolution of a market, and all of a sudden everyone considers them geniuses. Other than scale, EQ adds very little to old-school MUDs. Ultima Online was big, but had so many problems it was borderline unplayable.
I’m a software engineer for a living, and trust me – the vision is the easy part. It’s really easy to say “I want a game where five thousand people can play together at once!” but do it is hard. If you look at the tech, Blizzard has pushed very little despite being huge. The most interesting thing out there at the moment, technologically, is EVE Online. They’ve managed to grow to their current level with a single world, which at any given time has about 10 times as many players as one of WoW’s servers. But nobody seems to be going after their devs like rock stars…
But my main theory on the lack of forgiveness has more to do with the players. MMOs are, at best, average games. They’re dull, uninspired repetitiveness which subsist 20% on social experience and 80% on compulsive reward-driven compulsiveness. The sort of player attracted to those games don’t tend to be the most forgiving. MMO players are well-known for exploding on anyone who misses a heal in an encounter and inflicts a 20-minute penalty to their progress. Is it really any wonder that we’re less forgiving to the disappointment that comes from the two-year obsession we show with a game in development?
Great point about EVE online.
I couldnt disagree more on the dullness and repetitiveness of MMOs though.
This is what MMOs are today, or more like, this is what WoW is.
We cant extrapolate the lack of vision and passion of one dev team to the whole genre.
Besides, MMOs tend to get repetitive only because they are played for a very long time. Any other type of game would be even more dull and repetitive, had it been played for such periods of time.
In this aspect MMOs are perhaps the most re-playable and entertaining genre there is.
Via Syp at Bio Break, Brad McQuaid has just posted the first part of his Sigil:Vanguard postmortem. Interestingly enough that’s exactly what I suggested he do.
It’s an interesting read and I look forward to reading more. To his credit, I’m glad he’s decided to do this.
http://www.bradmcquaid.com/Brad_McQuaid/Blog/Entries/2009/6/29_Vanguard__Post-mortem_Part_1.html