Originally posted by anduz

My worst release top 5 is:

Shadowbane

Anarchy online

Asherons Call 2

Vanguard

Starwars galaxies or World of Warcraft, can't decide.

 

Age of Conan is frankly miles ahead in terms of lacking content, game breaking bugs and general downtime. Not that Age of Conan is the perfect game, and I can definetly see how the relatively high system requirements, and how they ultimately put players on low end machines off the game, can be compared to vanguard.

How can WoW be in your top 5 worst releases?    The reason it had problems was because of server loads from too many players.    It had great word of mouth at release.   

Funcom would be popping champagne corks if AoC had half as good a release as WoW.

Originally posted by bverji

Originally posted by gestalt11

Originally posted by SignusM

Originally posted by gestalt11

Originally posted by Malickiebloo

Originally posted by gestalt11

Originally posted by Elsabolts

I believe because of the Hype by Funcom they new there game was not gonna be what was promised and decided to take advantage of that. Because of this i believe they will pay a bigger price.

 

I would agree with this, so in that sense they have a worse release.  But all in all VG still had a worse release.

You'd agree why , Unless you didn't know about Brad's 7 year plan ? Brad hyped the hell out of VG maybe even more so than funcom was guilty of .

Yes that is true.  But fortunately for VG all the blame goes on BMQ (well except for crazy people who blame SOE).

 

I am not trying to say  they both didn't partake of the same poison.  But due to certain details and change of ownership the attachment of blame is different.

 

And to be clear this sort of stuff this hyping to the point of lying and then not delivering it is poison.  It will eat away at a company's products.  The thing with VG is the non-crazies know that SOE just bought the game and that all the BS was on Sigil.  And many people blame Brad for what went on at Sigil.  So since Brad is gone and Sigil is no more and SOE has made real strides in trying to improve the game.  That poison is in a much lower dosage.

Very very false information here, mostly. The failure of Vanguards launch was mostly on SOE. Brad, was start raving mad, and the code for the game was done, and redone, poorly. BUT, SOE pushed the game out KNOWING it wasn't complete and killed a game that had limitless potential with the engine it was running.

As for whats going on now, SOE bought Sigil, and fired a few people. That's it. They're not fixing the game. Sigil is. The Vanguard thats having a second coming now is all because of the hard work of the SIGIL employees. 

 

Now Funcom, they released a crappy overhyped game and the entire company lied, not just one lunatic. They deleted posts, they left their NDA up the entire beta, they lied lied lied lied lied. Then they super polished one tiny section of the game just to save some face. At least Vanguard released with a full world that was fairly stabl

So let's get this straight.  Vanguard was originally published by Microsoft, not SOE.  After years of poor progress and mismanagment Microsoft drops it and takes a $30 million loss.

 

BMQ then shops around until he connes his old friend Smedley into investing in the VG.  They reach an agreement where SOE is not the publisher but only the Co-publisher with no input into development.  This agreement basically gives SOE the responiiblity of managing the hardware and give Sigil some further funding.

 

The craziness and mismanagment at Sigil goes on.  According to Smedly, tkae that for what its worth, he did not realize how badly off the state of the game. 

 

Soe declines to spend more money on something MS already dropped like a frigging rock and continue its history of mismanagement.  And further SOE has NO input on development so has no hope of VG actually being well managed.

 

And the state of VG's is all SOE's fault?

 

I underatnd that people hate SOE, that is fine.  But given the known history and timeline of Vanguard's development.  Are you really sure you want to persist in this?  I ask that because this really is not a matter of opinion, there is too much known about what went on for just flat out opinion.

 

You are basically saying that its SOE's fault that VG came out so bad because they should have acted like incompetent idiots.  That is simply unsupportable.

 

In fact buying vanguard was a rather stupid move.  They should have let Sigil go down the drain from a business point of view and cut their not so bad losses.  Rumor has it Smed was pretty pissed when he realized what he had actually bought.  If they had done that they wouldn't have lost nearly the amount of money Microsoft lost on the game.

 

SOE choose to release the game, knowing it was unfinished in order to gain money for very little investment. That is why it's SOE's fault. Seriously why is that so hard to follow. Reguardless of rather SOE mad the game or not, they chose to publish its release when the game should been simply dropped (which is what an ethical publisher would of done). Then Sigil could of either choosen to continue to work on it, self publish by download, or find a new publisher.

