14 DAY TRIAL // Brad McQuaid, the creator of the highly acclaimed WWII title released for the PS2 platform (and due to release for Nintendo's Wii), Medal of Honor: Vanguard, has made a rather surprising statement, regarding to the game's poor performance, admitting it was released rather soon, when there was clearly more work to be done on the game. Elysium, the author of Gamers with Jobs has also made a few remarks about EA's MoH Vanguard, although it is not a review, as he didn't get the chance to play it that long:
"Now that the game has released in its incomplete state, in a state that McQuaid himself describes as requiring patches, bug fixes and new feature implementation on par with a beta product, Sigil essentially comes to the consumer as the third investor in the process of the development cycle, and that is not just a terrible way of doing business, but an irresponsible step in the wrong direction for complicit consumers."
Medal of Honor has made a name in the game industry since the first implementation of it on a platform. In this last MoH title, users will be playing as a character named Frank Keegan, corporal of the 82nd Airborne Division, and lead soldiers into battle against the Nazi war machine. Vanguard's firefights will take place in a variety of European locations, from behind the lines of Nazi-controlled Germany to the rocky shores of Sicily. It is also said to provide players with an option to upgrade their weapons.
These aspects alone aren't enough to make a MMOG successful, and the game needed even more than that to live up to the series' name but apparently, the main reason for its premature release is the fact that the franchise had to be saved from bankruptcy. Not only is this a sad truth, but Elysium also reckoned that it sets up a really bad precedent:
"Let me put it bluntly, if a game is not ready for retail when the money runs out find another investor or shut the doors. We are customers, and the retail end of the industry is bad enough about not supporting incomplete or inoperable products without developers and publishers assuming we are investors in the development process. Your job as the industry is to create product, and then, and only then, we buy it."
Who would have expected this from an EA title? Not to mention that it's Medal of Honor: Vanguard we're talking about here.