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."

Comments

And this is relevant because...?

[hackel]

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.

Re:And this is relevant because...?

[drsquare]

If there is room on the front page for eighty thousand articles about World of Warcraft, or Apple or Google, then there's room for the occasional article about something else.

"We have a cool ability planned for Rogues"

[Datamonstar]

Oh shit.

Still nothing for crafters? Or diplomats?

[Opportunist]

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.