SOE did not force Sigil to release the game. SOE suggested it because Sigil was going out of business due to Brad McQuaid (CEO of Sigil) poor decisions.

You guys really need to learn what the role of a distrubution producer is. SOE didnt own Vanguard until Sigil realized they no longer could afford the game or its employees.

Had nothing to do with SoE releasing the game; Sigil released it. Soe forced nothing.

thats a hard call to make my free time runs out in a few weeks.

but from what i can see aoc is trying hard to be the worst

Vanguard definitely had a worse release.  However vanguard was a better game.

"I'm sure if they had the same budget and resources as Blizzard, they could have made a game just as good as WoW. "

Hell no, there's more to making a good game than just throwing money at the project. A crapload of money was spent on Vanguard, and look what happened there.

Sometimes the developers just plain suck (yea, its rude to say, but true), and have no idea how to make a fun game or even one with well thought out mechanics. Sigh

Originally posted by googajoob7

which game in your opinion had the most problematic release ?

VG gets the award for a worse release.

VG had a massive amount of content, even though quite a bit was cut pre-launch. So, percentage wise, VG had more 'working' features than AoC. With that said, the worst problems you can have are performance and stability issues, and VG had a lot for a long time.

Performance and Stability = AoC > VG

Functional Features and Content = VG > AoC

Dark and Light delivered the most epic fail of all times.VG was indeed in bad shape when it launched,people knew that though,instead AoC mislead people,deceived em using lots of cunning statagems.

While VG is getting better and better,i predict AOC due to its core design wont be able to change things like instancing for example(which annoys a lot of ppl),even if it gets smoother and more playable with less gamebreaking issues.

So to answer the question ..

VG < AoC on worse launch!

Vanguard had a worse release than AoC.

WoW had what I like to call: The Dark Winter.

In about January after the release, the games was great, more servers were up, and if you were willing to hit a lower pop server, you only had the inbalanced classes with no ORGANIZED PvP.

WoW did have a worse release than AoC, mainly because any/all MMO's should be able to learn from what happened to their predecessers.

Now they all get to learn from WoW, AoC, Tabula Rasa, LotRO...

I think Dark and Light probbaly had the worse launch as it died soon after. WoW had a vagualy good launch the only real problem was how many players wanted to play not really Blizzard's fault. Out of AoC and Vanguard? I voted AoC mainly because a bad launch is forgivable and can be fixed but when a bad launch is made by lying thats when you have to think. IMO Lotro has one of the best launchs a MMORPG has ever had the game wasn't riddled with bugs and it was stable not only that 6 weeks after it had a hude update.

I think game devolpers need to really check out their game before its out in the shops because another few months of fixing stuff and adding those few extra quests is whats going to gain you people to stay noy just buy the box.

Originally posted by gestalt11

Originally posted by bverji

Originally posted by gestalt11

Originally posted by SignusM

Originally posted by gestalt11

Originally posted by Malickiebloo

Originally posted by gestalt11

Originally posted by Elsabolts
........

 

SOE choose to release the game, knowing it was unfinished in order to gain money for very little investment. That is why it's SOE's fault. Seriously why is that so hard to follow. Reguardless of rather SOE mad the game or not, they chose to publish its release when the game should been simply dropped (which is what an ethical publisher would of done). Then Sigil could of either choosen to continue to work on it, self publish by download, or find a new publisher.

 

Yes it is very hard to understand that because it makes no sense.

 

SOE had no control of development they were not responsible for the release.  Why various people insist on thinking SOE is omnipotent and controls all things it is associated with is beyond me.

 

You are assigning power to SOE that it did not have.  You are simply wrong.  Sigil were the ones who released the game not SOE. 

 

How can you possibly believe that SOE is the one who controls whether a game they did not make and whose funding they did not control was released?

 

It is preposterous.

SOE doesn't have to pay for publishing a game (which is the releasing of a game ie. releasing it to the stores and into players hands.) if they don't feel its ready for market. That's why publishers have so much power. They pay for advertising, packaging, making cd's, shipping and who will sell it  is all done by the publisher. Every publisher put in mildstones and conditions that a developer must meet before they spend money to relese a game. SOE CHOOSE to release the game in the condition it was in. It is prepopostrous to believe SOE didn't know what the game was when they released it or that they didn't have the power to not release it. What do you think a publisher does? Do you think a publisher just releases anything a developer says is done? Is anyone really clueless enough to think this is the way the industry works? Not that hard to understand and should makes perfect sense to anyone using a little common sense.