THE BORE
General => Video Game Bored => Topic started by: ManaByte on June 30, 2009, 05:26:43 PM
-
Part 1 is up:
http://www.bradmcquaid.com/Brad_McQuaid/Blog/Entries/2009/6/29_Vanguard__Post-mortem_Part_1.html
Vanguard: Post-mortem Part 1
Intro
I’m going to spend the majority of the time on mistakes we made in development and then what I’d do differently in my next project (e.g. the point of this is to learn from the past and share what I’ve learned here in the hopes that this information would be helpful not just to me going forward, but also to anyone else working on an MMOG). So the finger pointing is mostly going to be at me, not at our partners. I received a lot of email asking about what went wrong and what I’ve learned and how I’d apply that knowledge going forward with a new game. I’ve discussed most of these issues with others who were on the Vanguard team, and we don’t always agree. Sometimes the disagreement is about the issue itself, and other times while we agree on the issue, we disagree on how bad the issue was or to what degree it affected development. So take everything with a grain of salt and please realize this is my perspective and not necessarily anyone else who was involved.
Part One: Get Everything in Writing
The first mistake that would have a serious impact later in development was the verbal agreement with Microsoft that Vanguard was to be a first rate, AAA title. In other words, we were going to get the funding we needed to compete with other AAA MMOGs, and that we would periodically evaluate the competition and adjust Vanguard’s budget and/or release date if it made sense to us and Microsoft. And as time past by, we did increase the budget as games like WoW were released with very high development costs and a ton of polish. But then there was a regime change at Microsoft, and the people with whom we had this understanding and commitment were no longer there. The new hierarchy did not have the same perspective and commitment to Vanguard and when we needed more time and more money, the general reaction was that we were screwing up management-wise. So the moral of the story is one that should have occurred to us: get everything in writing, get it into the contract, because even a company like Microsoft can suddenly undergo significant changes to its management and teams. And when those changes do happen, you might as well be dealing with a new company – anything and everything can change, and change quickly.
One thought you might have reading this could be, “Would any publisher have signed a more open-ended deal?” And that would be a very good question. I do think, with 20/20 hindsight, that a more open-ended deal could have been made. I’m not talking about a contract carte-blanch, but something more than what went down. At this time I had multiple large publishers calling me on the phone, wanting to do a deal with me. So we were in a pretty good position.
Now, I said in the intro above that the majority of what I’m going to write is going to be focused inward, not outward. So my next blog is going to be about the plusses and potentially bad minuses of putting together an all-star team. That said, I’m going to approach this chronologically, and the above issue, IMHO, turned out to be our first significant mistake.
Without a doubt, everything conceivable should have been in writing. Like you touched on, if there is a change in the structure of organization, it can be a huge obstacle to overcome.
You needed to gain the trust of people you had little to no trust built with. When your allies and supporters left, those mutual "understandings" left with them.
Hind sight is always 20/20. This should serve as a lesson to anyone in business.
Here's what he means about the regime change at MS:
Prior to that happening, MS had all their MMOs (at that time, it was just Vanguard and Marvel) that understood that MMOs take up to four years and buckets of cash to create.
Towards the middle of 2006, MS restructured and put MMOs under the Family Games people who crapped out a new Zoo Tycoon every six months and couldn't understand why Cryptic and Sigil couldn't get their MMOs out in the same time period with the same funding. They were completely fucking clueless.