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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."
Aw man, I thought this was going to be about the Atari 2600 Vanguard. I was wondering whatever happened to those guys.
It is about the target audience. WoW is played by the masses, Vanguard aims at the old hardcore Everquest crowd. One of VGs main problems was that there wasn't enough gaming content for them so they quickly abandoned the game.
So your suggestion is that they instead copy WoW as closely as possible and hope that players spontaneously jump ship because...?
WoW is the Windows of the MMORPG world, and by that I simply mean it is the one that everyone, even those with no interest in the subject is aware of. WoW may even be fantastically good at what it does, but it seems like a lot of people pick it because they are already invested in it or it's the most widely known option.
If WoW is actually so fantastically good at what it does that most players are choosing it because it does what they want perfectly, then this gives other developers even less reason to chase the mass market. Much better to make a game that beats WoW's experience for 'hardcore' players, because at least that gives it an edge with a certain market segment.
Except EQ1 peaked at 500,000 players. And if you want to aim at the hardcore segment, you get even less. It's probably barely enough to pay the development costs.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually, you seem to:
A) assume that owning the MMO market is a for ever. WoW started from zero once too, and people predicted it won't do that great competing with EQ1 which owned the market. With EQ2 right around the corner, nobody expected WoW to do that great. Even the publisher only allocated funds for a couple of servers... resulting in the hideous queues to get in, as 100x more people wanted to play it than anyone estimated.
WoW _will_ eventually be dethroned too.
B) assume that there isn't room to grow the market. Again, people said the same about WoW back then. It had been years since any MMO had done more than steal some players from another MMO, so the total number of players looked static. (Seriously, look at the MMOG charts.) But then it turns out that making it more accessible for casual gamers has enlarged the market by an order of magnitude.
I see no reason why another game can't do the same.
C) forget that people do get bored and leave any game after a while. Last I've heard a statistic, it was an average of 6 months per player. Sure, it's still a Gauss curve, so some people leave after the free month, some stay around for years, but the average was half a year.
WoW sheds a million or two of players per month, who look for another home. Then we try a bit of EQ2, a bit of COH, and end up right back on WoW. A game would just have to not suck much to make a good living out of such people who, yes, liked WoW but got bored after a while.
Even briefer: we're talking about a game, not about Windows. Windows is something that just runs your programs, so if you already have it, might as well keep it. A game is something you have to actively play, and people get bored eventually of doing the same thing. Same as in any other game.
D) Going in the opposite direction is hardly a way to achieve any of the previous possibilities. Even if you don't plan to dethrone WoW or enlarge the market, aiming to actively suck for the millions of ex-WoW-ers around, seems pretty stupid to me. That's a lot of people who have already decided they like MMOs and _are_ looking for a new MMO to play. Any reason to actively try to hold them off?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
500K is not chump change. 500K is more subscribers than anything but WoW and Lineage have ever seen at peak. People really need to stop grabbing these numbers out of the air.
Well if you take EVE Online as an example where they have only about 250K to 300K accounts. Pretty hardcore game with an economist on the payroll. They seem to be expanding and have been since release when there was only like 50k accounts. With 500K accounts should be 750K per month in fees, sounds like more than enough to keep a game running. With 50k accounts getting 75k per month, well that's a bit harder. This isn't counting the monies from the initial box sales which should have been used to cover the initial dev costs.
Vanguard has always been aimed at a select "hardcore" group of people who feel that any MMO you can play without it being a full time job is for noobs. Those people seek to recreate a mythical golden age from Everquest, which is impossible since back then it was a new and shiny thing for most of them. It's not new anymore.
But, thats the audience they have. At this point in the wider market Vanguard is known only as the "WoW killer" to bomb most quickly. It was one of the buggiest, worst performing, and outright not done MMOs ever when it came out. There is no way it'll ever move into the mainstream market successfully.
Since that market is closed, they're best off catering to what they have.
(Lord of the Rings Online does pretty well without a huge market too, really. I really wish I liked that game more then I do, Turbine does so many things well.)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
That has got to be the most short-sighted and ignorant comment I've read on an article unrelated to Vista, Apple and iTunes ever. By your logic, all RPGs created after 2000 should have been doomed to failure since Diablo 2 took the market by storm. And the Colin Mc Rae franchise should have been ruined by MarioKart. Nice. You haven't, by accident, heard of something called target audience? There is a market for complex games. It's smaller and harder to cater to than the mass-market, but apparently it is there, and viable.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
That must have been a short conversation.
