Vanguard: Saga of Heroes
Setting: Fantasy | Developer: Sigil Games Online | Release Date: January 30, 2007 | Discontinued: July 31, 2014 | Payment Model: Initially Pay2Play, then Free2Play from 2012
When the developers from Sigil Games set out to create a new MMORPG called Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, many genre fans immediately perked up. After all, many former creative minds from EverQuest were part of the team, including veteran Brad McQuaid.
The lead developer aimed to develop a next-generation online RPG that combined theme parks and sandboxes. The focus was on crafting, a class system with 15 archetypes, challenging dungeons, and a comprehensive housing system.
A bit of MMORPG history:
What went wrong? This ambitious MMORPG struggled from day one with countless technical issues, such as a huge number of bugs and exploits as well as performance problems. At a certain level, there was simply a lack of content. Entire features that the team had announced in advance were also missing.
Later, McQuaid admitted that they had to launch Vanguard in this unfinished state because the studio’s financial resources had run dry – the budget was reportedly about 30 million US dollars. It certainly didn’t help that the Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft was released shortly before launch.
When taking all that into account, it is remarkable that the servers were still online until July 2014. However, the executives at the publisher Sony Online Entertainment, who had secured the rights to the game in May 2007, didn’t invest much more to actually turn Vanguard into a functioning next-generation MMORPG.
By the way, there’s now a new MMORPG available on Steam in early access called Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, which was originally led by Brad McQuaid. Unfortunately, the developer passed away in November 2019, meaning he couldn’t finish his last MMORPG project.
