Sigil to have closer relationship relationship with Sony
by Nick Doerr 
{ May 1st 2007 at 4:30PM }
Isn't love great? Sigil games online, makers of the semi-popular Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, have noticed that their not doing as well as they initially thought. In fact, they've come to the point that Sigil's CEO, Brad McQuaid, has admitted that Sony Online Entertainment is thinking about taking the extra step and acquiring the company. He said that in the acquisition, "SOE is going to be getting more involved with Sigil and Vanguard - our relationship is going to become even tighter - much tighter, [so that the game can] both continue to be worked on and improved and debugged and optimized."Vanguard isn't reaching mass-market appeal for a variety of reasons, says McQuaid. One is the marketing campaign -- the game doesn't require as much team effort and time as, say, Everquest. This wasn't explained very well. Also, the specs requirement were too high for early January 2007. He thinks a re-launch would be the best, with a new campaign and tweaked system. How will they do that? If Sigil gets funded and supported. Thus, the Sony Online Entertainment talks. Will we see Vanguard coming to the PS3? Who knows. We'll keep on this, since acquisitions are great.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Sport @ May 1st 2007 5:12PM
How ironic.
Brad McQuaid left SOE because he wasn't happy with the way the Everquest franchise was handled. Leaving a company to get more freedom just to sell your new company to your old boss. Kinda funny really
Andir3.0 @ May 1st 2007 7:34PM
No Vanguard on the PS3 unless they get around the fact that the Game uses the DirectX version of the Unreal engine and they practically stripped it of anything OpenGL in the process. The aquisition will mean the game gets more refined and SOE programmers step in a bit more than normal. That's about all I see out of this. I beta tested from phase 2 up and they pretty much stated that no console versions would be put out. (Though the game rings in just shy of 20G and would be a good fit on the BluRay disc. But there are far more issues at stake than content size.)
Not only that, but the game isn't really made with controllers in mind. An early version of the combat system was, but it was scrapped for the cookie cutter combat n every MMO.
GRT @ May 1st 2007 8:47PM
Yeah, we'll see Gears of War on the PS3 before we see Vanguard on it. If Vanguard even survives. How many years was it in development? And it has what? 100,000 subscribers?
Too bad, because there were some decent ideas there, but it was just released much too early.