Biggest mistake I can see in regards to Vanguard is over-reaching, and trying to create too large of a world with too small of a team in too short of time. Whether you want to blame Sony/MS for pushing Vanguard out too soon, or McQuaid for biting off too much, well, I"m far too removed to speak accurately there.
As for how to avoid that, I"d imagine there"s some triage that could be done in advance. Such that the game can be considered reasonably complete without feature X fully implemented. I suppose WoW would be an example of this done properly. The raid game, and even the support and structure of 40-man raid groups at the start of WoW was far from adequate. My own class, paladin, had to deal with both buffing being ridiculous, and in some cases certain spells completely inable to work on raid members because they weren"t part of my 5-man group. I know atleast Divine Intervention (back when you had to be good to use it) did not work properly in raid groups, and I"m unsure about BoSalvation.
Even with problems like those, and I"m sure there were others, WoW was largely complete on release, and I gather it was pushed out by Vivendi, in probably a similar manner to Vanguard. I cannot really vouch for Vanguard, because my computer is far from the capability to run it. I may be projecting more problems onto Vanguard than are really there.
So that"s something I hope GMG can do, that Vanguard didn"t seem to do right, or do enough of. Plan to be late, and to have to cut things. And plan your design so that if you have to cut some features and content, then you can do it in such a way as to still have a playable, reasonably complete game.
As for how to avoid that, I"d imagine there"s some triage that could be done in advance. Such that the game can be considered reasonably complete without feature X fully implemented. I suppose WoW would be an example of this done properly. The raid game, and even the support and structure of 40-man raid groups at the start of WoW was far from adequate. My own class, paladin, had to deal with both buffing being ridiculous, and in some cases certain spells completely inable to work on raid members because they weren"t part of my 5-man group. I know atleast Divine Intervention (back when you had to be good to use it) did not work properly in raid groups, and I"m unsure about BoSalvation.
Even with problems like those, and I"m sure there were others, WoW was largely complete on release, and I gather it was pushed out by Vivendi, in probably a similar manner to Vanguard. I cannot really vouch for Vanguard, because my computer is far from the capability to run it. I may be projecting more problems onto Vanguard than are really there.
So that"s something I hope GMG can do, that Vanguard didn"t seem to do right, or do enough of. Plan to be late, and to have to cut things. And plan your design so that if you have to cut some features and content, then you can do it in such a way as to still have a playable, reasonably complete game.
