Sony Online Entertainment Purchases Vanguard

The rumours have been around for months now, but Tuesday Sony Online Entertainment confirmed that they had purchased Vanguard and Sigil Games Online from its investors. Nearly everyone on the Sigil team was laid off with around 50% of the outfit slated to be hired back, so that work can continue on the Massively Multiplayer Online Game. The game will continue running under the auspices of SOE, as announced by company CEO John Smedley in a forum post on Tuesday. Rumours that Brad McQuaid (keeper of the Vision behind Vanguard) has not seen been in Sigil's offices since last year has only exacerbated fan reaction to this announcement. It remains to be seen if SOE can undo the damage that the last five months have done to the Saga of Heroes community, and the game itself.

Comments

Rootkit anybody?

[TheRealAnonymousCowa]

So from now on, we can see rootkits being installed along with Vanguard?

Re:Rootkit anybody?

[fistfullast33l]

Note by your lack of modpoints that no one finds that funny anymore. Try a Soviet Russia joke next time.

Re:Rootkit anybody?

[cthellis]

In Soviet Russia, the rootkits install Sony!

Re:Rootkit anybody?

[FunkThompson]

Actually, it shows +4 Funny to me. But it wasn't funny. You people are weird.

Bad Game

[Tridus]

The supporters of this game like to go on about "the vision" and Brad, and how that makes it good. In fact I saw one review give it an 8/10, while admitting that the game in its current state was flat out awful. The reason for the 8? Because of Brad, and that at some point it'd be good.

Without going into "the vision" or any of that stuff, the game as it stands right now simply isn't any good. Performance is its biggest problem, most people's machines simply can't play it effectively. Sorry folks, the market of people who buy new gaming rigs every six months isn't big enough to support a MMO.

Blizzard figured that out, and now they have a license to print money. Vanguard's makers didn't figure it out, and now they get a one way ticket to being dumped on Station Pass with a bunch of other games.

Re:Bad Game

[0123456]

Well, Vanguard as planned had a lot of potential; unfortunately they planned far more than they could deliver. Even the version they released was great fun up to the teen levels, but then the compulsory grouping to access much of the content turned it into a boring grind for casual players who just want to log on for short periods and get something done.

I agree about the performance though; I logged on for the last time at the weekend before unsubscribing and my PC would chug and thrash the hard disk for a couple of seconds every ten seconds while I was running around. OK, it's not the most modern system ever, but it has a 3GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM and a 7800 card, there's no justification for performance that poor.

Re:Bad Game

[Targon]

Back in the days of EQ, there was always a lot of talk about Brad's vision for the game. The reality was that the game was static with new paid expansions being required for any change. The idea that the world was alive was garbage due to the world never being updated except for the expansions and the VERY rare "free new zone". After several years, the idea that Brad had a vision worth implementing seemed foolish in light of the reality of the way the game was designed.

Now, you want vision, how about a world where the monster population would grow over time, and where the lives of the NPCs go on, with a script for changes in the lives of the NPCs that will happen if the players don't interfere? That's the sort of vision that would make for a better game. Oblivion has the problem where nothing changes or happens unless the player is there. I am more of a fan that life in any game, single player or MMO, TIME should update what is going on in the game world. NPCs who are in love will eventually get engaged, they may break up or they will get married. Children may or may not happen, but all of these things should go on without the need for the player to be there to get involved.

Now, there will obviously be changes caused by the player(players) in "My vision" of a good game world. The players can get involved in the events, and if they do, the outcome might change. So you have these little RP quests going on, where you can either help or hurt the people involved(depending on alignment). If you kill an NPC, that NPC stays gone, and the people that NPC knows will mourn their loss, and either hate you or look more favorably on you. The NPC reactions and day to day might also change as a result. What's more, by having scripts for "if this then that" and having many options for the NPCs, they really can have full lives. The key to this is that every game day at 3:30am or so, there is a "loading screen", which will update the AI for the towns based on the events. Mobs would also fall into this category where mobs would have a life cycle, and that life cycle would include being born, growing up, finding a mate, food, etc.

Now, all of this really wouldn't be THAT hard with modular NPC AI(where old "what if" scripting is pruned, and the devs put in new life events into the people. A default set for babies/children could also be auto-generated without being too complicated. But, I havn't heard of any developer looking at how to make an MMO that isn't based entirely on fighting/magic/crafting as a way to have fun. How about just going from small town to town as a bard, meeting people and having fun. No combat, but just "living the life"? Roleplaying, and how to add roleplaying to an MMO should be seen as the next true "next generation" MMO. The AI doesn't even need to be THAT advanced to make it fun, look at Baldur's Gate 2 and how you CAN have long-term interactions with party members. Now, expand that to an MMO setting and give the player more choices. It may be multiple choice roleplaying, but Planescape: Torment showed you can have a lot of different ways to play.

Eye candy is only one part of having "a vision", but if that vision doesn't include making the world feel alive, it will never be a true "next generation", because there will always be a "grind" just to have fun.

