The Villain Unmasked!
Today F13 posted an interview with a former Sigil employee. It’s a very compelling read, offering many juicy details that industry watchers have been drooling over.
In the wake of this interview, no doubt some will proclaim “At last we have the whole truth.” Well, we don’t. We have a perspective on the truth, to be sure, but we must keep in mind that this is only one person’s take on it. As in any workplace, depending who you talk to, you can end up with very different opinions on why things are the way they are.
Part of what makes this story compelling to so many is that it feels like classic drama. And drama needs a villain, right? So who is the villain here?
Let’s take a look at the suspects.Â
Microsoft – The company that initially partnered with Sigil to release Vanguard. Though often seen as a soulless juggernaut, the interview portrays Microsoft as treating Sigil fairly and being very patient with the development process — perhaps failingly so. The reality is that the average employee within Sigil probably has very little information on the details of the company’s relationship with Microsoft, which means the rest of us will almost certainly never know. But it doesn’t matter in the end, as it’s unlikely that Microsoft did anything villainous in this relationship. Expecting milestones to be met is the mark of good management, not bad. When it became obvious that Vanguard wasn’t going to be the product they bought into, Microsoft was willing to cut ties and move on. If anything, one could argue that Microsoft is a victim in all of this, which is certainly an unusual position for Mr. Gates et al.
John Smedley – Certainly an easy target upon which to pin the mantle of villain. After all, he takes the heat for pretty much all of SOE’s mistakes and gets very little credit for the things the company does well. Interestingly enough, though, the ex-Sigil employee’s interview goes a long way toward clearing Smed of blame. By this account, SOE’s boss treated Sigil and Vanguard just the way he said he would. And you know what? That’s typical of Smed. I may not agree with every decision he’s ever made, but I’ve never known him to have a malicious intent. He’s a good guy who treated me well during my tenure at SOE, and there’s a lot to admire about the things he has accomplished. If anything, he’s probably the one person most responsible for Vanguard being released at all.
Jeff Butler – I don’t know that I’ve ever personally spoken to Jeff. What I know of him comes mostly from what I’ve been told by people who worked with him. I don’t see any evidence of maliciousness here either, though as a leader he played some role in the breakdown that crippled the game. My hope is that he, like others, learns from this experience and doesn’t make the same mistakes again.
Sigil’s current management (Dave Gilbertson, Bill Fisher, and Darrin McPherson) – I don’t know any of these guys, so I can’t offer any particular insight. What I can guess is that these folks found themselves in a nearly impossible position: left floating in a power void unsure of their direction or limits. I wouldn’t want to be put in such a situation. No doubt mistakes were made, but how much blame can be put on any of these people is not for us to decide. Now that SOE is defining roles and responsibilities, the team should be judged by what they do going forward rather than what was done in the past. I wish them good luck.
Brad McQuaid – Ah, Brad. In many ways I see him as the tragic hero of the piece, and I can’t help but feel a certain degree of sympathy. Like Hamlet, he had noble goals that were brought down by ego and bad decisions. But even writing all those long FoH posts filled with grand promises doesn’t make him a villain. In fact, I am willing to bet that Brad feels like shit about all of this. He had dreams of building a team of people he cared about, making a game he loved, and leading his followers to wealth and fulfillment. Instead, he’s left as a nominal consultant on a broken game that represents only a fraction of what he wanted it to be. The team he cared about is a shell of what it was, and instead of a secure future many of them are left pounding the pavement looking for jobs. Villain? No. More like a casualty, though not a blameless one. What the future holds for Brad is a mystery with only one certainty: people will be watching.
So where does all this leave us? The reality is that there is no moustache-twirling bad guy tying Vanguard to the train tracks. What we have is a mixture of a noble goal beset by chaos and blunders, resulting in a game that will need a lot of work to get to where it needs to be.
No doubt other accounts from former Sigil employees will surface over time. Keep in mind that each of them is just one perspective on the truth, colored by all the personal biases that any of us has about situations we care deeply about. Maybe it’s impossible to ever get the whole, unvarnished, unblemished truth… but that’s okay. The message boards have their drama, and the rest of us have lessons to learn.
Brad got in over his head there’s no doubt about that.
I’m constantly reminded that ideas are a dime a dozen in this industry and it’s execution that matters. The problem is Brad by everyones account is long on ideas and short on execution, just like the legions of 14 year olds out there all clamoring with their own dream MMO designs.
People keep bringing up that he didn’t mean to do this, well of course not. No one sets out to have a dismal failure of a game. I don’t think anyone involved choose to maliciously cause this game to fail. So the question isn’t who willfully caused this tragedy but just plain who caused it. From the picture we’re getting from all around it’s Brad first and foremost. The most damning thing in my opinion is his simple lack of presence once things started looking grim and worse his lack of presence at the end when the rest of Sigil paid for his mistakes in that parking lot with their jobs. So no I doubt he meant to do it but that doesn’t absolve him of responsibility. After all is malice really that much worse than incompetence?
The most interesting quote i saw in that interview:
“I think Brad’s situation is an odd one. He’s got tons of crazy ideas but he really shouldn’t be in charge of anything. He is great as a theorycrafter so long as he was tempered by people who could determine what was possible or not.”
