Brad McQuaid: Vanguard Post-mortem, Part 3

Posted August 10th, 2009 by Martuk

After nearly a month since his last blog entry about Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, Brad McQuaid has finally broken his silence with the third blog entry of his Vanguard post mortem analysis. In his latest blog, Brad talks about the decision to push forward with advancing technology with Vanguard and how this played into the loss of many players. The decision was one made back during the development of Everquest (EQ). By assuming players would upgrade to play as they did with EQ, Brad and team assumed the same would be true for Vanguard. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

Why didn’t our techno-geek approach work with Vanguard when it had worked with EQ?  Probably there are a few reasons, but the big one I think is the perceived difference between the games and their competition.  First, EQ didn’t have a lot of competition and many people were new to MMOs.  This wasn’t true with Vanguard – there were many released MMOs when it came out.  Also just about anyone, techno-geek or not, perceived a big difference between a 2d tile-based UO and a truly 3d game like EverQuest.  It was like going from cassette tapes to CDs – just about everyone perceived a huge difference.

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Original page: http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/72493