Vanguard Dev Talks About the Game's Future

Massively sat down with Thom Terrazas, producer for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes about what the future holds now that the game has had time to stabilize after a rocky start. Terrazas talks about some of the upcoming content, and explains why they chose to develop in the direction they did. "A lot of the requests are a mix of high-end content requests. You know, keep delivering higher end content so that progress doesn't stop for our players. In addition there are many requests to fix current content. Those are the two things that the players have requested the most." He also provides some general information on their ideas for alternate advancement. "... the idea is you can build your character out so it's a bit more specialized in things like damage, or mitigation, or spell damage. So you can specialize any way you want. We're working on that now, and it's something we're looking to launch in the raiding portion of Pantheon. So if you really love your character and want to specialize in something more, be a little different then the rest of your class, then AAs will be coming with the second part of Pantheon so you can customize your character further in the higher level."

Comments

Heh

[Moraelin]

So, let me get this straight, at a time when WoW has got another couple of million players by going less specialized, so healers or tanks can still kill stuff when soloing and damage dealers don't get two-shot... Vanguard actually plans to make people _more_ specialized?

I have to wonder what _is_ with Vanguard and trying to do everything the other way around than what most people like. Is this some kind of ellaborate prank played on the publisher? Plain incompetence? Being unable to learn from past mistakes? Or just a case of keeping listening to the wrong crowd?

There seems be a group of people who've played WoW for 3 years, then got bored (which isn't anything wrong and abnormal), but can't seem to realize that the change is with them not with the game. Mixed with the usual human inability to deal with multiple variables, so if they like X then everything about X is great, and if they dislike X then every single trait or aspect of X is pure shit and an offense unto God. (Where X can be a game, a person, a company, etc.) So now they've flipped around to "everything about WoW sucks", including everything that kept them there in the first place. And I dunno why I get the idea that Vanguard chose to listen to precisely this segment, without applying much critical thinking.

At any rate, whatever the reason, it's kinda funny. It's like they're _planing_ to make a game that sucks ass end-to-end, and oh looky, they just got another idea how to make it worse.

If any of the Vanguard devs are listening, I humbly submit the following ideas to the same end:

- be the first MMO with DRM. I'm sure you can convince someone at Sony of that idea, given their past record.

- give the customers free wedgies.

- periodic player wipes. It worked great for MUDs to keep the population low, I'm sure it can work for you too.

Keep up the good job, guys. I'm sure with enough hard work and dedication you can even become worse than Anarchy Online ;)