Vanguard: Saga of Heroes [PC]

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Brad and Jeff's Excellent Adventure

Brad McQuaid is the cool laid back one. He's reclining in the corner of the couch with his legs stretched in front of him and his arm flung out across the back. He doesn't move much. He looks vaguely like Tim Roth, but his voice has the lazy liquid intonation of Nicholas Cage.

Jeff Butler, on the other hand, is like the attack dog of the pair. For some reason, he's not sitting on the couch. There's plenty of room, but Butler is on the floor at McQuaid's feet. He looks ready to spring up. And sometime he does, to emphasize something he's saying. He's fond of pulling out his cell phone to make a point. He can get very earnest. The guys at Sigil played a joke on him one morning by changing his high level barbarian's character model into a willowy female fox. Butler seems like the kind of guy to get these jokes played on him.

It can be hard to get a word in edgewise. These two guys, who've worked together on Everquest and founded Sigil together, are like an old married couple. They cut each other off and finish each other's sentences. They're like a pair of in-sync buddies who went from being in the same group (Butler was probably the DM because McQuaid seems entirely too laid back to be looking up stuff in the Monster Manual) to running a 100-man business that Microsoft is fervently hoping will finally get them a respectable piece of that MMO pie.

Following are excerpts from an interview with them following their recent media blitz for Vanguard:

Yahoo! Video Games: Is the genre of MMOs, and maybe even RPGs in general, saturated with fantasy motif?

Brad McQuaid: World of Warcraft selling millions and millions of units in the last year or so kind of blew any saturation right out the back window.

YVG: Well, is it harder for you guys to stand out with a fantasy motif? Does it help or hurt you?

BM: Well, World of Warcraft's success has definitely helped. Using their good name and the quality of the product and their ability to market things and get distribution throughout the world and to appeal to all their RTS fans, they've grown the gamespace tremendously. They've done everybody who's in this industry a huge favor. We're still in our infancy as a genre. We don't look at other MMOs nearly as much as competition as we do, "Welcome to the club, we need all the help we can get." So, not at all.

Jeff Butler: I'd love to see another great trilogy of movies as compelling as Lord of the Rings.

BM: The rumor is that Peter Jackson is going to go back and do The Hobbit. I can't wait for him to do that. Have I had enough high quality fantasy? Heck no. That doesn't mean that we're not interested in sci-fi or what have you.

JB: I think the technology of representing these worlds, whether it's fantasy or sci-fi, keeps growing to such a degree, by leaps and bounds.

BM: We want a virtual world and we're so far away from the Holodeck.

JB: Knowing what will be out there five years or ten years from now, I'm pretty excited by all that stuff. It's like if they were to re-film I Love Lucy today, it really wouldn't be any different than it was before. It's not like the visual or storytelling experience is different. Sitcoms are pretty much the same sitcom over and over again. That's not true of the technology of video games. Literally on all fronts we're driving forward. There's lots more room for fantasy games and improvements on fantasy games. World of Warcraft 2, for instance.

BM: Yeah, we've barely even scratched the surface. There's so much more that we want to get out of these games that we won't be able to achieve until three, five, eight, ten years from now.

JB: That said, I want another sci-fi MMO.

BM: That's true. I mean, I have my list of all the MMOs I want to make, the different themes, you know? I'm not a huge sports fan, but I think someone's gotta come along and do an incredible online.

JB: EA Sports.

BM: A Madden or what have you. Just because all that's true doesn't lessen my desire to see high fantasy taken far above and beyond what's capable today.