www.bradmcquaid.com

"After the sale, Brad decided to take an extended break from games development and is currently pursuing his hobbies and spending time with friends and family. That said, as of late, he’s starting to get that itch again..."

I thought some may actually be interested seeing this.

oh good lord. I hope he just buys a cream for this new "itch" and stays far away from and MMO development.

Originally posted by Bodeus

oh good lord. I hope he just buys a cream for this new "itch" and stays far away from and MMO development.

Why, he single handedly created this genre' ..!

Vanguard is a great game, ATI/Nvidia and Microsoft didn't come threw on time for that game to perform respectively. I bought an 8800 and it ran Vanguard great.

Performance is what killed that game. Brad was too ambitious about the "realistic" style of VG. To me, that was the only mistake he made.  If he's getting back in the game, I'm going to contact him...   as I have a $12mil/month revenue game in my head! (gauranteed)

Damn, he'd have some balls to come back and try to helm a project.

I'd like to see it for the entertainment value alone, and not in a mean-spirited way. I wish him and everyone that survived Sigil well including Vanguard and its community, but naturally it'd be a fiasco worth watching. I mean one thing about him, a lot of the original founders of this genre come back and try to half-ass a new product built on their legacy, but Brad has enough cajones to throw triple A money down to the last dime towards what he believes in; flawed beliefs or not. 

Sometimes when you have nothing to lose and only up to go, that's the best time to do something.

Originally posted by Bodeus

oh good lord. I hope he just buys a cream for this new "itch" and stays far away from and MMO development.

MMO development should do just fine, can't that be something to be agreed upon. It's the company management skills that is subpar. He is the kind of a person that needs to have a boss, not be the boss.

What I find most interesting on that site was the "Made on a Mac" part.

Originally posted by sepher

Damn, he'd have some balls to come back and try to helm a project.

I'd like to see it for the entertainment value alone, and not in a mean-spirited way. I wish him and everyone that survived Sigil well including Vanguard and its community, but naturally it'd be a fiasco worth watching. I mean one thing about him, a lot of the original founders of this genre come back and try to half-ass a new product built on their legacy, but Brad has enough cajones to throw triple A money down to the last dime towards what he believes in; flawed beliefs or not. 

Sometimes when you have nothing to lose and only up to go, that's the best time to do something.

In a sense if he do come back and helm a new project that would deserver some credits of it's own. But maybe there is a better way to pursue his itch.

Please Brad, do not let Salim Grant/Silius work on your new project. He is the of death of creativity.

I don't really know *that* much about the VG saga, but I know enough to surmise that the fiasco was due to mismanagement and not meeting deadlines.

I find Vanguard - the game itself - utterly brilliant. If the 3D system wasn't so sucky and it was run by a business that wasn't equally sucky (SOE), it would be the ultimate current-day MMORPG, IMHO.

Most of us learn from our mistakes, hopefully if BM learned from the various mistakes made on VG I am extremely interested and excited to see what new game or concept may come next.

EDIT: I also found the "made on a mac" logo at the bottom of his page interesting. Probably put there by whoever he paid too much to design the page for him. Sigh, mac fanbois.

---

Originally posted by fortuente
EDIT: I also found the "made on a mac" logo at the bottom of his page interesting. Probably put there by whoever he paid too much to design the page for him. Sigh, mac fanbois.

---

He probably made it on a Mac himself using iWeb (or whatever it's called). Pretty sure that app sticks the "Made on a Mac" logo at the bottom by default.

I think that Brad is a great creative force and has a lot of good experience in MMO games.  He isn't however a good CEO or Manager as can be seen by sigil.  Hopefully he has grown from the experience and recognizes his limitations.  That said I'm excited to see him looking to get into a new project.  He loves designing games and is very pasionate about it.

No investor in their right of mind would give him another $30mil to make another title.  Now, if he's willing to shed some ego and step down a notch to settle with the title "producer" or executive creative designer, then I have no doubt people will still give him a chance.

Vanguard was a story of lost money and time for investors all around.  Not many people get a second chance because what happened to Sigil/Vanguard will always be on his resume.

I hope he returns the fold and uses his many talents and abilities to produce an epic game.  I am actually playing Vanguard right now (free time), and I think it is a great game.  In fact, I think it is a shame it was released in the condition it was.

I am a firm believer in using your God-given talents.  Always do your best.  Life has ups-and-downs.  I was just reading in the Wall Street Journal today about how gaming sales continue to decline.  I have been in business a fairly long time, and I have seen great successes that were unanticipated and great failures that were unanticipated.  You try to plan, prepare, analyze, and so forth . . . but there are always unseen factors.

If anything, I suspect he has learned a great (great) deal from Vanguard.  Speaking for MYSELF, I have learned more from my failures and mistakes in life than my successes. 

Brad's vision (tm) of game design was always right.

