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Originally Posted by UnchainedAcolyte  By the way, I hear early EQ was a total flop too, Neric. Did you play it? |
If March '99 counts then I did.
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One of the biggest fallacies in our culture lies in believing that individuals who are a part of something new, innovative, and/or successful can continue to be so unerringly. Every creator/innovator has flops. It doesn't matter who they are. Yet when those people stumble and don't deliver, everyone acts like the bottom fell out of existence.
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I always thought EQ was very innovative and there thousands of great ideas, but then I ran into the docs of Sojourn. Now I know that EQ is just a MUD clone set in a nice 3D world with pretty unique dungeon layouts. From the standpoint of pure game mechanics judging from the engine protocol in the chatbox, it seems the game never really left the MUD stage.
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Brad and Co had some great ideas about game mechanics, lore, and sphere design, some elements of which are a positive in VG's current state. The implementation fell flat. Brad is the conceptual guy, not the implementation guy. And he must be a heck of a salesman.
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That's exactly the problem, whenever Brad&Co tried to come up with something on their own, it flopped big time.
Yes, it is easier to be critical than to be correct, but all of this didn't come unexpected. People like me pointed out that the game will fail and mostly because of the reasons it did fail and it wasn't difficult to predict. I based my concerns on the shallow gameplay, the generic stereotypes and the total lack of life in their world while others claimed the engine was asking for too much hardware power. In the end, it's a mixture of both. People couldn't run it well and got bored on top of it.
I think Sigil should have hired people not only with experience, but also with common sense and the courage to voice their opinion. The way it worked out it seems to me that everyone in the company didn't want to interrupt Brad in his daydreams, so this whole project slowly but surely went down the drain.
This game is a model for mismanagement. Too much weight was put on meaningless details on not enough weight was put on the important things and worst thing of all is that nobody noticed it or refused to take notice until it was too late.
Don't get fooled by Brad's lame statements. If he had released it half a year later, the game wouldn't be much better, it would only contain more meaningless details.
