I like how they made it geared towards old school DAOC and EQ players, that is the key.

But about the seamless world, i found that there are still many places that you can't get to because their either to steep or blocked by invisible walls...hopefully they'll fix that.

Originally posted by Drumwiz

I like how they made it geared towards old school DAOC and EQ players, that is the key.

But about the seamless world, i found that there are still many places that you can't get to because their either to steep or blocked by invisible walls...hopefully they'll fix that.

I guess I don' t know that much about Vanguard (I'm lazy, I'll admit) but I the remark of gearing it towards old school DAOC players caught me off guard.   EQ and DAOC appealed to different types of gamers, and people who loved one style usually didn't care for the other. 

Does Vanguard offer realm/faction based PvP in a controlled setting like DAOC does.  If so, that's great news..and goes a long way to making me want to play the game.  Is it geared towards epic quests that require 60 people to camp a site for 12 hours like EQ did sometimes?  If so, count me out. (unless of course, it has both)

DAOC has raiding, but they are very optional.... you can have a ton of fun in the game and never go on a dragon raid...heck, you can buy most of the drops that come out of them...    If raiding in Vanguard is also very optional, I'm going to like this game.

Flaws at launch I can live with..as long as I know they are being addressed.  WoW had tons of them at launch (how soon people seem to forget this) and I know how quickly companies can work to get them corrected.

It was a good interview.. could have used more questions addressing some of the complaints we're hearing about the unfinished state of the game, but I'm sure the interviewer was told up front to steer away from them.

 

Originally posted by Anofalye

Originally posted by anarchyart

Originally posted by brostyn
The hook is having freedom to do what you want, when you want, how you want? I hate to break this to them, but that's in all MMOs. I highly doubt their raid game is gonna have much freedom once expansions start coming out, and the game is balanced towards raiders.

How about experience the game first hand and then call it a raid game. Also, can you name me one MMORPG that doesn't have raids?

*Arguing* with other peoples part of the "insignificant minority" that don't want to raid as I see?

 

If everyone jumps off the bridge, will you?  When EQ was released, no other game feature PvE servers.  It doesn't prevent EQ to bring that back then.  The fact that "nobody" does it shouldn't prevent a bright person from doing it.  In medieval times, nobody was eating potatoes and peoples starve to death (it was pig's food), I am sure a few persons did eat potatoes and live because of that.

 

And to your precise question: City of Villains (not CoH).

 

Im not real sure what your point is, but your example is bad. People in Medieval Eurasia did not eat potatoes because they did not grow any. Potatoes are a new world food plant originating in the Andes Mountains. They were introduced into Europe soon after discovery by Europeans, and quickly became staple crops in Europe.

Originally posted by Kyleran

Originally posted by Drumwiz

I like how they made it geared towards old school DAOC and EQ players, that is the key.

But about the seamless world, i found that there are still many places that you can't get to because their either to steep or blocked by invisible walls...hopefully they'll fix that.

I guess I don' t know that much about Vanguard (I'm lazy, I'll admit) but I the remark of gearing it towards old school DAOC players caught me off guard.   EQ and DAOC appealed to different types of gamers, and people who loved one style usually didn't care for the other. 

Does Vanguard offer realm/faction based PvP in a controlled setting like DAOC does.  If so, that's great news..and goes a long way to making me want to play the game.  Is it geared towards epic quests that require 60 people to camp a site for 12 hours like EQ did sometimes?  If so, count me out. (unless of course, it has both)

DAOC has raiding, but they are very optional.... you can have a ton of fun in the game and never go on a dragon raid...heck, you can buy most of the drops that come out of them...    If raiding in Vanguard is also very optional, I'm going to like this game.

Flaws at launch I can live with..as long as I know they are being addressed.  WoW had tons of them at launch (how soon people seem to forget this) and I know how quickly companies can work to get them corrected.

It was a good interview.. could have used more questions addressing some of the complaints we're hearing about the unfinished state of the game, but I'm sure the interviewer was told up front to steer away from them.

