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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.
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.