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Re-release - Q4 - with expansion?
Teala
Member RarePosts: 7,627
OK. Speculate. We know Vanguard is not doing to hot with the mainstream gamers. So what will Sigil/SOE need to do to assure the success of this game? As it is now Vanguard is not the cats meow it should be and I seriously doubt it will be in 3 to 6 months. However, what if Sigil manages to fix and tweak the game to the point that it is significantly better then it is today. Even if they managed to do this how will they get people that have all ready given up on it or new players that are not going to play based on the bad rep the game currently has to play?
Repackage it. Re-release. Update the requirements info on the box - don't BS this time. Add additional content with an expansion and then re-release. To get those that have a very bad taste in their mouth who bought the game initially and left, give them another 1 month free trial with the re-release. Put out a massive ad campaign just prior to re-release.
Discuss.
Comments
By gameplay structure I mean: redo diplomacy, redo the class tree and change everything up, redo the quest system to lay out better and more robust quests. You should be able (if you wish) to do quests single-player from the newbie zone through 50. Redo rewards and respec all weapons from 1 to 50. Adjust the numbers up if you have to. A +6 int only necklace at 25 is pitiful.
Add a way to sell items. (The market system was the worst I have ever seen.) Add a way to put containers in bank vaults if EVERY quest in the game is going to vomit stuff into your inventory and/or take 3-5 items collected to finish one.)
Redo travel entirely. I like some travel, but I fear that it won't fly with most players.
Also, I found the game horribly boring, unengaging, and unsatisfying. Obviously a significant portion of others thought so too. (Judging from the posts I've been seeing and people I've talked to.) For some it seems just fine.
IMO when a game doesn't do well from the start, it is really hard to get it off the ground again.
I would never consider playing vanguard a second time no matter what they did to it. I wouldn't play it if it were free. (And it especially irks me that I have to call them to cancel. That sinks any chance of me trying any SOE game in the near future.)
However, as there are some people still playing SWG, I'd say there is some sub-set of people that will play ANYTHING. But are they enough?
*shrug* those are my thoughts off the top of my head.
I think to really make it work you will need to completely restructure the entire game; which will not happen. But here's some suggestions to at least make it better.
1. Condense some of that coding and rework the central code. When one plays on a 2300 dollar rig and achieves lag and slow FPS that tells you the game has way too much "junk" jarbeled in the code....very similiar to the cities in SWG during the first three years. Same type of situation. Also, getting rid of unnecessary code will also help out with the huge files that I know aren't all being useful.
2. Eliminate at least 50% of the bugs within the next three months. People hate paying for beta; plain and simple. While many MMOs have rocky starts, a 3rd generation MMO (as Brad said Vanguard is) should not suffer from bugs as bad as this. WoW and EQ2 are both second generation MMOs and the bugs they experienced paled in comparison to Vanguard's problems. For a 3rd generation MMO, these bugs should not be as prevailant and should be nipped in the bud ASAP.
3. Hire some talented folks (or force the ones they have now) to come up with better player animations. Nothing bothers me more than seeing my character not looking at the mob he's fighting. He just blankly stares horizontitly (sp) no matter what size the MOB is...it could even be 1 foot tan and he'll be looking as if its his height. The running animations are very first generation MMO, bad implementation of a model animation...very bad. Spells remind me of those little sparklys and many spells are just outright embarassing for the damage they place onto MOBs. Also, get rid of that friggin seam down the middle of the player characters...I feel like Im staring at one of those easter chocolate bunnies.
4. Increase the character customizations. Those sliders really don't do anything for your character. Sure you can slide all those sliders all you want but for some really weird reason you'll still end up looking like everyone else. Also, four hairstyles and 3 shades of face is just not 3rd gen MMO to me at all. Reminds me of a Western Lineage 2.
5. Redo crafting. All that clicking to make one damn board and then doing 825,287 more times to reach lvl 25 (lvl 25 is the lucky number for carpentors to actually start making something that is sellable and worth the 5 damn hours to make). The crafting is just plain ridicolous. It's taking a good idea and stretching it to one extreme to the point where you can't stretch it anymore.
