Slashdot Mirror
New Content Coming To Vanguard
Allakhazam spoke with Salim Grant, lead designer for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, about a variety of new content coming to the fantasy MMO. Grant says that the update will be free, and it will include two new dungeons, a revamp of the buff system, and balance changes.
"Both of these dungeons are going to have a group component and a raid component that you unlock. As we get closer to releasing these dungeons we will be releasing new features like AA, item enhancement, and increasing our level cap. ... We will also be merging as many buffs as we can into a single buff with one icon to help make going through your buffs a little easier. These buffs will be upgrades to their previous buffs as well. Some classes like Dread Knight will be getting something kind of different that plays off of their DC ability and we have a cool ability planned for rogues. Necros and druids will see upgrades to their pets as well. We are also using this chance to hopefully fix some of the power issues we have with our game. The way some of our formulas work is not very expansive and we are looking to fix some of these things while making some of our stat mods a little more valuable."
The game that I quit for being undeveloped, full of bugs, and having no active Game Masters is still around!
-Diables
Founder of the now defunct "Bank Gankers"
Cue happy letters from all seven fans of Vanguard
I was reading the interview transcript and was disturbed not by Salim, not by Vanguard but by the interviewer - Tamat\Andrew. I can't help but shakeoff the thought that he is a fanboi or is just trying to do his job in that interview. (I mean this is Vanguard we are talking about...)
I don't mean to offend those who are genuinely interested in this game, but is this story really worthy of being on the front page? Sorry for trolling, but I just don't understand it. Slow news day perhaps.
Seems to be on life support by SOE.
It's newsworthy because the game crashed and burned on release. It's still going and now it's being updated. Not completely unusual (Anarchy Online being the other example), but odd enough that it's a story of some sort of interest.
There's certainly been enough other fluff on Slashdot, like every little possible rumour that Apple is developing new iPocketLint. *rolls eyes*
Oh shit.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Vanguard is a great game.
It has a great system, a great story, interesting characters, lots of content, the crafting and diplomacy is fun, too. What i like most is that it's a lot more demanding than the too-easy WoW.
But, sorry, it sucks.
I bought the game just 3 months ago because i remembered playing the beta and having an underpowered computer back then.
Today, i have an Athlon X2 6000+, 2 Gigs of RAM and a Radeon 4870. Surely more than enough for a game from 2003, i thought.
Well, i obviously thought wrong. Even though i had 90 fps most of the time, every few seconds the framerate would give way, creating a terrible stutter in the process. This happened even at the lowest detail level, and i still refuse to lower the resolution because that FullHD screen was expensive.
Allow me to illustrate why this is a question worth asking, for those that never played Vanguard or dropped it after the first 10 minutes, like so many did:
Vanguard features three kinds of "leveling systems". One fighting, one crafting, one diplomacy. All three are supposedly allowing you to independently reach their respective maximum levels, i.e. you were supposedly able to become a master diplomat without having to resort to violence. You were supposedly able to become a master crafter without the need to go on raids for receipe drops.
So far the theory.
The reality is more like whatever you can craft will be outmatched by a drop. This is by itself not yet a complete backbreaker, but they made it so that the rarest item you could craft from the rarest resource can't hold a candle against an uncommon drop (read: One that you get in about three hours of slaughtering).
You may imagine for yourself how much demand there is for crafted goods. Essentially, the only thing that's in any kind of demand are bags and horseshoes because, you guessed it, they don't drop like candy.
So I thought, let's drop that idea and turn to diplomacy. That was at least a clever new idea. It's a bit like playing a trading card game in an MMO, but hey, it's something different. It also starts off quite nice, some neat tutorial quests, a main town quest line, then you're sent off to some other part and then... you hit the wall. You cannot do your quests because your gear does not provide enough influence (that dictates whether you can at all engage in a diplomacy contest with an NPC) to do any of your quests. Yet you only get new gear from quests, as rather rare drops or crafted from even rarer resources (and again, the crafted gear can't hold a candle to the drops). The drops in turn drop from the mob you cannot engage in diplomacy with. How this hen-and-egg problem is solved? Well, certain combination of race/class do have a different quest line that supplies them with gear with a hint more influence in the relevant area, so they can actually tackle this quest... in other words, it works kinda-sorta for certain races/classes, it's impossible for others. Personally, I'd consider this broken.
So the two features Van touted as "new and excitingly different" are broken and/or ridiculously pointless. What's left is a standard plain vanilla fantasy MMO with a balance I don't even want to start about. And the big news is new content for some classes for their fighting power? Wake me when something happens that gives me a reason to come back to Vanguard, i.e. something I can't have already, and better, in other fantasy MMOs.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...and there is no one to hear it, does it make a noise?
