[Lhon]

We know Brad has said that the MMORPG genre is in its infancy, and the most important thing is to bring in new customers and grow the genre. When Sigil started, EQ was the model MMORPG. Steady subscriber growth over a number of years, and good retention. It made sense to build on EQ's principles of character interdependancy, forced grouping, CRs, etc. a.k.a "the Vision".

Then WoW burst onto the scene and with 2 million subscribers and no indication of slowing growth it has redefined the genre. It has revealed that EQ was catering to a niche, and what were preceived as its strengths may have actually been inhibitors to its growth.

So if I were in Brad's shoes right now, I'd be aggressively tuning Vanguard towards casual gamers. Remove the death penalty, ensure soloing is rewarded, reduce interdependancy, flatten out the leveling curve, in general ratchet down the difficulty to make casuals able to succeed. I'd be watching the WoW forums and figuring out the common problems and complaints and addressing them in Vanguard.

With Microsoft backing and the potential for an uncontested audience on the Xbox360 platform, Brad and Sigil have an opportunity to go after a whole new set of players, the console gamers, who if anything are even more casual than PC gamers (note how EQ Online didn't have much success). Why squander that opportunity by only going after a small fraction of the players by targetting "core" players? They've got a graphics engine, models, content, and all the infrastructure. All that's left for beta is to really tune the game mechanics and content towards casuals.

But, wouldn't that piss off all the hardcore gamers who've been looking at Vanguard as the last, best hope for a hardcore game? Yeah, sure it would, but WoW has shown that pissing off that small niche really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Heck, I'm a one of those who would be pissed, but if I look at this logically I can understand why it would happen.