[quote]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?[/quote]
Not everyone is happy with WoW's generalization so this will appeal to them. .. check.
Least loved healing class for a party.. check.
Fragile cloth class w/ laughable aoe.. check.
Itemization forces competition with 1/2 the dps
Thoughts of playing that crazy blood mage again... check
Mostly because nobody has ever made a game with truly infinite content. (Even random generated maps eventually start to look like more of the same, once you figure out their rules and mob placement.)
So eventually people have done all the quests, seen all the zones, did their share of grinding the same "endgame content" a hundred times, etc. They eventually get bored and move on.
Since you mention X-COM: ok, they were great games. But now imagine playing X-COM for years straight. Same maps, same enemies, you just cycle through them one more time. And one time more. A thousand times. You get bored eventually, don't you? That's all I'm saying.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Vanguard aims at the old hardcore Everquest crowd.
As an old EQ player... they missed when they started being more guild centric, mass teleport, EQ2-mechanic lifting, and generally nothing like the GOOD days of EQ. The problem is that they started listening to the guilds and started putting in things that broke the original design. The game was meant to have regional economies, vast distances, and group centric content. Now, since SOE has them, they are plugging in all the code from EQ2.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I don't think that WoW grew a userbase that wasn't already there. While it is true that a large number of players came to a genre that they wouldn't have 2 years before, I think that WoW caught a lucky break in a number of factors, the first that comes to mind is this:
Network/computing potential. Prior to WoW, broadband wasn't as widely available, and it is now doing nothing but expanding. Computers also struggled to play games unless they were specifically built for such a purpose. As WoW arrived, it was designed, and took advantage of the introduction of newer, cheaper game-capable machines. It no longer took $1500+ to build a machine that could play WoW.
In short, they capitalized on a market that existed but just didn't have anyone trying to sell to it.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Vanguard has always been aimed at a select "hardcore" group of people who feel that any MMO you can play without it being a full time job is for noobs.
Actually, when I tried it real recently (when the new newbie island was in beta), I was shocked at how noob friendly the game really is. Soloing content was doable, maps were pretty straight forward. The things that got to me were the bugs (couldn't complete goblin starting quests without at least two GM petitions), and the sheer repetition. I remembered again the glory days of watching TV while playing Everquest, and how long it took me to realize that if I'm doing something to keep from being too bored in a game, it's probably not a good game for me.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
I tried Vanguard for a few months shortly after it came out. It seemed like it could be really fun, lots of potential there, but it crashed more than any game I've ever played. More than Morrowind, even. And there was no protection so that your character wouldn't get slaughtered if your game crashed, so it was frustrating. Also, I think I picked the worst race possible - it was the ones that look like cat people (so I could be a necro). They were 'kill on sight' to the people in all the major cities of their own home continent, and also that home continent was horribly, horribly unfinished.
/.'ers play that could say if things have improved?
But...if they've made it this far, they must be doing something right. I may have to give it another shot.
Any
Unpleasantries.
I was really hoping to hear they'd implement something new and cool, but AA's are just a rehash of old EQ.
Except there was a significantly less overall MMO players at the time.
EQ1 probably had comparable market share in the MMO market when it was out then WoW does now.
And this is coming from someone who didn't like EQ at all (UO 4 lyfe yo)
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
Or lack of there of... Can I end that with a preposition?
Looking at this thing you can really tell when the game was launched, and when the free month ran out. And there is no reliable data since. Not a promising sight for a WoW-killer.
Now explain The Sims Online please. The Sims had sold more copies than all warcraft games combined. TSO flopped quickly anyway.
Well, gee, all those Star Wars games on just about every computer type ever made, must have not existed in your alternate universe. The first IIRC was in 1982 on the Atari. Followed by several on the NES and SNES, which were _the_ number one gaming platform in their time.
On the PC? Let me see, several XWing and TieFighter games, Rebel Assault, Dark Forces, the Jedi Knight series, Force Commander (an RTS too, since you credit those with the success of WoW), Force Commando ('nother RTS), Rogue Squadron, and at least a dozen other games if we stick to just those _before_ SWG.
Sorry, SW was a major franchise in computer gaming too. It wasn't that which limited the appeal of SWG.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"be the first MMO with DRM" Oh dear, whats the subscription for then?
billy pilgrim *has* become unstuck in time!
The funny thing is what WoW is becoming so standard, it gets used as a communications medium. A lot of people have friends that the best (perhaps only way) to get in touch with them is through the game.