6. Eliminate some of the races or shrink the number of starter cities.. There are so many races and the world is so large that if you choose a race that isn't popular, you'll be one lonely person. Make some of the races unlockable or eliminate half of the starter cities. If you're not a Thestrian Human, a Kojan human, or a Qualia(sp?) human your starter cities will be very quiet. When I first saw the world I thought "WOW!! Its freaking huge" Then when I realized about 65% of all that world are actually starter cities and lvl 1-20 mobs, I was very disappointed.
7. Stay away from those double xp weekends for at least another six months. Contrary to popular belief, throwing two double xp weekends back to back in the first month of release is like Brad telling you guys they gotta get crazy to retain people. If the MMO is so successful in the first place, those "gimmicks" aren't needed. And that's what they are...gimmicks
It'll be hard work to get Vanguard up to par to the lvl many people had thought it would be for a 3rd gen MMO. Maybe that was the problem afterall; maybe many of us placed Vanguard on a trophy ledge so high that it would bound to fall off. I don't know...the game is ehhh ok. But I know of MMOs that are five years older with more innovation. It's my opinion but that's just how I feel.
Maybe in six months to a year, those problems will be fleshed out and the game can become one of the best to ever hit the shelves. You never know...it's certainly not too late.
People who have to create conspiracy and hate threads to further a cause lacks in intellectual comprehension of diversity.
I didnt find the game itself toooo bad, but the god awful graphics and the UI / Font just turned me off it eventually. It looks like it was made 10 years ago, not the cutting edge of PC wizardry.
Yes the graphics look ok from a distance, but from close up.... the textures are flat, boring and colourless, the particle effects when fighting are so dull, the models are nasty, and everything looks like a bland washed out plastic model. When compared to other MMO's that are around now it comes off as a second rate wannbe. And whats up with the UI? Apart from being copy n pasted from WoW, its HUGE with no way to shrink it, with the names and numbers on the screen looking like they came from a C64, with horrible jagged bitmap edges.
If they could port it to a much better graphics engine, redo the UI to be more modern, sort out the bugs, add in a ton more content, sort out travel, sort out levelling, and sort out PvP, then maybe it will be a better game.
"When people don't know much about something, they tend to fill in the blanks the way they want them to be filled in. They are almost always disappointed." - Will Wright
Let's face it, anyone who has played Vanguard can tell you. This game is empty. There is missing content. There is missing graphics. Most importantly there is missing PEOPLE!
This is a MMORPG. As such, I expect to run into other players. I expect to run into other players A LOT. It's the way of MMORPG's. You see other people, and you decide whether to ignore them, persue them as being a friend or choose to make them an enemy. In Vanguard, I am lucky to see or hear ANYONE at all. Ever.
This is a by-product of the game being way too big . Worse, it is big for no apparent reason. This game is stupidly expansive in its sprawling size. Mobs are sparse and uninteresting. You've got to travel long distances (for a MMORPG) all the time to complete quests or simply to find something to kill. Meanwhile, on such a large map, the player base is strung out too far. There's simply no way to build any type of comraderie with anyone, unless you are prone to chat in shout or ask for groups in shout. This game has zero community. It's a faithless bore.
Also, there is the performance issue. The game runs terribly on my machine . . . and my machine runs EVERY other MMORPG at advanced settings with absolutely zero problems. Now, these performance issues would not be an issue if I felt that the REASON I was having performance problems was becaus the game provided cutting-edge graphics and sound. But this game offers absolutely nothing special with its sound, and the graphics are not nearly as good as Lineage 2 . . . which, environmentally, is vastly superior to Vanguard.
Lineage 2 got it right. Lineage 2 is a huge world, but it started out much smaller than it is now. NCSoft increased the size of the game, and continues to do so, with the release of FREE expansions basically on a twice-yearly basis. This allowed the community to get to know each other, and to establish friendships, clans and alliances. Vanguard's size makes it virtually impossible to do any of this.
I'll be cancelling my account at the end of the month as well. I don't see the point in paying for a game that is basically a single-player game. I thought I was getting a MMORPG. Even if it were free-to-play, I probably still wouldn't play it, because it just offers nothing GOOD to do.
http://aion.24-hrgaming.net
You know I play this game. I'll be the first one to step forward and tell you the game is in pretty bad shape currently. I've done as much in my review I did on the game. Now I know what the game is like but for some reason I think when someone post about a game the way the above poster did it makes you wonder did this person really play the game? You never see anyone or hear anyone ever? Really? LMAO! Runs terrible on your machine yet you say nothing about your systems specs?
