Comment – MMO Fallout

Brad McQuaid is seeking eight hundred thousand dollars via Kickstarter for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, and not everyone is falling over themselves to hand their money over. For many, the disastrous launch of Vanguard is still fresh on their minds, an event that is causing them to be less than confident in Pantheon’s prospects. One gamer, Clmeas left the following comment on a Kotaku article promoting the Kickstarter.

Microsoft gave him $40,000,000 to make Vanguard with almost absolute creative control and he still released an unfinished, buggy, POS of a game after 5 YEARS in development.

The comment garnered a response from McQuaid himself, noting some of the challenges that Vanguard faced in its development from internal and external sources.

Microsoft funded us to almost $30M, after which there was a regime change at Microsoft and virtually all of the people we had been working with disappeared. The new people didn’t want to make Vanguard… they really didn’t want to make an MMO at all, and if they were, they wanted a Wow-clone-beater. We broke away from them and I turned to SOE and got them to fund as much as they could. Unfortunately, it fell short of the 6 months we needed, and the game was released too early.

WoW came in around $80M and they took at least 3 years to develop it (probably more, but 3 years after they *announced* the game — I have a feeling they were already working on it).

Star Wars: The Old Republic took at least 3 years, had hundreds of people involved, and cost between $150M and $200M (no one really knows for sure except the publisher).

Anyway, just some numbers for perspective. In any case, Vanguard was released too early but if you go check it out now it’s a solid game. The world is underpopulated but beyond that I’m still very proud of what we accomplished.

It’s good to see that McQuaid is proud of what Vanguard has become. You can check out the Kickstarter for Pantheon here or follow the link on the side-bar.

(Source: Kotaku)

Good news everyone!

Normally I don’t report on website updates, but I feel that this is large enough to warrant a note. Generally MMO Fallout doesn’t get a lot of comments, and I think I’ve figured out why. As the folks from the Save City of Heroes group have pointed out, the Bad Behavior plugin I had installed when I transitioned MMO Fallout from a wordpress.com host to its own server (back in February), had been flagging real people as spam bots and not allowing them to post at all, and in some cases not even access the website. After some careful deliberation, I decided that Bad Behavior wasn’t doing its job, and the role of spam-detection has been handed over to Akismet full time.

I’ve been able to tweak the comment system to a much finer point than it was before, and have removed some limitations, and the experiment appears to be a success. Spam is still getting caught, but all comments should now be immediately approved by the system instead of requiring me to go through them by hand. As always, I try to keep the comment system as open as possible. There is no requirement to register, you don’t even have to fill out the username/email box.

This update actually went into effect last week before I left for Comic Con. I wanted to leave the comment system to itself for a few days to make sure everything was running smoothly before announcing anything.