He saw everything that was going wrong with modern anti social solo quest grinders a long time ago, well before the current zeigeist of thinking, and he was shouted down for it because his thinking wasnt in line with the fashion of the time.

A lot of things went wrong with VG's development, Sigil as a company, and Brad's life at the time, there is no denying that at all, and the game obviously needed more then he was capable of giving it as a project leader, but that has nothing to do with his core ideas and philosophy of game design.

Now it has matured VG from a technical PoV it is, imo, the best traditional fantasy co-op mmorpg out there, bar none. That to my mind stands as vindication of what he stood for.

If I ran a dev house I would be glad to have Brad on board as a Creative Director.

Originally posted by Mardy

No investor in their right of mind would give him another $30mil to make another title.  Now, if he's willing to shed some ego and step down a notch to settle with the title "producer" or executive creative designer, then I have no doubt people will still give him a chance.

Vanguard was a story of lost money and time for investors all around.  Not many people get a second chance because what happened to Sigil/Vanguard will always be on his resume.

Brad's problem is the same faced by Raph Koster and Richard Garriott.

The people most qualified to make the game are not the people most qualified to run the company that makes the game.

And the people who run the company think that gives them the experience and expertine to shape the game.

Originally posted by vesavius

Brad's vision (tm) of game design was always right.

He saw everything that was going wrong with modern anti social solo quest grinders a long time ago, well before the current zeigeist of thinking, and he was shouted down for it because his thinking wasnt in line with the fashion of the time.

A lot of things went wrong with VG's development, Sigil as a company, and Brad's life at the time, there is no denying that at all, and the game obviously needed more then he was capable of giving it as a project leader, but that has nothing to do with his core ideas and philosophy of game design.

Now it has matured VG from a technical PoV it is, imo, the best traditional fantasy co-op mmorpg out there, bar none. That to my mind stands as vindication of what he stood for.

If I ran a dev house I would be glad to have Brad on board as a Creative Director.

I couldn't have said it better myself. His visionary work has always been dead on with the wishes of this player. It's a shame what happened to VG which could have been a great sequel to EQ. Something EQ2 never was.

A lot can be said about the man but his vision for the genre is most welcome in these trying MMORPG times.

Originally posted by vesavius

Brad's vision (tm) of game design was always right.

He saw everything that was going wrong with modern anti social solo quest grinders a long time ago, well before the current zeigeist of thinking, and he was shouted down for it because his thinking wasnt in line with the fashion of the time.

A lot of things went wrong with VG's development, Sigil as a company, and Brad's life at the time, there is no denying that at all, and the game obviously needed more then he was capable of giving it as a project leader, but that has nothing to do with his core ideas and philosophy of game design.

Now it has matured VG from a technical PoV it is, imo, the best traditional fantasy co-op mmorpg out there, bar none. That to my mind stands as vindication of what he stood for.

If I ran a dev house I would be glad to have Brad on board as a Creative Director.

Yes!

He has to let other people have creative lease on his vision(TM).

Originally posted by Urael

www.bradmcquaid.com

"After the sale, Brad decided to take an extended break from games development and is currently pursuing his hobbies and spending time with friends and family. That said, as of late, he’s starting to get that itch again..."

I thought some may actually be interested seeing this.

Maybe he do it better this time.

For me, just the fact that he had a certain vision was enough to give him props.

So many people do by-the-numbers work in games that seeing someone look at all the different aspects from an overarching perspective, a sense to how those traditional pieces come together is becoming increasingly rare. I appreciated the drive. 

Granted, I did not think the vision for Vanguard was groundbreaking when compared to Everquest, but it still was an effort for the refinement of many ideas that drove EQ. And while Vanguard is now not exactly true to the initial vision in its particulars, it still has that certain appeal that keeps players like me coming back to it now and again.

And something else: Creators are usually remembered by their masterpieces and not their failures. That's because failure happens very often in creative work. I also would agree it's really how you learn, so you should just gather the resolve to shrug it off and keep on so that you can get back to the good stuff :) 

What I've never gotten is the claim that Brad's a bad manager/CEO and that was his only fault.

It seems to me that business was the only part he largely got right; tens of millions of dollars in investment, Microsoft and Sony as publishers during two different periods, independent investments in-between those two, four or five years of development plus and the game still made it out of the door.

You gotta account for his business successes, which all totaled to ":the second most expensive MMO ever" as he called it.

Brad was a great business man. When someone is the utmost creative authority within their company with five some years to spend 30 million dollars and a bad product is produced, well I'd personally probably examine how good of a designer he is rather than his business knack.

Brad needs to stay retired.  Too many stories of explicit office affairs, mismanagement, missing CEOs, and drug abuse.  Ask anyone at Sigil and they will tell you they never seen Brad after the SOE acquisition and that was May 2006.  The game went Gold in Jan 07.  Brad got lucky with EQ1 and it was a great game no doubt, but I wouldn't give him a penny for any new titles.