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

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.

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

[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: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".

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