SOE acquires Vanguard team

Here's a post from Nino, one of the good guys at Sigil:

"There is much I would love to unload about right now, but seeing as I am feeling pretty emotional while trying to respect the wishes of remaining Vanguard management, I will refrain.

I knew this was coming months ago, as did most others, so I made arrangements prior to the whole unfolding of events today. Sony was kind enough to invite me and a few others to form a small team and to start prototyping a 'new' project. While we've done some 'secret' preliminary work, we begin in earnest tomorrow after we officially sign on with SOE. Don't bother asking about details, because you won't get any.

I became increasingly disenfranchised with the situation since the forced premature launch, which then culminated several weeks back when I decided I could not, in good conscience, continue serving the Sigil management staff in my over-extended capacity and stepped down. I would have walked away completely if this recent opportunity had not presented itself when it did.

I did the best I could with the time and resources I had at my disposal, but in the end it simply wasn't enough to bring the game up to the standards we all had hoped for in the time we had remaining. I apologize for any disappointments players have experienced. During the final year, I was pulling 80-100 hour weeks, and I was not at all alone in the building. I wish things could have been different.

While I was fortunate to stay employed, there were near 50 people today who were not, and it was painful watching the procession of stunned coworkers packing their belongings into little cardboard boxes with blank looks on their faces. I've never had to endure something like this, and I hope to never have to do it again. I know it is easy to point fingers at 'why' things ended up this way, but the vast, vast majority of the folks losing their jobs today had very little control on how events unfolded and many were skilled and creative people who simply wanted to make a great game.

The Vanguard team, obviously now much smaller, will go back to improving and fixing the game tomorrow. Myself and four others will be moving to a new location and beginning anew. The others will begin the process of trying to find a new place to work.

I promised not to be publically scornful, but I will say this: I hope those truly responsible for the deep rooted failings of the company lay in bed tonight and relive the events that transpired today in their heads, over and over. For not ONE of you is without your job come tomorrow morning"

[BTW he's talking about Brad McQuaid and Jeff Butler in that last paragraph]

I think that they were fired, then SOE re-hired most of them.

edit: What I want to know is, why are they keeping McQuaid, who is alleged to have not bothered himself to come into work for the last 5 months? A 'vision' means fuckall if you can't be bothered to avail your programming team of it.

There's a gem of an interview over on f13.net

"Ex-Sigil: We gave demos to high-level Microsoft people frequently. These demos were often just dog and pony shows where content was created specifically for the demo. There was no intention that this content ever be used in game. When you spend 30+ million on a project, you want to see results. They became more and more suspect as time went on, and more and more people got involved. Though, they were mostly just oversight. They never sent anyone down here to actually work on the project.
...
f13.net: Then when did Microsoft grow suspicious that they weren't going to get an actual product out of Sigil?

Ex-Sigil: When they started testing it themselves.

f13.net: Or rather, talk about how and when things started going downhill.

Ex-Sigil: Tt's hard to say really, management never communicated stuff like that to us. Often times I feel like they told us more spin and nonsense then they told the public.

f13.net: So management kept everyone in the dark as much as possible?

Ex-Sigil: Completely."

and so on.

Terrible state of affairs. I'm sad to hear this sort of thing coming out of the industry, reminds you what a truly shit business it can be and what the pazazz really boils down to - a charade.

why do you keep writing those stupid gamesindustry.biz sentences at the bottom

I believe that SOE fired the guys mostly in Marketing and some production work because as they say ' teams naturally get smaller once the product is out there'

I'm not certain which one (McQuaid or Butler) but they have taken up a 'Creative Director' role

I know i'm in a minority here but I've plyed VG since launch and am still playing it now. (It's a very lonely server this morning I can tell you!)

I can't say I'll bother continuing a subscription unless in the next few days there is a very good roadmap released for all to see what they plan on doing with the code.

Shame, because there is a great game in there under all the problems.

I have VG but I'm finding it a real hard game to get into. I can see something nice under there, but after my free month if I haven't broken through to that sweet spot, what reason would I have to continue playing the game?

That said, I'm still trying to find a class I'll enjoy playing.

Shame. I gave Vanguard a decent review on Amazon UK, not that many liked it! Truth is though the game wasn't different enough to Everquest 2 , World of Warcraft and the rest nor did it have the branding of Lord of the Rings Online or Warhammer or Conan. Even if it had been a great game from the off, it would have been squeezed by those heavyweights.

I had such high hopes for Vanguard years ago when it was first announced. Now that SOE have eaten it it'll always be a second-rate EQ2 clone.