Re:Bad Game

[0123456]

The problem with world-changing events in an MMO is that everyone wants to be there when it happens; the players who were at work when the demon army invaded (or whatever) will be pissed that they missed the phat lewt drops when they're paying the same as the people who were home at the time.

That's one of the reasons why MMOGs have to be limited compared to single-player games. In a single-player game you're one adventurer (or a small party) in a world full of monsters and normal people, in a MMOG you're one of a bazillion adventurers in a world where almost everyone is an adventurer.

Just imagine, for example, a LOTR MMO where only one person could ever do the 'Ring Quest', or a Star Wars MMO where only one person could ever blow up the Death Star. Don't you think most players would be pissed?

Re:Bad Game

[Tridus]

That sounds interesting, but I find these types of ideas always run into problems when random asshats show up. Some jerk levels a character, then goes in and murders an entire village worth of NPCs.

Now what?

Re:Bad Game

[faloi]

but then the compulsory grouping to access much of the content turned it into a boring grind for casual players who just want to log on for short periods and get something done.

The sad thing is... People have been telling Brad this for years. It was the big reason a lot of people got fed up with Everquest, and is a huge reason Blizzard claims millions of subscribers. Back when EQ was king, there really wasn't another choice. People that liked MMORPGs continued to play it because it was all there was. People have seen MMORPGs that play a little differently now, and they happen to prefer that by huge numbers.

Re:Bad Game

[wolfing]

I totally disagree. In fact, the reason why I'm not playing is quite the contrary of what you mention. Since it's so easy to solo, nobody groups. My lvl 32 *healer* spends day after day trying to find a group, and all I see is people soloing. Definitely not what I thought Vanguard would be. Vanguard's main problem was actually listening to the forum posts. Because of vocal minorities (as always), the game changed swings so many times during its alpha and beta, that it never really had time to be tested or polished. Complete class remakes and whole regions were done even just a couple of days before the game went live, without any chance of testing them.

Re:Bad Game

[Tridus]

Thats a lack of leadership. A lot about Vanguard's failure can be explained if you listen to the reports coming out now that Brad (CEO of Sigil and the "vision" guy) stopped coming to the office six months ago.

Class remakes at the last minute are caused by a lack of leadership and focus, not listening to the community.

Re:Bad Game

[0123456]

"Since it's so easy to solo, nobody groups."

Which is odd, because I've hardly seen a solo quest since level 12. Sure, I could grind, grind, grind killing the same damn mobs over and over and over, but I got bored of that crap years ago.

Re:Bad Game

[poot_rootbeer]

Vanguard as planned had a lot of potential; unfortunately they planned far more than they could deliver.

I agree. It was overly ambitious of them to design a game that accomplished horizontal AND vertical scrolling on hardware as primitive as the Atari 2600; as a result they had to cut corners on enemy AI, leaving it nothing more than "stop, wiggle, proceed".

Re:Bad Game

[LocoMan]

I don't think I've ever said this... but I wish I had mod points... aaah.. the memories (that was my first videogame ever on an atari 5200 that came with vanguard, pac man and moon patrol).. :)

Re:Bad Game

[garylian]

I think you are partly correct.

It's a two part equation. First, a whole lot of players are not into the whole grind thing. They weren't that into it in EQ1, but it really was the only good game out at the time.

But, Brad set out to create a game for the hard-core player initially. A large majority of his early beta testers were people wanting a harder EQ1, with greater penalties and more enforced raiding. Those testers were VERY vocal, and Brad was happy to listen to them. By the time he pulled his head out of his ass and started listening to more moderate folks, too much damage had been done to be quickly undone.

You would have thought he would have looked at EQ2, and seen the revisions SOE had to make to get folks playing again. I played that game for 2 months shortly after it came out, only so I could hang with some of my EQ1 friends. The game was just plain awful. It made things difficult just to be difficult. Access quests. Corpse Recovery. Not enough solo content or small guild content. And it suffered badly. After a year or so of dropping subscriptions, SOE started to make it more palatable.

Now, I would rank EQ2 ahead of WoW for pure fun and entertainment. Sure, there is still raid content, but you can solo just about any class to 70 if you want to. My wife and I have duo'ed a paladin/warden combo to 57 with only a few groups along the way, and haven't felt like we have missed out on much. I've found EQ2 to now be very "casual friendly". Heck, two guys duo'ed a paladin/ranger combo into the 60's.

Our small guild has had 3 people recently bored with WoW come over, and their eyes are as big as saucers playing EQ2. Sure, it isn't as colorful as WoW, but there is so much more to see/do, and so many class variations to play, that they are hooked.

I think the first thing SOE is going to do is to start making things not be so hard in V:SoH. The game was broken by design by Brad. It's time for someone to fix it.

Re:Bad Game

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. It was overly ambitious of them to design a game that accomplished horizontal AND vertical scrolling on hardware as primitive as the Atari 2600; as a result they had to cut corners on enemy AI, leaving it nothing more than "stop, wiggle, proceed".

What exactly do you have against wiggling?

No wonder you were marked as a troll, trying to start a wiggle war of all things.