As the person that started this thread I asked a specific question and made a little request about if Sigil should re-release the game and how they might go about doing it and ask others their input on how Sigil might do it, and what does the above poster do instead. Rants, BS's...and then advertises Lineage II. Totally disregarding the topic of the thread. I guess his reading comprehension is a little below average huh?
Nice. Thanks for totally derailing this thread and turning it into a slam Vanguard thread. God I swear some people. ::shakes her head::
LOL! You're right the voice overs are atrocious. I think they sat in a cubicle or some sound guys office and took a mic, grabbed some guy walking down the hall and told him to read the text on these pages into the microphone. Same goes for the female ones. Sheeeesh...they did a lot of the sounds really well and totally missed the boat on voice overs. So yes lets hope they redo the voice overs.
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force"
Mainstream gamers ? The servers where crowded for the free 30 days. None of them was a mainstream gamer. 99.8% of those people did know about bugs and situation of the game. Few of them left because of the bugs.
Vanguard is a sad and tragic story story. I can see a lot of good intentions, i can see that some people really thought about how to do things. But the product is a failure. Its like there was no project management, no art director and noone who really knows whats happening in the mmo world.
Its not like much content isnt finished due to the early release. Its like nobody ever had a plan about content. The sun in Qualia is very bright and immersive but a cold sun. Every art director who is worth his salt would have reconized that the sunlight there lacks yellow and red color. Thats nothing that costs money or needs 100 manhours of development. An art director would have seen this on day 4 of development.
Buildings, castles and stuff are nice done and sometimes very detailed. But then they are often not fitting into the landscape. Everything is based on right angles and every building looks like a render of a CAD workstation. The whole architecture is as cold as the qualian sunlight. Every building is brand new. Nothing there is worn. Clean, new and cold. Nobody recognized that or was it intendet to create a ice cold game lacking heart and soul ?
Bumpmapping is to hard, and there is no slider to reduce it. Although lowered bumpmapping would improve performance. Is the engine crap or are they dumb at Sigil or was it all intention ?
No pun's and similarities to real world in a fantasy game. I dont need and dont want to have revolting prisoners and i dont want to have tribes with names that sound like words in real life (Veehad). There is enough undead and unholy crap to kill and hunt.
The world itself is quite nice. I like the models, most armour and weapons where ok. More haircuts and faces would be good. Toons should be able to look at things (no static neck) Quest where ok up to level 18 or so. I agree that a game must have solo quests up to level cap. They should be stories people want to play through like someone reads a chapter of a book every evening. There should be those epic group grind quests too, because some people love them *shrugs* The textboxes are 100% contrary to the immersive design to the landscapes. Again... who was/is the art director in charge and who was project manager to coordinate the development departments ?
If all this and a lot other things change i would give it a 2nd try on a new reborn server (no highlevels )
Runs terrible on your machine yet you say nothing about your systems specs?
Yes, most of us can learn.
What we learned is that if you post your system specs, that each and every fault of the game will be blamed on your personal hardware.
Such diversion tactics can be easily avoided.
Back to the original topic:
I think Vanguard had it's chance and lost it. Some people stated that they will check it out later. This will most likely be after a major feature upgrade or expansion. However I don't see such a thing in the near future. Until it happens there are several more attractive games out competing for your attention. The question is how likely will people give a game that was disappointing a second chance instead of giving a brand new game a first chance? I think it will be very unlikely...
I wonder why you complain about people telling you to shut up, when almost every post u make is in the Vanguard forum saying that it sucks, or that "they blew it" or even that people who like Vanguard sucks and are just liars. And then, you dont mind telling everybody who like the game to "shut up" and they are just obsessed Vanboys... Do us a favor and go play you favorite game (i really wonder if someone like you likes anything at all)...
Sorry, about the rant but seeing the same person making the same posts bashing and trolling like a little kid in every vanguard post just makes me sick. Oh and btw did you try the game? I bet you didnt bother, since you know it sucks.