 

I'm kind of wondering about the RvR like DAOC too. I see ways in which it might be possible, but I have no idea how it's unlocked if it exists. Between the lines, I read yet another instance of Brad & Company's knowing glances and smug smiles.

By the way, I think I will soon need a term like "Evercrack" for Vanguard. I'm starting to have withdrawal symptoms whenever the servers are down.

 

I have not played every race myself but I don't see how anyone can say all the quests are well written. My favorite example is the orc starter quest.  I was on a slave ship supposedly a captive and my quest was to go kill a slaver take his key then free a slave and escape. Nice quest except the slavers are non aggressive. So here are 5 slavers standing within arms reach of each other. You kill one, take the key, unlock the slave standing there walk past the other 4 slavers and down the gangplank. For gods sake a nice damn quest if the slavers had been aggro, them being non aggro ruined all immersion. The majority of the rest of the quest are kill 5 of these and ten of those and collect 5 bumblebee snouts sort of thing. I had one where I had to lead a camel down a hill, and another where I had to lead a horse down the road. I did not do any of the diplomacy or crafting quests because crafting is just not my game style. Both of which were designed to say, "look here is the next higher level mob and mission terminals ( quest NPC) " which I have to admit were useful if not terribly difficult or hard quests to do.

Now to the immersion, I have yet to see a NPC do anything but stand there like a mission terminal in SWG. Towns are pretty much empty. Remember Tazoon in Horizons? Vanguard towns are about the same. The ambiance sucks, I like to her the sound of the ocean when near the ocean, I want to hear the hustle and bustle of a city when in the city. I want to see NPCs wandering the streets and working the forges and looms, patrons ion the taverns drinking pixilated mead and eating pixilated mutton. I want to hear the fire in the fireplace and the sounds of horses being shod. Vanguard has all the ambiance of EQ1, enough said.

Now I just know a fanboy is just ready to jump in here and call me a troll but the point is everything I typed above is true and they cannot deny that. Sorry but this game needs a lot of work before they actually change people to play it. It is mid beta still, by December it may be ready for release.

 

Hey, It's great to know you did'nt bother to ask about the IMPORTANT SHIT!

• PERFORMANCE
• Why the game is in such horrible shape after 5 years of work
• blah blah

I could go on and on. Hey, way to go out there!

I guess "What happens in Carlsbad, stays in Carlsbad". Or, in this case Vegas.

 

Originally posted by Jackdog

I have not played every race myself but I don't see how anyone can say all the quests are well written. My favorite example is the orc starter quest.  I was on a slave ship supposedly a captive and my quest was to go kill a slaver take his key then free a slave and escape. Nice quest except the slavers are non aggressive. So here are 5 slavers standing within arms reach of each other. You kill one, take the key, unlock the slave standing there walk past the other 4 slavers and down the gangplank. For gods sake a nice damn quest if the slavers had been aggro, them being non aggro ruined all immersion. The majority of the rest of the quest are kill 5 of these and ten of those and collect 5 bumblebee snouts sort of thing. I had one where I had to lead a camel down a hill, and another where I had to lead a horse down the road. I did not do any of the diplomacy or crafting quests because crafting is just not my game style. Both of which were designed to say, "look here is the next higher level mob and mission terminals ( quest NPC) " which I have to admit were useful if not terribly difficult or hard quests to do.

Now to the immersion, I have yet to see a NPC do anything but stand there like a mission terminal in SWG. Towns are pretty much empty. Remember Tazoon in Horizons? Vanguard towns are about the same. The ambiance sucks, I like to her the sound of the ocean when near the ocean, I want to hear the hustle and bustle of a city when in the city. I want to see NPCs wandering the streets and working the forges and looms, patrons ion the taverns drinking pixilated mead and eating pixilated mutton. I want to hear the fire in the fireplace and the sounds of horses being shod. Vanguard has all the ambiance of EQ1, enough said.

Now I just know a fanboy is just ready to jump in here and call me a troll but the point is everything I typed above is true and they cannot deny that. Sorry but this game needs a lot of work before they actually change people to play it. It is mid beta still, by December it may be ready for release.