I for one will have no part in it.

Re:Bad Game

[wolfing]

Oh there are plenty of areas with lots of solo quests. You can do solo quests all the way up to max level if you want. I recommend googling for vanguard leveling guide or something. There is one I read written by a necromancer who did just that (solo from 1 to max), and tells you where to go for solo content for all level ranges. It's pretty good if soloing is your thing. In my case, since grouping is my thing, I was screwed.

Re:Bad Game

[wolfing]

I totally agree. The problem I guess is that people complained and joked about EQ1's "Vision" and Brad didn't want to repeat that, so they kept changing things in Vanguard according to what the testers said, which imho was their worst mistake. We all know 90% of the posts are made by 10% of the people, so it was this 10% who kept changing the direction of the ship, until it didn't have any more time to steer away from the cliffs and crashed.

Re:Bad Game

[Wyrd01]

I would love to have that level of Artificial Life going on in a game, but it just wouldn't work in an MMO. Griefing is real part of MMO life. There will always be some kid, or some guy who had a bad day at work, or just a plain old jerk who wants to log into the game and make other people suffer for their amusement.

You'd inevitably have some group go through an entire town and kill every single NPC "just for fun"... then what? That town is just a ghost town now? That might be kind of cool, but what happens when every town in the game becomes a ghost town?

Even now in WoW a group of high level characters can go to a lower level zone, kill off all the quest givers in an area, and make it impossible for the low level players to finish their quests or get new ones in that zone. If those NPCs stayed dead then I predict the game itself would follow shortly after it.

Re:Bad Game

[Anonymous Coward]

Well Sony customers are used to buying things based on "potential" and empty promises (where's my PSP online store, Sony?) so Vanguard would be a good fit. It expands their ever-growing portfolio of endlessly-hyped, poor executed, half-assed products that will be abandoned in two years when the next solution-in-search-of-a-problem drops from the Sony egg sac.

Re:Bad Game

[aztektum]

A "solution"... Instance it. Present a storyline with quests and some such that build the story, then have an instanced "dungeon" that friends can group together and play through the conclusion of.

However, I would also make a cut off point. Give players 30 or 60 days then drop that content and then rearrange the game world to reflect those changes. You could also have a larger open to all event at that point.

Anyway you slice it though, one thing MMO studios need to realize is the "grind, grind, grind" simplicity of EQ and the early games is fading. I think companies were hoping they'd last forever and these games wouldn't *need* dynamic content. Oops.

Re:Bad Game

[theelectron]

Give players 30 or 60 days then drop that content and then rearrange the game world to reflect those changes.

MMOs already do this and call them 'story quests', 'story arcs', and whatnot.

A "solution"... Instance it. Present a storyline with quests and some such that build the story, then have an instanced "dungeon" that friends can group together and play through the conclusion of.

That takes the MMO out of MMO, and leaves you with a single player or cooperative game that is not an MMO. When you do that, you get a coop game with a 3d lounge. Guild Wars does that. It gets really boring after a short while for players like myself that like a dynamic and social game.

Re:Bad Game

[aztektum]

what's the difference between instancing it (and i didn't mean all content, just event style ones) and ignoring everyone else around you while you and friends run around doing lame quests? this is entertainment, not real life. don't be seem so anal. so for the main storyline arcs you can instance some portions of it so people won't miss out, and then throw in "you either see it or don't" events. good grief you make it sound like a computer program simply HAS to be limited to a specific method of operation.

Re:Bad Game

[MoeDrippins]

> In fact I saw one review give it an 8/10, while admitting that the game in its current state was flat out awful.

Pics or it didn't happen.

Re:Bad Game

[Bobosan]

I rushed out to buy Vanguard when as soon as it came out. I even scheduled that day off. I would rush home every night to play, and for the first few months, I had fun. Nevermind the bugs that I would find, or the client crashing.

I was so hyped on VG that I put that out of my mind. But months later, I felt cheated. I wanted Sigil to, well, frankly, die. I wanted Brad's Vison (TM) to fail. Why? Because I was cheated. You, me, and everyone else who played this game was cheated!

We stuck around in the promise of a better day. We saw the hardcore game have two double xp weekends that oddly enough fell on dates when subs would be canceled. We stuck around even when we hit level 50 and found out there was nothing to do.

I'm glad Sigil failed. I'm not glad the people and coders lost their job, but as it is now, Brad is gone. There will be no more of him in gaming, period.

The hope I, and many other people shared of a game to bring back the experiences of Everquest is also long dead. As for Me, I've moved on back to Eve-Online, and I'm having fun with that. Maybe some of you should join Me there...

Star Wars Galaxies

[icthus13]

So now we're looking to SOE to fix an MMO????

Re:Star Wars Galaxies

[tadprime]

Why not? Look at the wonders they have done to turn around The Matrix Online. Oh...

Re:Star Wars Galaxies

[0123456]

Given how much SWG sucked a few years ago when I played a trial version (and uninstalled it after 2 days) I can't see how they could have made it worse. And they definitely improved EQ2 over the last couple of years.

