Vanguard - What went wrong? @ FoH

Inauro

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August 31, 2006
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Bluesnews directs our attention to the Fires of Heaven forums where Vincent 'Teclisen' Napoli, one of the designers on Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, responds to the GameSpy article naming VSoH as the biggest disappointment of 2007. As with any opinion piece from a former (and possibly disgruntled) employee, you might want to take some of this with salt.
Anyway, enough of my blabbering. The most shocking reality that I don't think anyone really ever understood is that Vanguard was made (exclusively the design staff, I should say) COMPLETELY by amateurs. People who had been hired less than a week with 0 prior experience were tasked with designing entire newbie areas that shipped. People who had never produced a game in their life were asked to fix a 40 million dollar fuck up. People with no experience were asked to fix the item, diplomacy, ability, content, quest and pretty much every system in the game.
The game that exists now was designed in a single year by people with 0 experience. If that sounds too vague think of it like this: about 1 year from release we had 0 quests in the DB because the tool didn't exist yet. When I decided to split the team there was over 30,000 quest object entries. Yeah, explains a lot doesn't it?
What a huge let down indeed.
More information.
 
Joined
Aug 31, 2006
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Holy shit, well then I salute the 0 experience team, even with the problems, I still had a lot of fun and it's clear ( to me at least) there are some very good innovations in this game.

I left just before the server merger and in a way it's good to know how talented the unexperienced guys were that they could go in and do a good job under possibly the worst conditions. On the other hand I have egg on my face for trying to defend McQuaid at times for being a talented guy from EQ days and almost pulling off Vangard.

Oddly enough it's true and maybe he like so many people have circumstances which started out legitimately need those drugs and ended up take control of his life.

Too bad, I hate to see anyone's life get taken control of by drugs, government or religion.
 
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Ya, the fate of Vanguard is really a tragic one. I have to admit that in a way it really deserves this dubious award, but it should also get an award for the most innovative MMORPG in 2007. It had a lot of potential... unfortunately the Vanguard crew wasted a lot of it. In the end - who cares who is responsible?
 
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