 

I hope you said that stuff in the quest assessments.

Other people liked the Orc starting quests, and thought they made sense for an Orc. I wondered about survivability for the totally inexperienced folks that the starting quests are obviously designed for, and now I know. How about this: In youre opinion, would the starting quests starting at night, with sleeping and/or drunk guards, who are aggro but highly inattentive, make the quests more immersive?

Understand, I'm not a vanboi or a vandev, I'm just interested in making MMOs better.

Originally posted by oakthornn

 

 Personally,you just sound like a WoWcoholic who's become accustomed to how WoW is right now..You most likely think your a hardcore elite level 60 stud decked out in Full MC,BWL,and AQ gear.. But remember something,comparing WoW's endgame to Vanguard's starting game is like comparing a wolf to a puffy lil poodle..

 

Dude, I don't even play WOW.

I am trying to get my Blood Mage past 10 but the server he is on keeps going down

mhm, so i can go where i want and do what i want. after all i have the freedom of choice,  and i can play the game the way i want, no?

the only problem is that those lvl 54382.725 mobs overthere are going to 0.00000006419 hit my char with my 66449372.543m agro radius.

so i first have to do those 5863.9 quests telling me to kill those 983164.98 rats.  sounds like the 54728.271th grinder to me.

This game leaves a lot to be desired, so far, everytime you go between chunks you bog down and lose your FPS, the characters are stiff and lifeless, all the characters, no matter how you change them look the same.  So far it seems to have the same itemization issues that EQ II has, all items look the same as the last item just a recolored.  The quest path is very confusing after you get to about level 9, i constantly hear people asking where am I supposed to go next?  Combat is stiff, unresponsive and pretty confusing with the the counterattacks and such.  Its hard to believe its been in planning for six years, it seems like six months at best?  I know what a lot of fan boi's say about the lag issues, "Get a better system or upgrade, there are debuggers running in the background", but my system is pretty decent, I have 3 ghz amd processor, 2 gigs of DDR 2 ram and a 256 MB ATI video card, so its not my system.  The characters in both EQ II and WoW have more life to them than this game,  eyes look around, hands move, they breath, but not in vanguard, they are like barbie dolls, stiff and plastic.  Don't get me wrong, they have some good ideas, with boats, caravans and being able to log off while in a group and still get your xp, but I don't think there is enough here to make it worth sticking with no matter how much the devs say.  I think that, even if Sigil says it isn't so, that SoE is rushing them to push the product out the door, things still break pretty hard on a daily basis, as a matter of fact on more than one occasion, Leth Nurae locked players in and the graphics inside the buildings in that town disappeared, this is just one example of the problems in the game, along with broken NPCs for quests and all that, but they still won't have enough time to get it smooth as it should be the hype associated with this game.  Don't take my word for it, just wait till it launches and buy a copy, give it a try, but you won't get that cash back.  I just had to speak up about my time in the beta, and i've been in since beta 3.  I also didn't hear any explanation why they couldn't log into the game for this interview either and I can't say as i'm suprised by it, but I would like to hear from Carolyn why they couldn't get into the game today.  It just seems kinda sad that they couldn't even log in for a game preview.

Originally posted by Jackdog

I have not played every race myself but I don't see how anyone can say all the quests are well written. My favorite example is the orc starter quest.  I was on a slave ship supposedly a captive and my quest was to go kill a slaver take his key then free a slave and escape. Nice quest except the slavers are non aggressive. So here are 5 slavers standing within arms reach of each other. You kill one, take the key, unlock the slave standing there walk past the other 4 slavers and down the gangplank. For gods sake a nice damn quest if the slavers had been aggro, them being non aggro ruined all immersion. The majority of the rest of the quest are kill 5 of these and ten of those and collect 5 bumblebee snouts sort of thing. I had one where I had to lead a camel down a hill, and another where I had to lead a horse down the road. I did not do any of the diplomacy or crafting quests because crafting is just not my game style. Both of which were designed to say, "look here is the next higher level mob and mission terminals ( quest NPC) " which I have to admit were useful if not terribly difficult or hard quests to do.