This is the reason that I keep my WoW sub current. There are so many people I know that their E-mail address, IM handles, and Facebook messages are changed or never watched, but people do log into WoW to check on their auctions and WoW mail tends to work well almost all the time.
Add a Blizzard Authenticator (a rebranded Vasco Digipass Go 6) to minimize the chance of an account being stolen if a box gets compromised, and for most things, its a decent means of communication.
Seriously. I dove into Vanguard for a year before I quit. The game had amazing graphics, worked extremely well even on my mid- to low-level graphics card, it didn't seem to have any feature missing, from swimming to flying mounts to a plethora of different races, it had a unique crafting system, it introduced the extremely interesting diplomacy content, there were quests around every corner. I could go on.
But they forgot to make the game fun.
They spent a ton of time focusing on features and graphics and the technical aspects of the game, but I was never really drawn into the gameplay. The storyline was disjointed, confusing, and uninteresting. Soloing in combat was extremely difficult, and getting a group together was hard (though this did improve toward the end of my year). Crafting, while initially interesting, didn't significantly change when you advanced and it became dull and repetitive. And they all but stopped developing diplomacy, the most unique aspect of the game.
As much as I wanted to like the game for all of its features, graphics, and technical aspects, I just couldn't keep playing. It just wasn't that much fun.
Help me fix my brother's injured butt!
"Vanguard - Saga of Heroes" is not fun. Vanguard doesn't even have 50k players let alone 500k.
Thanks to eating disorders most chicks are reasonably good looking these days.
Well, I see you make basically my point: a license will only get you so far either way. In the end, if people like your game they'll play it and provide word of mouth advertisment to their friends. If not, not.
Everquest is probably the best illustration of it: it was based on no franchise whatsoever, and for a while it was king of the hill. It overtook both UO (which had the very strong Ultima name) and wasn't surpassed by SWG (which had a huge following in computer games, though as you correctly note an even bigger one outside of it.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I remember EQ in its heyday, but I really can't wax nostalgic about making sure I only wore gear that I wouldn't mind losing if my guild chose to raid Fear or another plane.
Fear should have had a small staging area. The early EQ1 zones definitely had design flaws.
EQ pre Kunark wasn't designed to make you wait forever to get a kill. It was simply that the game at launch didn't have enough high end content.
Of course, one death would set you back hours
It gave you motivation not to die. And/or gave you motivation to group with a Cleric/Paladin, or at least make friends with other players, even if you played solo. WoW is dull because I simply don't care if I die, it costs an in game nickle; and outside of instances I simply don't ever need help. That really kind of sucks.
I will agree that EQ combined painful deaths with arbitrary deaths, and THAT wasn't fair. (Zoning into oasis and getting stomped by a giant and getting sent back to qeynos and losing a few hours worth of xp, and having to do a corpse recovery... was unfair.)
I don't mind getting punished for making a tactical combat mistake. I do mind getting punished for zoning in at the wrong time.
Of course, all it would take for a group wipe is one person running through a zone with a nice train of mobs behind them, and pretty much there was nothing to be done about griefers like that unless a GM or guide was actively watching and caught them in the act.
I thought you said you had to wait half an hour to get a kill, because every spawn point in the zone was being camped? ;) Seriously though, yes, that both sucked, and was awesome at the same time. The trains in blackburrow, guk, and sola/b were legendary and usually weren't even intentional, and actually getting griefed - meh it wasn't -that- common. They had a saying in EQ... if you don't want to be hit by a train, stay off the tracks.
Greifing sucked, but it also enabled the stuff that made the game great. 3 or 4 independant groups getting together and fighting off a train (intentional or otherwise) for example... that made lasting memories, and started lasting friendships... it can't really happen in WoW and it doesn't happen. Sure some friendly passerby might wander by and assist... but its just not the same. Because there is no meaningful death penalty I don't really care if I die so heroically banding together and surviving doesn't mean much.
In EQ we were all in it together against the game. In WoW, the game is so easy, you aren't forced to rely on others so there is no real impetus to be sociable. Two groups in EQ fighting in the same general area often made contact and chatted and talked; you had downtime so there was time, and it was well worth your time too -- if you wiped, maybe they could rez you and save you hours... and vice versa... or maybe they'd come to each others rescue, or join forces together to take out a rare spawn named or work together to break a multi-spawn. That's the sort of stuff that made classic EQ great... that WoW and other new games simply don't have.
Kunark made things easier to find stuff to kill, but the exp curve for 50-60, especially for a soloer, was painful.