Re:Star Wars Galaxies

[danbert8]

Then you truely haven't seen the current game. SWG was an RPG then, and probably sucked because you were a noob. It was fun when you got friends, lived in a player city, and were a master at your profession.
 
Now it's a role playing action game, where you'd be much more happy. You'd jump in the game and already have skills, hell you could be a jedi if you want. I think it kills the game if you don't have to earn your skills.

Re:Star Wars Galaxies

[theelectron]

Completely agreed. I wish I had mod points, but since I don't I'll simply voice my agreement.

Re:Star Wars Galaxies

[0123456]

"It was fun when you got friends, lived in a player city, and were a master at your profession."

Maybe... but who's going to stick around that long in a game that isn't fun?

When I think of 'Star Wars' I think of flying around in spaceships, fighting in big battles, and shagging Natalie Portman. But all I could find to do in SWG was spend thirty minutes running from one city to another doing Fedex deliveries to NPCs who often weren't even there (or wait around for ten minutes for a shuttle which ate up most of the profit and caused a big loss if the NPC wasn't there), or fight monsters that would probably kill me if I didn't run away.

As to Jedis, whoever came up with the brilliant idea of preventing the majority of players from becoming Jedis should have been sacked on the spot. I don't care what Lucas' 'vision' may be, a large fraction of people who play SWG games play them because they want to be a Jedi, and don't want to have to jump through weird unpredictable hoops just to do that; they should either have been left out of the game altogether, or made a character creation option for every player.

Re:Star Wars Galaxies

[danbert8]

I don't think you're familiar with the point of an RPG... I think what you're looking for is called the Jedi Knight series of FPS games. What people who played SWG wanted was to be a part of the star wars universe. Unfortunately, in a realistic universe, not everyone can be a Jedi (and even less so in the timeline the game was supposed to take place). I was quite happy to be a wookiee doctor, and did not aspire to be a Jedi at all.

Re:Star Wars Galaxies

[Guysmiley777]

It was fun when you got friends, lived in a player city, and were a master at your profession. Speaking as a former Master Weaponsmith on the Ahazi server I can say that no, it wasn't fun. It was a tedious grind that felt like a second job. The only thing that made it somewhat interesting was having friends playing. I thought JTL was a blast, but a lot of MMO players despise "twitch" gameplay.

WoW has dominated because it is fun to play AND you can have a good time with friends.

Re:Star Wars Galaxies

[garylian]

I wish I had mod points right now.

SWG sucked out of the box. I never understood people that thought it was the greatest MMO.

And EQ2 has gotten incredible changes, changes so good it is no wonder that SOE took a flier on fixing SWG.

Ask anyone who ever played EQ2 when it first came out, quit the game, and then gave it another try after getting baked on WoW for a year or so. Just about every one of them will tell you they were amazed at how cool the game became. Heck, most of the ones that did that wouldn't even go back to WoW for the BC expansion. They just didn't care to. Add in the fact that the EoF expansion was actually everything released to date, and you were getting into EQ2 easy.

Re:Star Wars Galaxies

[Anonymous Coward]

WoW has dominated because it requires no brain to play AND it requires many friends (at least 40 in many cases) all on at the same time to have a good time.
There fixed that for ya.

Re:Star Wars Galaxies

[servognome]

I never understood people that thought it was the greatest MMO.

It was the greatest MMO in terms of being a role-playing game. It appealed to a minority of people who enjoyed being "Moisture Farmer #5" to "Uber Jedi Galactic Hero."

2 more games down the drain

[unity100]

down the drain that SOE is, precisely.

they have managed to take a franchise like star wars and screw up its game SO bad that, swg have broken fastest account cancellation rate among mmos in history once, or maybe twice from what i remember.

Re:2 more games down the drain

[will_die]

SWG was messed up from the beginning, the design for it was just terrible not to mention the bugs.
As for Vanguard SOE has been purchasing failed MMORPG, such as Matrix online, and combining them into thier all access pass. If you are to plan SOE and not Brad. SOE saw an MMORG with a large fan base that was being dumpped by Microsoft, purchased the rights to support gave Brad money(aggreements on this was before SOE signed on) and expected him to know what he was talking about. As some others have put it SOEs blame is that they gave Vanguard a second chance, they should of just let it die.
Now that they have purchased it they will probably go invest money and people it in and attempt to grow the user base. In reality the only people to blame are Brad and Raph and lets hope no-one else spends money on thier "plans" or designs.

Re:2 more games down the drain

[unity100]

soe uses userbase as cash cows. they continue games only to draw a month's payments from them. just like they do with star wars - its like hosting business. recently they have created a small ploy to make people log in once so that their houses wont be purged if they closed their subscription. and probably theyll do it more. in that buying vanguard is like web hosts buy each others' clients - ready subscribers to pay monthly fees as long as you can take them.

SOE...

[djones101]

The place where MMOs go to die.

Re:SOE...

[NoodleSlayer]

At least you didn't say good MMOs.

Almost had a chance

[bconway]

Good times. =D

Re:Almost had a chance

[ChronoPositron]

It's a good thing that they are so committed...