Now to the immersion, I have yet to see a NPC do anything but stand there like a mission terminal in SWG. Towns are pretty much empty. Remember Tazoon in Horizons? Vanguard towns are about the same. The ambiance sucks, I like to her the sound of the ocean when near the ocean, I want to hear the hustle and bustle of a city when in the city. I want to see NPCs wandering the streets and working the forges and looms, patrons ion the taverns drinking pixilated mead and eating pixilated mutton. I want to hear the fire in the fireplace and the sounds of horses being shod. Vanguard has all the ambiance of EQ1, enough said.

Now I just know a fanboy is just ready to jump in here and call me a troll but the point is everything I typed above is true and they cannot deny that. Sorry but this game needs a lot of work before they actually change people to play it. It is mid beta still, by December it may be ready for release.

 

 

Get to level 7ish and go to the cavern where you learn about Grakkor and his sacrifice, and then have to repeat his actions.  Makes up for the lousy early quests, and then some.

Originally posted by teakbois

Originally posted by Jackdog

I have not played every race myself but I don't see how anyone can say all the quests are well written. My favorite example is the orc starter quest.  I was on a slave ship supposedly a captive and my quest was to go kill a slaver take his key then free a slave and escape. Nice quest except the slavers are non aggressive. So here are 5 slavers standing within arms reach of each other. You kill one, take the key, unlock the slave standing there walk past the other 4 slavers and down the gangplank. For gods sake a nice damn quest if the slavers had been aggro, them being non aggro ruined all immersion. The majority of the rest of the quest are kill 5 of these and ten of those and collect 5 bumblebee snouts sort of thing. I had one where I had to lead a camel down a hill, and another where I had to lead a horse down the road. I did not do any of the diplomacy or crafting quests because crafting is just not my game style. Both of which were designed to say, "look here is the next higher level mob and mission terminals ( quest NPC) " which I have to admit were useful if not terribly difficult or hard quests to do.

Now to the immersion, I have yet to see a NPC do anything but stand there like a mission terminal in SWG. Towns are pretty much empty. Remember Tazoon in Horizons? Vanguard towns are about the same. The ambiance sucks, I like to her the sound of the ocean when near the ocean, I want to hear the hustle and bustle of a city when in the city. I want to see NPCs wandering the streets and working the forges and looms, patrons ion the taverns drinking pixilated mead and eating pixilated mutton. I want to hear the fire in the fireplace and the sounds of horses being shod. Vanguard has all the ambiance of EQ1, enough said.

Now I just know a fanboy is just ready to jump in here and call me a troll but the point is everything I typed above is true and they cannot deny that. Sorry but this game needs a lot of work before they actually change people to play it. It is mid beta still, by December it may be ready for release.

 

 

Get to level 7ish and go to the cavern where you learn about Grakkor and his sacrifice, and then have to repeat his actions.  Makes up for the lousy early quests, and then some.

Well I am surew they have some good stuff in the game, but I think I will wait and give it another shot a few months after release to let them add some more polish and content. Sigil has teh talent to make a good game, it just seems they goofed off for months and are now trying to push the game out two weeks before release. EQII did not get really good until about 2 or 3 months after launch. It just seems to be a SOE habit ~shrug~

I honestly think this has the potential ( god I hate that phrase after DnL abused it)  to be a good game several months down the road. Sigil has some good talent as I said, they just need to find a direction and stick to it. The closed beta wasted a lot of time backtracking and redoing instead of adding and polishing in my opinion. Unless they pull a SWG they have pretty much committed themselves to a course of action now.

 

Originally posted by Poldano

I hope you said that stuff in the quest assessments.

Other people liked the Orc starting quests, and thought they made sense for an Orc. I wondered about survivability for the totally inexperienced folks that the starting quests are obviously designed for, and now I know. How about this: In youre opinion, would the starting quests starting at night, with sleeping and/or drunk guards, who are aggro but highly inattentive, make the quests more immersive?

Understand, I'm not a vanboi or a vandev, I'm just interested in making MMOs better.