What bothers me about all this “drama” (and by drama, i mean that reads like Sigil was the Enron of the gaming world) is that i can’t imagine that this hasn’t happened before in so many other capacities. Only reason there’s a big spotlight on it is because of all the hype surrounding all the “big names”. But how many other times has something like this happened in the gaming industry (not necessarily with MMO’s but with any product)? It makes ya appreciate some companies a little bit more – love em or hate em, they had the managerial skills to keep the company in business. I can think of some great companies that have tanked or been taken over, but it wasn’t big news. I wish the devs well in moving on and getting new jobs. The game industry is full of em, and they already have a leg up. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of that talent gets snatched up by 38 Studios at some point
I have maintained for a long time now that the producers of a game set the tone for management on down. If the producers seem to be clued in to the desires of the players and responsive to feedback and ideas, even if to say “no, that’s not the way we want to go”, then the game tends to do well. On the other hand, if the producers seem to not be listening, or disbelieving of what the player community is saying, then the game tends to not go well.
Based on the few conversations I’ve had with them, I think individual devs very often care deeply about the parts of a game they’re responsible for and really try hard to build something that people will like. The problem is when someone above them, like a lead designer, has an idea they won’t let go of and isn’t willing to compromise. Virtually every bad game decisison I’ve ever seen in a game I was playing seemed to come from this. Standing up for your ideas and pushing them is important, but so is being willing to listen to other viewpoints and compromise. Sometimes there are honest mistakes, sure, where the dev team went down a path that turned out to not be as great as they thought, but the good teams are the ones that see that happening, admit it, and then go back to the drawing board to fix the problem.
Anyway, I’m glad that most of the drama with Vanguard seems done for the time being – my guild just wants to explore the world and enjoy the game, and all the worry about what was going to happen the last two days really hit morale hard. Hopefully now that it’s over, it all gets better from here.
Brad simply let his ego get the best of him and believed what his loyal followers told him.
Crazy to see history repeat itself so much though.
Maybe the third time will be the charm for Brad, though I doubt he’ll ever find himself in any sort of decision making position on anything of importance, especially considering his inability to be realistic in his promises and desires.
I hope SOE can turn VG around like they’ve done with EQ2, but imho VG will take a lot more effort and work to polish than EQ2 did.
I think the game simply got away from them. There was so much hype and hysteria surrounding the game from day 1. There were hundreds of people predicting it would be the best game to ever be released (putting pressure on the devs to come up with something amazing) while there were an equal number of people predicting failure from the on-set (creating the same problem for the developers).
That is the problem when you have so many known names working on a game coming on the heals of something as successful as Everquest was for them. It really kind of was a no win situation most likely.
Unfortunately, people want a scape goat. While Brad certainly deserves some blame, I doubt he really deserves to be burned at the stake… just as Smedley doesn’t really deserve all the vitriol he generally gets to “enjoy.”
The whole circumstance is just unfortunate.
Brad will be back. Daikatana was a similarly huge disaster and John Romero is still kicking around the industry.
Hi Moorgard,
As a former Sigil employee I would like to add that this interview is not just the “opinion” of one person, it was the reality of anyone who was not part of the top management team. I feel the interview could have been a lot worse and the interviewed party did a great job at restraining personal bias. It was sad to see a collection of such dedicated professionals (both new and seasoned) spend hours and effort just to watch management deny them the tools and resources to create the actual plan for Vanguard. When I worked at Sigil, I was employed to work in one department but had my hands deep in three departments (including QA) by the end of every 18 – 32 hour day. By launch, management basically sat around and picked its nose. I can say that a lot of work fell on Ryan Elam’s shoulders, he was one of the only people in upper management who cared if this game did well.
It was obvious that Brad (and maybe even Jeff) never cared if Sigil was successful, the goal was to make another EQ and sell to a bigger company. All we could do was try to make such a great game that Brad would be interested in keeping Sigil. In the 2 times that I actually saw Brad, one of them was a company meeting regarding the launch date being so close to Burning Crusades. He actually said he didn’t think launching next to WoW would hurt our numbers because the people who were going to play Vanguard were not going to be WoW players (all 4 of them?). Between not planning for the massive numbers at launch, to SOE “accidentally” doing things like pushing the wrong patch several times, it seems the plan was already in effect and the limitations were too big. Oh well, though SOE will just assimilate it into their style of soulless MMORPG, hopefully they can do something better with it.
Finally, please remember that you are a voice in this industry that many listen too, I appreciate you reminding the reader to not just believe any random person’s posts. I am however suggesting that though this employee’s opinions are from one perspective. You have never worked at Sigil (to my knowledge) and any doubt of this person’s story has less validity then someone who has actually experienced it first hand. Brad is nothing like Hamlet, he is a bit more like Nero.
Best of luck to all who were let go,
“What we have is a mixture of a noble goal beset by chaos and blunders, resulting in a game that will need a lot of work to get to where it needs to be”.
I find myself at odds with the general opinion of Vanguard, in that in terms of gameplay, content and overall “feel”, to me it already is where it needs to be. Yes, it needs a lot of work on performance and bugs, but outside of that it is very much the virtual world I was hoping for.
It is the first mainstream MMO that has the “hook” that EQ1 had for me. I love EQ2 and look forward eagerly to Rise of Kunark, but it is still a storyline-driven game that I will play through and then leave until the next chapter. Vanguard’s Telon is much more a place to “be”.
This is clearly very much a minority opinion, though, so I had better enjoy it while it lasts because I don’t doubt there will be big changes ahead. I’m just glad I had the chance to spend some time wandering the huge, wild world before the theme-park signs go up.