Warcry: While only a few months have passed since announce, it feels like so much longer. For those of us on the “outside” we eagerly await Vanguard and what you have to show us, and for those of you on the inside you slave away for 60+ hours a week trying to make your dream and ours as well into something tangible. If you could pick one thing to say that would describe your feelings on this project, what would it be?

Brad McQuiad:I think it would honestly be: both incredibly rewarding and also to-date exceeding even our highest expectations.

What we accomplished with ‘Thestra Online’, our playable alpha: you have a client/server MMORPG running on a series of servers at Sigil HQ and being logged into by both Sigil people locally as well as MSFT people from up in Washington (actually there’s two shards right now – an internal dev server that is more volatile (e.g. patched more often) and a test server). As of late March you can create characters, advance in both spheres (adventuring and crafting – keep in mind all characters can be a class in each sphere, with separate experience pools, skills, etc), gain experience, level up (and receive new skills and abilities when you do so), slay and loot an NPC, advance your skills through use, send tells/shouts/says/etc. (actually, we already have an IRC-like flexible multi-channel chat server up), group up, share experience, trade items, buy/sell items from NPC merchants, die with the death penalty we’ve been describing almost totally implemented (it already generates a corpse with your items which you can then go loot – only a few minor things missing at this point like corpse drag and such)… and probably a lot of other stuff I’m not thinking of at the moment. Anyway, I think for a team that averaged 17 or so people in size to do that in 18 months is simply unprecedented (and also ‘lean and mean’ – Microsoft has taken care of us with a nice budget, but we intend to use that money wisely and have the time to really take this genre forward – throwing people at a problem too early is not a mistake we’ve made).[More]