Sony is way ahead of you

[Opportunist]

Vanguard has been on Station Pass since day 1. I wouldn't have tried it if it wasn't. And the game proved me right.

Sony = Brokers?

[Tickenest]

Wow, I didn't realize they wanted to get into the stock broker business. I wonder if I'll be able to set up an IRA for my EverQuest characters.

The bugs aside

[PrescriptionWarning]

its a pretty fun game. I guess people also tend to forget that pretty much every MMO ever release had a few months of very rough performance. For WoW it was major lag, for Vanguard its the graphics. I really don't see a big difference there, and I kinda appreciate the fact that once I can get a better computer the game will look even more amazing than it does now. That's aside from the fact that the game's performance has drastically improved the last couple of months. I know I probably just sounded like a huge zealot there, but whatever, the fact is the game has actually managed to keep me as a casual player for a few months now, whereas WoW only managed to keep me for 2 months and it was my first MMO.

Re:The bugs aside

[Tridus]

Lord of the Rings Online just had a very smooth launch. No lag, hardly any queues, and the game actually runs decently.

Re:The bugs aside

[cthellis]

True, LotR:O was the most solid beta I've ever been in, and has had a smooth launch. Its' main problem is in figuring out what differentiates itself from WoW, other than more appeal to the Tolkien fan base.

My HOPE is that they actually have some story direction and movement through the War of the Ring events (especially since it would be cool to play in "the rest of the world" that you never saw directly in the trilogy, but still had lots going on), but that puts them on a path to an "ending," so... I'm not sure I can see them doing that.

Regardless, as far as "smooth launches" go for MMO's, this will basically be the first. ;)

Re:The bugs aside

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya but Turbine also released DDO just over a year ago. And since the LOTRO client acts a lot like the DDO client... I am imagining they just used an enhanced DDO engine for LOTRO... which would explain why there wouldn't be many problems.

Re:The bugs aside

[Krinsath]

Not to derail this too much, but I do believe that complaining that the WoW launch had "Major lag" is overlooking that nobody, Blizzard included, had any idea what WoW would become. They probably thought by February of '05 they might have 500,000 subscribers, which was roughly the peak of EQ's success. I'm sure the concept that there would be (at that time) 1.2 million people playing (based on information from http://www.mmogchart.com/ )was almost their publisher's wet dream, not something that could actually happen. Most of the lag was caused by Blizzard underestimating how popular their product would be and not building up their infrastructure accordingly. Sure, it's an error on Blizzard's part at the end of the day, but all the same had you said in May of 2004 that there would be an MMO out there with 8 million+ people paying to play it, I think anyone around you would have asked for whatever it was you were smoking. That was a major monkey-wrench in their launch plans, but I'm sure most companies would kill to have the problem of "there's too many people paying us". In contrast, their expansion's launch was fairly smooth. There was a lot of off-hours instability, but the general performance during prime-time was quite good overall and the game mechanics were adjusted appropriately to account for the insane rush of people in the same areas.

Hopping back on topic, this reminds me of another article I read on /. talking about MMO design and how many MMO developers don't seem to grasp that much of what they do is downright annoying to their customers and could probably be done differently and that people would probably respond. Most of his criticism seemed to be leveled at EQ (and those EQ-ish features that WoW seems to have included) and when Vanguard was presented as a refinement of EQ, it seemed to me that his thoughts on at least that count were correct. While it appeals to some people, if you're looking for the mass-market appeal, you need to *gasp* appeal to the mass-market and not a niche! While they might have targeted a niche from the get-go, it's still a very foolish idea to look at the majority of the marketplace and tell them "We're not interested in your money, now go away."

I too grow tired of hearing about "The game sucks, but it has a great vision!" (and it's been said about more than just Vanguard). When someone figures out that how to balance solo play with group play with PvP and PvE so that any combination you want to choose is viable and actually delivers it...that's an MMO who's "vision" I'd like to hear about. WoW works for now, but their developers are oftentimes just as guilty of forgetting the core question any games developer should be asking themselves: "Is it fun? And not just to me, but other people?" Seems like that question never got asked around Sigil....nor did the "Will this even run properly?" question. Were there external factors to that? Sure, money is a big driving force in any business. Still, "release now, patch later" is the singularly most stupid business practice to indulge in. Good customers don't mind waiting for quality, and when you release it they will be happy they waited. Bad customers do mind, but probably nothing you release would satisfy them in the long-term anyway. Release a bad or half-baked product and you lose them both.

Maybe SOE can fix the game, but given their body of work with Star Wars: Galaxies, The Matrix Online and PlanetSide (a great concept game that SOE did nothing with and allowed to wither on the vine)...I wouldn't hold out much hope. If a quality game emerges though, I'll be happy to be proven wrong.

Re:The bugs aside

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. WoW had stellar client performance from release day 1. Vanguard's client is so bloated and poor that you can't even run it at low settings on new hardware decently. It's simply crap. The just-released LOTRO client? Great performance and it looks twice as good as Vanguard. I hate SOE but Vanguard deserves to wither and die. They were criminally stupid enough to think that performance didn't matter, gamers will eat anything up as long as it's new and glittery. They deserve to pay, exactly as they are, for making that insulting assumption.