If you "played the game" instead of "rushed to 60" the level curve was a non-issue. Who cares how long it takes to level? Its not like you get a prize for reaching 60... you just to play the same game, but now without the xp reward. Whoop-de-doo.
I like modern EQ. Even classes that were unable to solo (and when I say unable, I mean *unable* because HP regeneration was so slow without a healer) can hire mercenaries and go hit somewhere to work on exp.
EQ wasn't designed for solers. The fact that any class could solo well was almost an accident.
If you want an instanced dungeon all to yourself (although boring), there is always Nedaria's Landing and the Forgotten Halls which scales to your level, and if mobs are too hard, you can shroud down to a lower level, get the instance,
I played since beta, lasted until a little while after they merged some servers, took a break for about 9 months, then came back to it. It is much improved from the original launch. There is finally some high-end content that is rather enjoyable and complex -- not all encounters are pure "burn" fights and require instead a lot of strategy, timing and cooperation by 18 to 24 players. And as mentioned above, expanding the level cap by introducing AA's will make the grind much more worthwhile than killing an entire populations of high-end mobs.
;^). I wound up migrating my PvP toons over to a PvE server, got hooked up by a friend into a heavy raiding guild, and haven't looked back on my decision. The raids are far more challenging than PvP combat in this game ever was. But for those who want a taste of it, the devs introduced an FFA PvP arena on the PvE servers.
... just don't get too attached to your characters unless you want to convert the trial into a full account -- no transfer of toons between accounts is available.
Plus, as mentioned elsewhere, the new Isle of Dawn "tutorial" will level you up to the max of the first tier for all professions -- you can leave the nexbie area after completing the last combat quest or you can stick around until you are a level 10 adventurer, 10 diplomat, 10 crafter, and maxed out on tier 1 harvesting as well. The adventuring, crafting and diplo quests are all inter-related when it comes to the story line as well. When you finish the combat questline, you get an item that grows in power as you rise in levels -- existing players have to go to ridiculous lengths to get a similar item.
Plus, the Isle has some silly, fun features that you can't get on the mainland, like Slappy's whistle.
Sure, there are still problems. Bugs still related to ones from launch, bugs introduced with the new content. And there are the eventual nerfs of favorite character abilities, but the devs do pay attention to the player base, even if they can't fix an issue immediately.
If your main interest in an MMO is PvP, then this probably isn't the game for you. Originally, there were two types of PvP servers -- Free For All and Team PvP (similar to SWGs Imps and Rebels, but based on the race of your character). I loved the team-based PvP, but when Sony merged servers the one remaning PvP server went FFA. Plus, overpowered classes have a much more dramatic effect on game play in PvP than in PvE, IMO (too many TLAs, I know
If you want to give it another look -- get the 14-day trial and give it a look. That way you won't have to spend money for a month if you decide you don't like it
Thank you for writing all that so I didn't have to! Spot on. Especially with the mapping! I remember more of EQ than I do any other MMO because I had to learn the land.
Previous EQ DE Enchanter, breaker of (lower level) trains.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Unless the fees are $1.50 a month you should probably add a zero to your revenue figures.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
To date no MMO has designed a world that is as large or vivid as what Blizzard has done. Most MMOs utilize zoning while moving from one zone to another where as WoW incorporates seamless transition not to mention the amount of quests, npcs, instances is truly remarkable. I hope Blizzard will work in true successor to WoW or something new rather than more xpacs.
Here's a neato graph of Eve Online subs
quoted from CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson on 17 Aug 07
"We began full-force in 2000," he continued, "by raising $3 million, which is about one-tenth of the current MMORPG." Its flagship product, EVE Online has been in development for three years, "the last year of which we had no money, but everyone turned up to work anyway despite us not being able to pay them," he admitted.
"This created a core of people who have gone through hell with us, and helps with the community especially," said Petursson.
"We had publishing problems with Simon & Schuster," he continued, "which resulted in no distribution or marketing, despite having 30,000 players. We ended up buying the rights back at 2002 and going into digital distribution. This has forced us to treat [EVE] more as a service than a product, and using viral marketing techniques to propagate the product out, long before others were doing this."
Petursson said CCP is planning a "massive graphical upgrade to the game," and also predicted that this year would see a total of 200,000 subscribers, after reaching 100,000 subscribers in February of last year.
"We have had different growth than most other games," said Petursson, "because the whole game takes place on a single shard, which allows escalation of power and social equity as the size of the community grows."
The rest of the article
EVE seems to have succeeded because the people who made it love it and won't give up.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman