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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.
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.
That must have been a short conversation.
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
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,