Re:The bugs aside

[garylian]

I don't know that this was the first "smooth launch".

City of Heroes had a pretty smooth launch. It wasn't perfect, but nobody will every achieve that. But I had the least amount of problems with the CoH launch than any other MMO I played/beta tested.

The biggest problem for LotR:O is that it was fairly boring. Other than it being based on LotR, there wasn't anything that made me go "whoa, this game is cool!" It's one of the few (real) games I got so bored with while beta testing, that I had to force myself to play.

Re:The bugs aside

[Harlockjds]

they had lots of lag in the city area's and the 'hardly any queues' is only a good thing if you compare it to WoW... most games have launched without any queues.

But yes the launch has been very solid.

Re:The bugs aside

[bogjobber]

I really don't see a big difference there, and I kinda appreciate the fact that once I can get a better computer the game will look even more amazing than it does now.

The only reason WoW had lag issues in the beginning was because even Blizzard didn't anticipate such a quick adoption by so many people. That was in part because so many people could play it (it barely required a decent PC when it came out, let alone now). They quickly fixed the lag issues, and even offered credit to players for server down time. The difference is that lag is fixed by adding more equipment on the server side, poor performance on the client side can only be fixed by upgrading your computer. Most people will not do that.

Re:The bugs aside

[Foz]

DAoC also had an amazingly smooth launch.

Launching a game smoothly shouldn't be rocket science. It should be the norm instead of the exception. Unfortunately...

-- Gary F.

Re:The bugs aside

[UnknownSoldier]

> When someone figures out that how to balance solo play with group play with PvP and PvE so that any combination you want to choose is viable and actually delivers it.

Why don't you first define what you mean by "balance" ??

Re:The bugs aside

[VGPowerlord]

I remember back in mid-2005 that one of the servers I had a character on went down for 2-3 days.

Blizzard gave me a five day credit on my account and I continued playing on other servers during that time period.

Still... I remember the bad times when walking around Ironforge or Orgrimmar near the Auction Houses would lag my computer... not just because of the number of people, but also because it only had 512MB of RAM. Doubling that reduced the problem considerably.

Re:The bugs aside

[Krinsath]

Meaning "If I want to play solo most of the time I can progress to the same level of gear/abilities/etc. that people who participate in larger scale affairs, albeit at a suitably adjusted rate based on number of people involved" (in other words, if I choose to play solo instead of in a 5 man group, I progress at roughly 1/6th the speed I would in said group giving me incentive to group, but not forcing me to should I not desire to) or "If I want to advance solely via PvP I can, or if I want to focus just on PvE I can do the same."

As it stands, there are very few MMOs where a player can opt to play exclusively by themselves and advance past a certain point. WoW, for instance, allows this to the level cap, but then almost immediately starts to funnel you to larger and larger group affairs. That's fine for some people, but not for others, especially people who do not have the ability in their schedule to devote whole blocks of time and would like to be able to get in 30 minutes here and there. WoW also has the problem of trying to keep PvP in line with PvE and vice versa. When they increase the effectiveness of a class for one, they now have to turn around and consider its impact on the other.

In that particular case what I find ironic about that example is that Blizzard learned a similar situation with their Paladins vs. Shamans where changes to one had to be done in context to changes in the other was a bad idea because, at their core, they were two totally different classes and the "design in parallel" was hurting them both. Yet, after figuring out that practice was bad there, they seem oblivious to the fact that PvE and PvP are much the same situation. Yes, they can share some systems, but at their core they're fundamentally different and trying to keep them both in line merely makes them both worse. Figure out a way to design specific systems tailored to those environments, adjust the way the classes interact with those systems accordingly, and you produce a higher quality product for both.

Does all of that fall into the realm of "Easier said than done"? Yes, but my point is merely the designer who figures that out will create an MMO that will probably put WoW's subscription numbers to shame just like WoW's put EverQuest's to shame.

Re:The bugs aside

[MBraynard]

As others may point out, the reason for this is that Turbine has launched more MMOs than anyone else. Asheron's Call, AC2 (failure), DDO, and LOTR.

AC is still alive and trying to do well and I'd say it was much superior to the EQ that seemed to oclude it during it's early lifetime.

AC2 was pretty ambitious but for some reason - and I'm not 100% sure why - it failed. Very pretty game.

DDO - it is still alive and has an appeal to a very specific kind of player, trying to be faithful to the pnp DD crowd. I'm not sure how the game is since launch but it looks like Turbine is doing the same kind of frequent updating that it did with AC in the early days (major update every month).

So LOTR was their fourth crack at the bat - and it looks like practice makes perfect.

I actually would expect any major IP who wanted to develop a MMO around that property to approach Turbine. At one point I thought that Turbine was going to get Star Trek and it's too bad they aren't.