A lot of people made a lot of suggestions during closed beta. The slave quest would have been better if they had started you off in the compound and the free the slave quest would have been used around lvl 3 or so to teach aggressive mob behavior was my suggestion. Even in betas of games that I am having fun in I criticize everything that does not strike me right, it's the only way the genre will improve. I try not to beat dead horses but I do speak my mind. I have been getting on the nerves of  fan boys since August of 97 when I was in my first beta.

Originally posted by anarchyart

Originally posted by brostyn
The hook is having freedom to do what you want, when you want, how you want? I hate to break this to them, but that's in all MMOs. I highly doubt their raid game is gonna have much freedom once expansions start coming out, and the game is balanced towards raiders.

How about experience the game first hand and then call it a raid game. Also, can you name me one MMORPG that doesn't have raids?

Guild Wars doesn't have raids and from what I've read Ryzom doesn't have raids either and once upon a time WoW didn't have raids. At any rate I'm not spending money on Vanguard unless they provide a non raid server. Yep, chances are they won't so I'll look in other directions.

Spiritglow



P.S. Experience is really the best teacher :) After 6 years of  EQ1 I lasted less than one hour in EQ2 because I knew eventually I'd have to raid to experience the whole game. That realization was enough to prompt me to log out for good. I have bought Guild Wars and every Guild Wars expansion because I know the potential to experience the whole game without raiding is possible.

Personally, I've just about killed any idea of playing this because of the horrendously moronic NPCs / PvE.

If someone can tell me that past lvl 10 mobs are scripted to do more than 1 in 10 wanders 5m left then 5m right it'd help, I guess.

Ran through the Ogre Cave-thingie and Vault of the Ancients with my lvl 8 Dread Knight with a group of friends some lvls higher, and it was the most boring thing I think I've ever done in a computer game! 90% of mobs are totally static, don't care that their buddy got hammered with ranged attacks and just ran through them to get at the party. There were no combinations of ranged, melee and healer mobs in groups to challenge you... basically, it felt like the world outside, only linear with walls showing you where you can go. For crying out loud - Eye of the Beholder was more dynamic with its mobs than this!

Tell me it changes DRASTICALLY - that lvl up-to-16 dungeons are a total oversight and in no way represent the abilities of the devs, and I'll give it a try more, but so far - wooooo boy, this is boring.

I've played much more hardcore games then Vanguard (in terms of how many hours you have to play) Vanguard is a nice balance between hardcore and uh.. I guess core ?

In my personnal experience, games like Mankind, EVE, SWG were my best moments. They all lacked from the western style: Give quests and stuff to do at every corner of the streets but the community was and is still amazing. Being one of the guild leaders of a large guild and having a city of more then 300 citizens on SWG was an amazing experience. Suddently our focus was not raids or loots, we were geared more into trading, alliances, PVP, improvement of our city and such. Our guild really had guild nights were we worked towards our greatest achievements (Maybe having that unique Statue in front of our Cantina!)... our City, our Armors, our weapons, the best ressources, the best Buffs and at some point, our rare loot stores.

Walking in our city was laggy as Coronet lol... 

Seriously, that's what I see in Vanguard... Guilds comming up from scratch with a small outpost and then bang! They have a giant Metropolis with more player interaction then the main capitals. I already picture some guilds going out for a month, raiding non stop just make that unique Armor that no one will ever wear. The guild will simply display it in a house open to all.... All this to prove how united they are or uber :D

We did it for the silly Boba Fett armor and just by charging 100 credits per visitor, we managed to make thousands or credits... it proves that many people are interested in that type of gameplay. Our City had a weekly cost (around 12 million credits per week) and we never had a prob playing... The donations were always always beyond our costs.


So yes, I believe Vanguard is heading towards that aspect.. Perhaps not as City oriented as my post but the general idea behind is the same: Community Evolution.

Uber Gear will exist i'm sure but I don't actually think that everyone will be focused on that only... Most MMOs these days are based on the Uber High End gear. Don't tell me you did Molten Core for 200 hours only for the storyline.... You did it because you wanted your DKP and your gear.

