Interviews

Sigil’s Brad McQuaid talks about the state of Vanguard, as the game enters the third beta phase
By Michael Lafferty

“I think that is one of our strengths is to say this is not just a game, this is a home.”

It’s been six or so months since Sigil Games hosted a media event that allowed video-game journalists the opportunity to get a glimpse of its pending massively multiplayer game, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.

The cliché would be “oh, what a difference six months makes,” but that is only half true. Vanguard was already shaping up to be a triple-A title. What Sigil, and Sony Online Entertainment showed off during the recent San Diego event only confirms that. Ok, at this juncture we can’t go into details about that game – that is still under embargo – but the game is still expanding and in the third beta phase. There will be two more beta phases prior to the game’s tentative release date in the first quarter of 2007.

GameZone was also able to sit down with Sigil’s Brad McQuaid, chairman, CEO and executive producer of the title for a chat about the game.

Question: It’s been six months since we last saw the game. What significant changes, generally speaking, have gone into the development of the game between then and now?

Brad: We’re totally 100% in the production mode; we are just cranking out content, the art team is much, much faster so we are producing more fantasy, more fantastic, more interesting new areas, and making them more quickly. The design team has gotten their tools down and are really getting a lot of new content into the game. The switch from beta two to three was huge – we’ve let a lot more people into the beta and we’ve learned a lot, so much from beta one to two and reacted to it and saw a retention, people being happy and enjoying beta three.

Q: Earlier today you spoke about EverQuest. Vanguard is a huge leap forward from EQ Live (which Brad also was part of), not only in technological terms but in terms of expectations. People are a little more savvy, and more knowledgeable about MMOs in general. How are you position Vanguard to meet the expectations of both the high-end or hardcore gamer as well as the more casual gamer?

Brad: Well, that’s our biggest challenge. People naturally assume the extremes – you are either a casual gamer or a hardcore gamer. In my opinion most people are in the middle, the core gamer. So we are really focusing on the message that our game is not a hardcore game. It has hardcore content, it has casual content but the majority of the content is core content where you can log on for an hour and have a good time. You can work eight hours on some rare item, but you can do it in two- or three-hour chunks. We realize that people who played EQ have grown up; we realize we want to attract a lot of people who play WoW (World of Warcraft) who have different expectations, different experiences. One of the benefits of being Sigil and having our background in EverQuest is the recognition, but it is a lot of the challenges that a lot of people assume that this game will be a lot of camping and hardcore. So that is one of our big efforts right now in messaging, marketing and PR is that, yes, we are more challenging and deeper and are about longevity. We hope that people, World of Warcraft players that have three of four characters at max level, and are looking for something more, we want to let them know about Vanguard. So one challenge is even letting them know, because maybe they are new players and weren’t around in the EQ days, or maybe they were around and they only heard ‘oh, it is a hardcore game.’ So we want to get the message out right.

Q: You are giving players a well-rounded playing experience. When someone logs in, there are four things they can do – adventuring, harvesting, crafting or diplomacy…

Brad: Yes, and those things take different amounts of time, too. One example I use is you are mostly into adventuring but you still enjoy harvesting and diplomacy and you log in one day and your buddies are not on. Normally you might log off, but with Vanguard, you might spend an hour harvesting. There are all sorts of things in there for core gamers, for people with different amounts of contiguous amounts of time they can commit to playing in a given session. That’s our biggest challenge.

With the switch from Microsoft to Sony (as publisher) we’ve lost several months of marketing. So we are playing a little catch up. It’s not the end of the world, we can it and we’re really focusing hard on getting the message out.

Q: Right now the MMO market is somewhat stagnant. There are no triple-A titles releasing in the very near future, and one gets a sense that MMOers are waiting for the next big thing …

Brad: They really are. And to my knowledge, other than maybe Lord of the Rings Online and other than World of Warcraft’s expansion, I don’t think there are any other triple-A titles for 2007 …

Well, there is Conan …

Brad: I don’t think it is going to be ’07 and if it is, it will be late ’07.

And you also have Gods and Heroes …

Brad: They are both very different kinds of experiences. I’m talking a WoW kind of MMO. The definition of an MMO is kind of blurred. For example, is D&D Online an MMO. I would say no; some people would say yes. But for that virtual world, exploration, immersion, your WoW/EQ/Vanguard-type game, we’re pretty much it for ’07 and that’s a tremendous opportunity for us. We really excited about it.

Q: Are you afraid that when you tell people that ‘our game, when you buy it, is 25 gigs of hard-drive space,’ are you afraid that will be a little daunting to some?

Brad: I don’t think the hard-drive requirements are going to be a problem. Nothing has gotten cheaper than hard drives, you can get a hard-drive for nothing. I am concerned about the perception that you will need a very expensive PC, in terms of graphics cards and CPU to run the game, and the game does take advantage of Shader 2 technology, and it’s meant for longevity, it’s meant to look good years and years from now, but we are spending a lot of time optimizing and getting it to run on lower-end machines. It will never run as well as like WoW but WoW is also going to have a problem in four years still looking good.

My two biggest concerns is that people think the game is hardcore and they think they will need some $3,000 machine to run it. That’s not going to be the case. It’s a core-gamer game, it’s challenging but not tedious, and an average gamer’s machine should be able to run it.

We want to reward the guy with the uber machine (with enhanced graphics) but we don’t want to say you can’t play it if you don’t have that type of machine. The thing is you can grow into it. If you can upgrade your machine in six months, you will be rewarded for it in game.

Q: Your world is huge, but you’ve left a lot of space for expansions. Earlier today you talked about how you have left yourself space for expansions …

Brad: Years of expansions …

With all that in mind, what do you do to draw the line for the release, for the expansion …

Brad: I think as long as you have enough content, and functionality at release, to keep the average gamer happy, until you launch your first expansion, and you have a decent live team, you are ready to launch. To me, launching an MMO , is an arbitrary date – when we start charging for it, because an MMO is never done, that’s the beauty of it. But it’s not right to charge for it until you can entertain the average guy, and if you are going to launch an expansion every nine months, you had better have enough content for the average guy to last nine months. And you should have a live team, too, that keeps it tuned and tweaked and adding some new content. And that’s our commitment, and that’s what we are going to do. We are also hinting and talking about the Vanguard of 2008 is going to be so much more than the Vanguard of 2007 because longevity is what Vanguard is all about. I want this game going for years.

And with all due respect to World of Warcraft, that doesn’t seem to be their focus. I think that is one of our strengths is to say this is not just a game, this is a home. Come home and play this game and it will look good and play well, and entertain you and give you new challenges and new features for the next five or 10 years.