Re:The bugs aside

[Chris Mattern]

Final Fantasy XI had a smooth US launch, but that was mostly because it had been out for almost a year in Japan (the first US release came bundled with the first expansion!). I've heard that the initial Japan release was somewhat rougher.

Chris Mattern

Re:The bugs aside

[Incoherent07]

I am convinced that the problem with WoW is that you can't make everyone happy. 8 million people means 8 different "visions" of what the perfect MMOG would be.

Witness the BC ideas. Separate PvP and PvE progression? Sounds good, except that the way they chose to do it doesn't apply equally to all classes; if they went further, though, and put PvP-only or PvE-only bonuses on items, you start to have two divergent systems of gameplay, which means you might as well make two games and stop confusing people. Solo, group, and raid progression being equal? A noble goal, but then they discovered that every new tier of encounters has to involve more elaborate gimmicks because there's really no gear progression from instance blues to Vashj drops. So they're changing that, and people are already howling about how the top raiding guilds with Black Temple loot are going to go around two-shotting the lowly casuals in their instance blues.

You really can't win playing a game like this with your playerbase.

Vanguard has the opposite problem: they've somehow made a very expensive game that manages to appeal to no one. They refuse to learn from WoW's successes and failures, or for that matter EQ2's successes and failures (which are an even better example of how to turn around a game that was going nowhere fast). You read an interview with a former Sigil employee, and you get the sense that their Vision, coupled with the release of an unfinished game, makes it entirely unsurprising that the game failed.

Re:The bugs aside

[Talondel]

AC2 was pretty ambitious but for some reason - and I'm not 100% sure why - it failed. Very pretty game. I'm going to have to assume based on this comment that you didn't acutally play the game? The first 5 months of it's retail release it was an Alpha quality product. There were huge bugs in every aspect of the game. Chat didn't work most of the time. Mobs (and players) constantly got stuck on terrain. There were practically no quests. There was practically no content of any kind really. The crafting system was a joke. Leveling a character was about repeating the two or three quests available at your level range, and trying to get high level group mobs stuck on terrain so you could kill em easy. Yeah it was pretty. It was also empty. And broken. Six months after it's release they finally got it working to a standard that it was a decent beta. There still wasn't enough content, but at least it was somewhat stable, and most of the game breaking bugs had been removed. Chat still didn't work (they blamed Mircosoft Passport for this). But who wants to be paying a monthly fee to play an unfinished beta product? It was so bad, my friends and I vowed never to play a Turbne MMORPG again. One of my friends was tempted to pick up LOTRO recently, and the rest of us had to hold him down and beat him about the head until he regained his senses. I'm only slightly exagerating here.

Re:The bugs aside

[MBraynard]

Hi,

I played the Beta. I really wanted to be an engineer in that game. But I got tied back into AC as no one I was with in AC were inclined to go to AC2. I wound up doing the monarch thing instead on AC.

Maybe you should let your friend get LOTRO and consider AC2 a learning moment for Turbine. I don't know if you aren't buying Turbine anymore to PUNISH them or because you don't believe they can make a good product. Both are invalid. You need to REWARD them for good products (buy LOTRO) and PUNISH them for bad projects (cancel AC2) or they will be confused - just like training a dog. And aparently it is a GOOD product.

What's a vanguard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it something that stops people vandalising your Ford Transit?

Sony's taking over Vanguard?

[UbuntuDupe]

Uh oh! I think I know whose stock is going to be overweighted in their S&P 500 index fund!

Really?

[Cyryathorn]

Sony Online buys Vanguard? I sure hope they do a good job with my retirement savings ...

Track record is mixed

[thezig2]

Yes, SOE totally screwed up Star Wars. They were, however, able to fix EQ2 so it's actually fun and playable. Hopefully they've learned since the SWG mess and will be able to turn Vanguard into something worthwhile.

Re:Track record is mixed

[Todd Knarr]

SOE learned from SWG:NGE, yes. But they didn't create that mess. If you look at the deal between SOE and LucasArts that resulted in SWG, you find that SOE has no control over the game itself. LucasArts controls game mechanics, artwork creation, content creation, customer-service policies, in-game rules and just about every other aspect of the game. NGE was Lucas' idea, SOE was violently against it but they've no say over that aspect of the game. Essentially they're contractors, providing coders, CS bodies and server hosting to LucasArts and following orders about how Lucas wants the game to be. The blame for NGE rests squarely on Lucas' shoulders. The basic problem seems to be that LucasArts views SWG as nothing more than a nice merchandising tie-in opportunity and occasional source of interesting artwork. The idea that there's people who like the game itself, as opposed to fans of the movies looking for more SW-related material, doesn't seem to have registered.

SOE's attitude internally, BTW, seems to be very much "Never again.".

That's a scary healine.

[etherealotaku]

For a second there, I thought I was going to have to dump my 401K plan!

Sony...Fix?...

[EvilGoodGuy]

Something tells me Sony is going to do just as good a job fixing it as they have with PSP and PS3. Maybe SOE being a different branch will mean they have some sense left in their PR though.

At least Brad got his priorities straight...

[aapold]

Can't abandon those Heroclix figs...

