Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) Involvement
On May 5, 2006 Sigil announced that they had reacquired marketing rights from Microsoft and that Sony Online Entertainment would take over marketing of the game. According to the terms of the deal, Sigil would maintain full control of development, funding, intellectual property rights, and in-game customer service, and SOE would be responsible for marketing, publication, distribution, subscription services and maintenance of game servers. However, some of SOE's game designers and artists did participate directly in the Vanguard's development.
This partnership represented a homecoming of sorts for Sigil CEO Brad McQuaid who was - along with Sony Online Entertainment CEO John Smedley, Bill Trost and Steve Clover—one of the four original developers of Everquest for SISA (Sony Interactive Studios America renamed Verant Interactive in 1999).
On May 15, 2007 Sony Online Entertainment announced they had acquired all assets of Sigil and retained over half the developers of Vanguard to work for Sony and to continue developing Vanguard. Brad McQuaid gave an interview two days later to F13.net but since then has not made any public comments about the game .
Dec 22 2009, in a recent announcement to the Vanguard community, the team has decided to be as frank as possible and outline the road map for the game in the year ahead. Due to limited resources and a new focus on bug elimination over ambitious content releases, some of the game's anticipated updates are being shelved indefinitely. Those features include the Halls of Shattered Souls, Pankhor Zhi, Nexus, and the anticipated "alternate advancement" system.
The new roadmap includes an increased focus on smaller content releases occurring more frequently. In essence, the game is trading from a slow development cycle with large chunks of content to a faster development cycle with small bites of content. This new system will have an emphasis on longer test cycles of smaller batches of content to eliminate bugs while the content will start and end chunks of storytelling instead of leaving the story hanging.
The road map also includes plans for a hypothetical server merge to bring the community together, but lead developer Salim "Silius" Grant made sure to stress that the server merge is not set in stone at this time. The team wants to take the time to weigh the positives and negatives of merging the servers in order to make a sound decision.
Read more about this topic: Vanguard: Saga Of Heroes
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