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Perhaps, on reflection, Sigil Games might feel that putting the word "Saga" into the name was asking for trouble. Calling a game a "Saga" of anything, aside from inviting silly jokes about old age pensioners that don't play very well beyond England's shores, also practically guarantees that your development process will indeed become a Saga - a long, drawn out
and somewhat painful experience abounding with whispered half-truths and vague generalisations. Still - even given the number of misconceptions and conflicting views which exist on the topic of Vanguard, Sigil's developers can at least count themselves lucky that they avoided the "Forever" pitfall, eh?
Misconception Numero Uno, and possibly the single biggest communications nightmare facing Sigil, is the entirely understandable belief that Vanguard is a hardcore MMORPG,
designed for ultra-hardcore MMORPG players - the kind of people who turn up their noses at World of Warcraft for being "too casual", and who are colloquially known as "bottle-pissers" due to an often committed, yet rarely confessed, act of desperation during extremely long MMOG raiding sessions. Hey, it's a lifestyle choice, and if you're happy with that, then good luck to you - at least you're not doing anything genuinely odious, like buying Jimmy Carr DVDs. However tolerant we may pretend to be of the bottle-pissing masses, however, the fact is that if Vanguard was really designed to appeal to that market, the game would crash and burn instantly - there simply aren't enough truly hardcore MMOG fans out there to support an ambitious project like this, after all.
It's easy to see where the misconception came from, though. After all, the CEO of Sigil Games is Brad McQuaid; the president of the company is Jeff Butler. Both men were incredibly influential figures in the development of EverQuest, and McQuaid's name in particular is almost synonymous with the groundbreaking MMOG. And indeed, early on in development of Vanguard (we're talking way back
in the mists of 2002, here) Sigil did make a number of statements that seemed designed to appease the EQ playing demographic - comments about how they wouldn't water down the gameplay to give Vanguard a broader appeal, and so forth. Reports from very early betas seemed to confirm that while it may have headline features like the ability to buy houses and other property, or to craft sailing ships and scoot around the oceans on them, or realistic real-time weather effects, this still wasn't a game for the faint of heart. The majority of the right-thinking world, who were quite happy to consider themselves rather too faint of heart for most MMOGs, wrote Vanguard off as a curiosity for the hardcore.Whole New World
Then Blizzard burst onto the MMOG scene, and World of Warcraft happened. One has to wonder whether it's galling for industry veterans like Brad McQuaid or Ultima Online creator Richard Garriott to witness the success of World of Warcraft, a game which basically took the rule book they had written for the MMOG genre and rewrote entire sections of it, with one fell swoop recasting a genre most commentators believed had
a maximum market of half a million people as one where seven and a half million people could get on with just one game. Whether people like McQuaid ever felt a little chafed by WoW's success or not - Sigil's staff are certainly far too polite to ever express anything but the most heartfelt congratulations for Blizzard in interviews - the team behind Vanguard was
certainly not too proud to realise that the earth had just moved under their feet. Comments from beta testers - and changes in tune from the firm itself - show a major transition taking place for Vanguard in the wake of WoW's success, and the influence of Blizzard's behemoth is clear in the game as it stands today. Call it homage, call it pl