Dammit...

[Intellectual Elitist]

...for a second there I thought we were going to get a classic shoot-em-up in the PS Store. Oh well.

God almighty

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Sony/EQ people bought 'em?

I was wondering why I saw a charge on my credit card for Vanguard a few days ago, when I had cancelled it before the free month had even expired.

Maybe it will be as hard as Horizons to cancel.

On the positive side, my "WoW Burning Cruscade Please Come Back" free 10 days just expired yesterday. I had gotten my new Blood Elf up to level 18, on top of half a dozen other new characters, and that's with a family and life. A flunking college student could have probably gotten up to level 60 in that time. Well, a flunking, out of money college student, anyway. A normal flunking college student has his WoW account active, of course.

LOTRO vs Vanguard

[SmallFurryCreature]

Right now the race seems to be between Lord of the Rings Online, a WoW clone with a well-known license and an amazingly done hobit starter area, and Vanguard: Sage of Heroes, a sorta sequal to Everquest that is claimed to try to innovate the MMORPG.

WoW is an Everquest light with added evercamp and evergrind added but coated in a delicous cholate covering that have most of us not noticing how goddamn boring the game actually is at times.

LOTRO in some ways tries to remedy this, it for instance has reduced to almost zero the number of times you will have to kill for a rare lootdrop. If you are asked to collect bear pelts then the bears will drop them pelts, if not it is a bug. So far I seen only two quests were did this not happen, this was mentioned in the quest description and it was then about half that dropped them.

It also has reduced the evercamp, rare or named mobs just respawn at a reasonable time, nothing close to everquests 2, once in a blue moon. Yet you still have quests were you have to kill boss X and have to stand in line to do it. One of the worse variations of this is a quest were you have to rescue a lynx kitten (don't ask) and it is a afraid to come out so you have to kill six budgies that are pestering it. Problem? They ain't assinged to you, so far this invariably results in someone else attacking one of yours. Since you have to kill six of them, this means you then have to wait around for someone else to trigger a respawn of six of them and kills some of theirs. At times you wish they set the respawn more frequent or made such quests into instances.

In the end LOTRO seems to be a WoW with a nice license done slightly better. Yes the Shire is absolutly amazing but the dwarf hall has nothing on the one in WoW.

Vanguard on the other hand is.... Well what is it? Once upon a time SWG was a game that was radically different from Everquest. You just could not compare the two. Vanguard has a lot of lofty claims but ends up being WoW with lots of complexity and even more bugs added but deep down a WoW clone (not that this need amaze you, WoW is an everquest clone and Vanguard is by the everquest guy).

LOTRO and Vanguard even share an oddity. For crafting you need special tools. Sensible enough I suppose, vanguard for some reason turns it into an entire outfit. Yet they both add an amazingly stupid bit of micro management. In LOTRO you have to equip the right tool for the job yourselve. WHY?

Vanguard goes even further, during the crafting process you use a lot of different tools, you can have them in bags (3 tools in a bag) but only one bag active at once, if you need a different tool you need to make a different bag active. WHY?

It really adds nothing to the gameplay but annoyance.

While in theory the combat in Vanguard should be deeper in reality it just isn't. It looks better (LoTRO animation is not even close to Vanguard) but it is just as shallow. If you played WoW or EQ1/2 you will know the drill.

But where LOTRO beats vanguard is in presentation. If you look on at the shire then LOTRO vs Vanguard is like WoW vs Everquest2 times 100. The shire is like one of those adventure themeparks. Something is always happening, it is a beautifully animated populated world. Its quests are fun and exciting and bug free (so far, I do see others having troubles) and it is just an amazingly well done world.

Compared to that Vanguard just seems, lacking.

It is not simply that they are bad, they are not, but they lack the spark. It just ain't the shire and that is it.

The odd thing here that it is not SWG vs EQ or WoW. This is a WoW with license vs WoW with lots of complexity bolted on comparison.

For all that vanguard claims to do, it is just WoW made complex and confusing.

Not that it is all bad, short of Guild Wars Vanguard wins for having females have their own animation. (GW has boobie animation and so beats almost any game) Its combat animations also seem to connect more.

But offcourse, last but not leas

It's okay

[cordsie]

It's okay Vanguard fans, another MMO has been announced recently that's sure to ease the utter failure and disappointment of Vanguard.

Ladies and gentleman pretending to be ladies, I give you The John Romero MMOG!

You think Brad McQuaid knows how to burn $30 million? Just wait till you see this guy in action. He'll make McQuaid look like Steve Jobs.

Come to think of it, now that McQuaid's on the market again perhaps he'll find his way into Romero's Team. Damn, can you imagine that? A joint Romero-McQuaid MMOG vision? They'll have the combined power to take down any billion dollar development operation, and cause dozens of other local businesses to file for chapter 11 just from proximity fallout alone!

The Past

[Vexor]

It remains to be seen if SOE can undo the damage that the last five months have done to the Saga of Heroes community, and the game itself.

Well SOE/Sony's track record points to no. No they can't and won't. Let's not forget SWG.