Poll: Was Brad Mcquaid Overrated?

[WokeCat]

Originally Posted by magnetaress [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Shameful

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head almost exploded just now

[magnetaress]

Loramin is now up there too. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[loramin]

Originally Posted by magnetaress [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Loramin is now up there too. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

It's less specific commentary on him in particular, and more my experience in software development in gneral. I don't actually know enough of what it was like to work under Aradune to say anything specifically about him.

However, I believe anyone at the top is "overrated": they are only barely more responsible for the final product than the tons of other people working on it, and often enough the people at the top's contribution was to make things worse, not better.

[magnetaress]

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

It's less specific commentary on him in particular, and more my experience in software development in gneral. I don't actually know enough of what it was like to work under Aradune to say anything specifically about him.

However, I believe anyone at the top is "overrated": they are only barely more responsible for the final product than the tons of other people working on it, and often enough the people at the top's contribution was to make things worse, not better.

Back then was different. He was not a rich executive he failed at that actually.

Vanguard was awesome. It's a shame they didn't get better funding. Where pushed to develop too fast. Didn't have the tools and experience of developers today.

It was too ambitious. Half as many starter races and classes in development with the design for the rest to be added in expansions would have helped.

[WokeCat]

I think Vanguard got a really super unfair take too. I upgraded my computer to play it... and when it finally came out I was super excited. I'm pretty sure I had been playing WoW for a bit at this point, and as soon as I was in Vanguard I started having flashbacks from EverQuest.

It was like I was finally "home" after being severely disappointed by EverQuest 2. But then I started to notice major frame-rate issues. This was back in the day, you didn't really shop online, you actually drove around to various "computer" stores trying to find upgrades for your computer. I think I upgraded everything, and the game still ran terribly.

I remember seeing in magazines about how if you had a $6,000 NorthWest computer, the game would run amazing, but I just couldn't bring myself to squeeze the trigger. Apparently everyone had this same problem, so the game was mostly unplayed by the majority of us who tried it at launch.

I asked a friend who actually did get to experience Vanguard if it was similar to EverQuest, or at least as good, and his response was that it was a million times better and that the loot system and dungeons were extremely inspired by EQ 1, but also way more exciting.

I take what he said fairly seriously because he is a YouTuber whose EQ videos regularly get over 5k views. He not really a casual person, and he still stands by those statements.

[Danth]

Originally Posted by WokeCat [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I remember seeing in magazines about how if you had a $6,000 NorthWest computer, the game would run amazing, but I just couldn't bring myself to squeeze the trigger.

I had a newer, but average-quality PC and it ran Vanguard decently enough that performance was not a serious complaint. I think the issue was more a case of poor optimization and hardware/drivers: If you happened to have a system basically similar to what they did their very limited tuning for, you were okay-ish, otherwise, it was touch-and-go. A lot of folks with nominally superior computers to my own reported crippling performance issues.

I don't think Vanguard is unfairly maligned--it did have a great many problems, after all. I do think that under the mountain of problems there was a good game hidden in there. That being said, I also think there's an element of "wrong game at the wrong time." Vanguard was something of an anti-WoW trying to release right at the peak of Warcraft's popular growth phase. Even if VG had been complete and stable, I expect it would not have done all that well commercially just due to the timing.

As for McQuaid, his most important skills were on the PR and promotion side of things. He was very good at drumming up interest and corporate support, at least until Vanguard turned into a fiasco. The idea of 3D MUDs was not a new idea in the mid 90's--dang near anyone who had logged onto such games imagined sticking them in a realtime/3D environment--but not many people could convince major corporations to bankroll such a project.

Danth