 

Originally posted by Ironman2000
I would like to hear from Carolyn why they couldn't get into the game today.  It just seems kinda sad that they couldn't even log in for a game preview.

Well, first they lost the internet connection, then after we got that back, we could not log in.  Brad spent some time on the phone and then we ran slap bang into an update.  We did get into the game and they showed me a few things - like the really cool ships and housing, but I basically ran out of time. 

They had technical issues in the suite that morning and had already pushed the appointment back an hour.  Vanguard was the last game in the rotation for me - other press were there as well - and I just ran out of time.  Heh.  I munched on their lunch so I could have enough time to get as much info as possible before I had to go to make another appointment.

CES isn't like E3 where they have many stations all showing the same game, and usually, a local server with them.  They have one each in a hotel suite and we're dependent on the hotel's internet connection, etc.

Well i'm not to sure about  playing Vanguard.  After Beta testing it I realized it has no innovations.  And he talks about sailing a boat lol......heck i went back to Ultima Online after 5 yrs and now i'm sailing a boat again.  Got my fisherman out, killing sea serpents, love it.  There is no leveling system, the Uber loot does not impact the game as much as I thought it would.  Not like WOW or other MMOPRGS i've tried.  Its funny how this old game keeps me interested.  

Vanguard is huge, has decent graphics , but it seems cold and barren.  I didnt like the overall environment of the game. And I detest leveling ! 

Oh well, glad I tried the Beta before buying, I know its not finished but I think I saw enough.  

I may give it one more honest try in a week or 2 but i'm not sure.

I'll admit I wasn't a huge Vanguard fan until I started to beta it, yea it's laggy, yea it has 'bugs' (although the only major bug i've encounted is falling thru the floor at CB), but looking at it you realise it's 'old school' MMOing, everything is earned, you HAVE to explore to get anywhere, and it deffinitly doesn't shove you down a 'you MUST level' path.

One thing that I've noted in the game is in fact player housing actally works, it's not an instanced portal that leads you to a room that doesn't really 'do' anything in the game, it is actally there, DnL promised it and failed, Vanguard have finally realised it..  Someone posted 'The Uber Guilds will own citys to show their leetness', well from a PVP view, don't like them? BURN IT DOWN! This is what will make the game it's the player created content further down the line.. Theres only one game I know thats done somthing on this level and thats would be EVE, also a small 'will die within the first year' game and look at it now, it's not the biggest subcriber based game but it's damn well known. Vanguard will thrive off it's player created content, it's the one thing if done perfect that will put this game on the map.

So all in all Vanguard may be a buggy unineresting game on release but come back to it in 6 months time when the 'leet guilds' control the world and you'll be loving it..

You have to love how they make up new terminology just to avoid the 'hardcore' label.  A 'core' player instead of 'hardcore'?  Well if you make up a new word it must be something different!

But then they say 80% of the players of their game will "play 2 – 3 hours a day, 3 or 4 days a week. Perhaps they would play longer sessions on weekends and would plan a day to dedicate a larger chunk of time for a raid."

12 hours each week?  Plus dedicating time for raids?  Sounds pretty hardcore to me.  Sure there will be people who play a lot more, but playing 3-4 times a week is NOT a casual schedule. 

I guess it's a good sign when a game wants to avoid the 'hardcore' label.  Hardcore game mechanics dedicated to a small fraction of the potential market of players have driven MMORPG design too long.   

Whatever the game mechanics, the art is atrocious.  People have been comparing it to EQ2 which remnds of a Penny Arcade quote:

"I know there must be artists working at SOE. The only thing I can think of is that they are simply cogs in some corporate machine. They must be given no freedom at all. In fact after looking at the game I wouldn’t be surprised if they are beaten daily." http://www.penny-arcade.com/2006/02/15

Looks like they got some of those EQ2 artists all right.  At least for the characters.   The monsters look a little better at least.

yup

started as a fox based character

all beginning quests have npcs just standing around waiting to be killed - found this "very exciting"

haven't been back since