General Discussion

Carolyn Koh is keeping busy down in Las Vegas for CES, today, she's talking to Brad McQuaid and Paul Luna from Sigil's Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.

With their marketing collaboration with SoE, Brad McQuaid and Paul Luna of Sigil Games showed Vanguard: Saga of Heroes at CES 2007 at invited press appointments. After introductions, we chatted about our gaming history and when Paul asked if I were familiar with Brad, my answer was tongue in cheek as I replied that I was familiar with Aradune, a wood-elf ranger in EverQuest who wore green splint mail and implied that he hacked Soulfire - the Paladin epic weapon so he could wield it.

We waited to connect to the server and I asked Brad, "Who's idea was it to put Aradune is stinky! Graffiti in the Qeynos sewers?" Bill Trost was the answer - one of the original team of developers of EverQuest. We digressed into how quickly screenshots of Aradune corpses made their way around the internet. "So I forgot to put up enduring breath in Kedge Keep." Brad said laughingly, but enough of old EverQuest anecdotes and toward Vanguard:Saga of Heroes.

Read the whole article here.

They split up players in "casual"  "core" and "hard core"

Now I wonder how the loot is split up,maybe "non" "crap-medium" and "uber"  Imo problems of modern mmo games is not that you cant kill stuff and level , main problem is that unless you are in a big raid you never find any decent loot. There are some hard core players that dont like raiding and those never find decent loot either.

“We wanted to recreate the experience for the old school DAoC and EQ player. The player who wants to be challenged, but we also did away with the tedium.” Said Brad.

Paul continued, “Also the WoW players who wants more immersion and challenge. Those are the players that Vanguard will appeal to.”

I have yet to see any challenge or immersion which is what I have been looking for but it just isn't there. So far its been more like weak thin and boring.

I would like to see your character thrown into the storyline getting you interested and on the path so far I have only seen one of those type of starting area and even there its not clear whats going on. 

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?

Originally posted by Dento

“We wanted to recreate the experience for the old school DAoC and EQ player. The player who wants to be challenged, but we also did away with the tedium.” Said Brad.

Paul continued, “Also the WoW players who wants more immersion and challenge. Those are the players that Vanguard will appeal to.”

I have yet to see any challenge or immersion which is what I have been looking for but it just isn't there. So far its been more like weak thin and boring.

I would like to see you're character thrown into the storyline getting you interested and on the path so far I have only seen one of those type of starting area and even there its not clear whats going on. 

 

Have yet to see any challenge and immersion? What level have you gotten to? After level 10 the game starts to mean a lot more. Before then is just getting you used to the controls and world. Around level 10 the quests and tasks get harder and the level of immersion rises with them. Go and see!

Asheron's call = No raids

The first 10 levels should be getting the player hooked on the story, this is when most people are still reading the quest info screen after that people tend to read the info screen less and less especially if the first handful of quest that they did read lack any interesting lore or plot.

this is the perfect time to get me involved and hooked because after I fully understand the system and have not found anything interesting regarding the plot I will stop looking for it

"Freedom of play" is a great thing, and overall this should be a nice game.

One disappointment, however, is the "locked encounter" thing.  I have no problem with locking experience (i.e., whomever attacks first, gets the experience for the kill).  But locking encounters creates an artificial barrier.  Sure, it may prevent players from "stepping on one another's toes", but isn't this part of the MMORPG experience? 

I'd much rather have my gameplay occasionally interrupted by an asshat, that to play in a sandbox with artificial invisible barriers.

Trains were part of what made EQ1.  Zone arguments over kill-stealing added to the atmosphere too. 

If there are too many invisible barriers and artificial rules in a game, then play will feel more like a solo RPG than a MMORPG.

I was really dead set against liking this game.  Then I beta tested it and found it has hooked me.  The only tedium that bothers me is the corpse-runs and the trains.  Actually, I wouldn't mind trains if dieing wasn't such a pain.  You hear this over and over  by the die-hards, "don't like corpse runs?  Lrn2play."  Well I don't care how perfect your group is, you're still going to have wipes because some idiot came along and trained the entire non-instanced dungeon on you.  In fact, we all know there are idiots that go out and do this on purpose just to be arsehats.   I'm not whining,  I don't want an easy game.  I like that the banks won't magically port your stuff from one continent to the other.  I love the travel.  I like that there isn't much hand-holding.  I love the diplomacy sphere, which is something else I was sure I was going to hate.  But the Corpse-Runs...archaic.  Yes there are alternatives to running naked, but in reality, they just don't work for me and I'm not going to let that argument overshadow the rest of the game, because I do like this game.

Right now, the game is buggy, badly buggy and a lot of quests are broken, but not any worse than other games that have launched, and they are patching constantly and I'm seeing huge improvements with the last minute patches.  In fact, my FPS doubled with the last patch. 

I went from having very bad expectations of this game to completely turning around and really enjoying this game.  If you buy at launch, just be patient, because the game isn't finished yet.  But even unfinished, if you want a game that you aren't going to race through, that you will slowly get into and take time to smell the roses, read the quests and get into the intrigue of the world that plays out in the diplomacy (not just a card game, there are plots revealed while playing those cards), then you'll like this game.