The Call of Aradune

The sword of Aradune has been drawn.  Brad McQuaid is back in play.

That sword

The word is out.  Reports are popping up around our little online neighborhood.

• Keen and Graev
• Massively

Brad McQuaid is putting together a project for Kickstarter, which he describes:

The game is high fantasy and if you’ve played EQ 1 and/or Vanguard, you’ve got a general idea of what the game’s about…

And part of me reads that and goes, “Whoo-haaa!” or some other loudly affirmative interjection.

After all, there was a time and place where we were clearly on the same page when it came to online gaming.  We both were playing TorilMUD back in the day and he, along with a group of talented people, many of whom also played TorilMUD, and created EverQuest.

To this day I cannot describe the combined feeling of newness and amazement mixed in with equally strong feelings of comfort and a sense of being exactly where I wanted to be when I first started playing EverQuest.

And that is what springs to mind right away when I think about Brad McQuaid.

Unfortunately, he also brings up Vanguard, which is sort of the antithesis of EverQuest to me.

What has he done for us lately?

There were certainly a lot of things that went wrong on that path.  The list of mistakes… with I can sort of sum up as “too much breadth, not enough depth” or “too much big picture ambition, not enough focus on the details”… was long.  And it was crowed with arrogance that I found off-putting.  It was the spiritual forefather of Tabula Rasa or Warhammer Online, the big draw based on a reputation that failed to pan out.

I suppose that Brad McQuaid can get a little satisfaction out of the fact that his creation outlasted those two titles.  But it damn near did not.  While I was happy enough for SOE to step in and save Vanguard, I couldn’t tell you if that was the best business decision for SOE.  It is certainly not obvious if SOE made much money with the game relative to the effort it took to fix it, and less certain is what SOE could have done with that money.  Finish The Agency maybe?  who knows?

Anyway, I bring up those two other titles, Warhammer Online and Tabula Rasa for a pretty obvious reason.  Mark Jacobs and Richard Garriott both had initial successes in the early MMO market, turned that into big projects that failed to meet expectations, and then turned around years later to do smaller, Kickstarter focused projects allegedly based on what they learned on their respective roads through life.

That, in turn, required them to come clean on what they actually learned in their failures and how they would apply that to the current projects, Camelot Unchained in the case of Mark Jacobs and Lord British’s Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, which they did with mixed results.

Richard Garriott spent a lot more time blaming EA, NCSOFT, and people less talented than him along with playing the nostalgia card rather than going into much detail.   Mark Jacobs was more forthcoming, especially in terms of focus and what the Kickstarter financing really meant to the project.  But then he had to mention how Warhammer Online still had a great rating on Metacritic, which was something of a face palm moment, as well as a reminder of the value of pre-release reviews around something like an MMO.

So that time is coming for Brad McQuaid.

He is going to have to stand up and not only be able to talk about his new project and where he wants to go with it, but also what he learned from Vanguard and how those lessons will be applied to this project.  I realize that he has spoken frankly before about what he felt went wrong at Sigil Games when they were working on Vanguard.  But that is always the easy part.  Now is the time to talk about practical application of the lessons learned.  How will he keep these things from happening again.

And I am expecting to hear a lot about focus and managing expectations and keeping things small to start with and then building upon a solid foundation.

Anyway, that should make for some interesting reading when it comes to pass.