What Happens In Vegas Stays in Vegas

Posted by Stropp on January 6, 2008

Or so the saying goes. But what happens at Sigil, isn’t staying at Sigil. As I predicted, industry drama is already unfolding.

Over the weekend, one of the developers of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes dropped something of a bombshell about the events that occurred during Vanguard’s development. This forum post on the Fires of Heaven Guild message board goes into a lot more detail about those happenings. It reads like the script to a movie of the week. Drug addiction, lies and deceipt, and manipulation appeared to be part of the daily routine.

One of the most interesting quotes was this one:

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 **** up. People with no experience were asked to fix the item, diplomacy, ability, content, quest and pretty much every system in the game.

If this is true, then quite frankly, Vanguard turned out better than it should have. Developing software is hard. It’s even harder if you don’t have the domain experience, or a team experienced in the domain, to rely on. If you have management that doesn’t have a care or a clue, it makes it that much harder.

• He’s literally never played a video game in his life, yet when Brad died off and Dave inherited the position of Vanguard Jesus, he decided he must be the final call on every design decision.

• But more often than not, this just meant people had to go around him to get something in, only without the help of (Place whatever department here) that was necessary for a game feature to actually turn out right. Imagine for a second people at Sigil actually knew how to do something right? (Believe it or not, we did on occasion) this guy would become the bottleneck to prevent that from happening.

• The only part Sony really played in Vanguard’s destiny was to let its life unnaturally and undeserving-ly continue. And apparently, it’s simply because they were naive enough to think this project was worth their cash. Hah! Even the staff at sigil was left wondering why the hell Sony would buy us. Dozens of lunch hours were spent trying to figure out why.

At the time of Vanguards release I was confused as to why it was released in that state. There was just too much wrong with the game for all concerned not to be aware that it was in no condition to be released. Even the most impatient publisher could see the necessity of additional development time. With this new information, the answers are finally becoming clear.

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes had people in charge:

1. who had incredibly major personal problems,
2. who didn’t have any experience in the domain,
3. who didn’t care, and
4. who forced others to do the work they should have been doing in order to complete the game.

In retrospect, I’ve got to tip my helm to the guys who were left in the lurch by their management team and still managed to deliver a game.

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