When I say dishonorable I meant that it was too embarrassing or damaging for the details to be shared outside those close to him and his loved ones. If he died in a car accident, a stroke or cancer then it would've been mentioned in an obituary somewhere. The reality is he was once again at the helm of a project in another studio and for word to get out that he died due to yet another relapse, it would've hurt said project and his lasting image.
I also remember far too well how horribly he managed Sigil as the CEO just 16 years ago and all the drama that spurred including devs who were fired out in the parking lot when the studio collapsed accusing him of being absent for months on end and not even being there when everyone was fired. If you have massive internal issues dealing with drug addiction as a head of a studio, than you need to step aside and appoint someone else early on and not just wait for shit to hit the fan costing over a hundred people their jobs.
Glad you didn't, saved yourself from losing a few grand. Vendor PC's are overpriced usually with shoddy proprietary hardware connecting it all. Basically paying a premium for the GPU, CPU, and possibly a monitor if it was included. If this was in early 2007, what made it cost so much was probably because it had something like Core 2 Extreme X6900 which was a $1200 CPU at launch along with a set of high end SLI/Crossfire GPU's.
Though tossing hardware at a game isn't a be all solution. It all depends how the game was programmed and if the hardware would be fully utilized for the game instead of diminished or bottlecapped. When EQ2 came out, much of its processing came from a single core CPU and barely any rendering came from the GPU, then the slower multi core CPU's came out by 2006 and the game was perpetually ran by many in a mid-tier settings for years to come for a smooth solid frame rate. If I recall; the major issue with how Vanguard ran was because while it was on the Unreal 2.5 engine, it lacked the usage of the Unreal scripting language that was built inside of the engine. It was basically all spaghetti code. It's one of the reasons why a proper bonafide emulation has yet to manifest. And it's the very reason why the game had such high requirements despite its visuals being a mixed bag. That was just one of many problems with the game though. It was in a pre-alpha stage and nowhere close to being finished.
Yet regardless of this, being a 17 year old who was super hyped for this game, purchasing the pre-order for the $100 Collectors Edition a month before launch and playing its Jan 2007 disastrous beta, I held on up until April in the vain hope that it would turn around. It didn't. And it's a shame since deep down somewhere could've been a good game. It had great music and some state of the art particle effects implemented at the time such as volumetric clouding, and a solid atmosphere to the entire game, but it would've costed them to remake the games code from scratch to get said good game out of it. Last videogame I ever really hyped, and left me a little wiser to never do such a thing again nor pre-order until reviews of a game came out.
And here's an archived post on the Fire of Heavens board back in Jan 2008 by a former Sigil developer who was laid off. Now this is a major flashback.
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01-02-2023, 12:30 AM
Hybrid Mode