In general, the poster has many valid points, but:
Crafting is not completely borked. Sure, it's fallen into niches or into status items (like having a galleon now), but there remain areas for which a crafter is essential. A few examples (and sadly, there are only a few) are guild halls and houses, particularly GHs for the guild buffs. Specialized gear, such as spell countering gear for casters, can pretty much only be crafted and is essential for critical raid battles ... try killing Kotasoth without being able to counter his heals. Focuses are critical, too -- my cleric has almost a full set of APW armor and it's caused my healing focus so much I'm checking into using a focus instead of a shield to get my healing focus back over the cap. All of these get into the fourth line of progression -- harvesting -- which has been widely overlooked these days because of dropped items. If you want your specialized gear, you have to do a lot of harvesting to get the rare and ultra-rare resources and dusts to make these, or have the plat to buy them off the exchange (if they are available). Some of the best APW gear is crafted gear as well, based on materials you need to harvest off of APW mobs.
We can be thankful at least that Sony hasn't completely screwed crafting like they did in Star Wars Galaxies -- once it was both essential and an artform that required a great deal of skill, now it's a joke.
I can't say much for diplomacy, other than using the VGTact.com resource, but again it's essential to the game. Adventurers, crafters and even diplos can all benefit from civic diplomacy buffs and we have a number of level 50 diplos in our guild to make sure the adventuring buffs are up before beginning any raid. Diplo buffs are another way of gaining some prestige -- at least enough to push you over the limit you need if you're relatively close. Again, VGTact.com also has information on locations and quests to help level you up.
These two definitely need attention, like making more raid gear drops targeted at these professions and making the items Bind On Equip, not Soulbound, but more importantly attention needs to be paid to the main ideas behind the classes. They've been ignored for too long.
I thought that Vanguard had gone the way of Tabula Rasa, but I guess I was mistaken. Is there anyone in the player base on slashdot? And if so, maybe you could explain how the game has progressed since the (reportedly) abysmal start it had.
Ha! Didn't even know the game was still up and running. Good for them. But yeah I was certainly one who jumped in and attempted to play. I got fed up with the ridiculous lag as well as the system requirements to play it at the time. Since then I've got a better rig. Unfortunately Blizzard just keeps my addicted arse coming back to WoW.
Think there are plenty of us out there that would love for someone to come out with an MMO that makes us feel what we felt with WoW 4 years ago. Since then nothing has done that for me.
Dewser - all around techy "In the immortal words of Socrates - 'I drank what?'"
Remember, there's still time to make an IRA contribution for 2008!
Nice that someone is interested.
I took about 9 months off the game because of all the bugs at launch and the lack of end-game content, but was pretty surprised and impressed when I came back about 4 months ago.
The game is still visually stunning -- one of the best looking MMOs I've played. It's also is one of the largest, in terms of game landmass. The multiple paths you can take -- anyone can be an adventurer, crafter, diplomat and harvester -- can offer a variety of different challenges depending on your play style. Most importantly, there have been a lot of bug fixes, exploits patched, and some great end-game content added with more to come (the point of this article). Grouping was always limited to 6 people, but for the high-level content your can form up to 24 people raids. Until recently, the most challenging raid content was limited to 18 people (3 groups, with 1 for support, swapping people in/out) but a new raid dungeon has opened with 24 man raid content.
As mentioned in a post above, there are limitations to the crafting and diplomacy branches. There still are lag (as any game) and chunking (switching between land zones) issues. As more powerful mobs get introduced, some character abilities (like levitation in APW) get nerfed to make the battles harder, but leaving players with those skills disgruntled. A lot of character class balance has been addressed, but there are still some over-powered and under-powered classes ... but not so much as there being a "class of the month" sort of issue. The PVP aspects of the game are dying off, but then this game was never really built for PVP. (A lot of people credit this from a change from having a few team-pvp servers to an only-FFA server, including me). A PVP arena has recently been introduced on the PVE servers for people who want a taste of that, with some of the staples of PVP (such as infamy gained or lost from kills) changed into a loot system that rewards players for gaining infamy, instead of the stat being fairly useless.
A lot has been said about the "low player base" because of server merges about a year ago, but except for the PVP server population seems to have risen or at least stabilized. Plus, with all its problems, the game is still enjoyable enough that when I see guildies leave for the game of the month (AOC, WAR, etc.) they eventually come back to Vanguard. It's survived the hype and the problems that almost killed off the game because it didn't live up to the hype, so now it's a fairly solid MMO with a loyal player base and continually improving content.