I agree. And given that SIgil ran out of money on the original project, I don't see how they could possibly fund a major overhaul and update at this point. They are doing damage control right now, and that's about it. Even with the debates on the number of subscribers the game has now, I doubt they're pulling in enough to fund new projects.
And then on top of that, I really don't think that this dev team has what it takes to overhaul the game the way it needs to be overhauled. They haven't released a good patch yet, and they're stuck in Brad's "vision" which seems to change with his mood.
Nah, it's just not going to happen.
It all depends on what your definition of success is. If Sigil is looking to keep it a niche game they really just need to finish some of the unfinsihed areas and polish it up a bit. If Sigil is looking for a player base in the millions than I believe the game would have to be revamped and made much more casual and forgiving. As much as I hate to say if you made VG in to a WoW clone it would be huge. If for no other reason but the number of things there are to do in VG compared to WoW. Imagine WoW with housing, diplomacy, a meaningful crafting system, boats...etc. That is money in the bank right there. It would however alienate the current player base and if they didnt do it right you would have another NGE on your hands. Not good at all.
I dont know if the SOE marketing machine would get behind another release of VG and I dont think that Sigil has the cash to fund a major marketing campaign. Im pretty sure as G&H gets closer to release SOE will be sinking cash in to marketing that and VG will have to stand on its own. I think the only way you could get SOE to fund this re-release would be if Sigil decided to do the WoW type of revamp. For now I would say that all Sigil can do is what they are doing. Keep fixing bugs,balancing classes and doing damage control.
qft
Trying to save this Frankenstein's monster by repackaging and rebranding it would be throwing good money after bad, and SOE will never do it. The marketing and advertising costs would be significant, certainly not worth the gamble that they might attract back some of the droves of people who left in disgust after just one month of release. Sure, they'll keep trying to fix it up and patch bits on here and there, treading water on the backs of the subs from diehard fans who love this game's potential and are happy to ignore its glaring faults. They'll probably also send out an email to all ex-subscribers in six months or a year, telling them how much they've changed and improved the game and inviting them back to have another look... it costs almost nothing after all. And no doubt the Free 14 Day Trials will start appearing here and there when they feel confident that they'r efinally out of beta and ready for release. But by then it will be consigned to the Vault where failed dreams go to die, and the Next Big Thing will have left it for dust.
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Vanguard seems to be torn apart at the moment between those who believed it would be one thing and those who see it being taken bit by bit (patch by patch) in another direction. After waiting so long for something and finding out its not what you believed it would be (mis-represented?) then the players are going to be polarised. Between hard and casual gamers( dont like using the term but there is no other).
Therefore the most important thing to happen IF it was ever to be re-packaged and re-released would be to make a stand on what it represents in the world of MMO's. WOWification or the VISION. Either way it is going to hurt,but IF you are going to attempt to Re-package Vanguard then someone needs to say exactly where vanguard stands.
If/when Vanguard doesn't meet SOE's expectations, it will be NGE'd. You know this is true. It's that simple. And then you will blame WoW again, instead of blaming lame devs who can't come up with an original idea of their own. You'll blame WoW for dumbing down MMOs, and yet keep paying these douchebags your monthly fee.
You wanna know why WoW is so successful? Because it's a FINISHED product. It's polished, and sure it has bugs, all software has bugs, but nothing that is game breaking. Anyways, bring on the fanbois typical "gtfo of our forum wow noob lolz"
First, to develop a full on expansion that people will pay for will take a good amount of dev time. That is time that should at present be spent making the game live up to what was supposed to originally be released.
Second, to re-release in Q4 of this year will place it directly in competition with a number of other games set to come out: Warhammer, Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Gods and Heroes, Hero's Journey and Chronicles of Spellborn. Releasing against no new releases (apart from an expansion pack) probably has given Vanguard more players than they, most likely, would have gotten otherwise. The costs of repackaging, marketing etc could very well be a bad thing for the bottom line. Not to mention my first point, taking dev time away from fixing the plethora of problems, saying "just wait til q4 when we re-release all your issues will be addressed" sounds too much like what was said for a year or so of SWG's life and most of us know what happened after those statements: CU and NGE.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/7300033012
To answer your question:
No, In my opinion I think a re-release for the game would be a disaster. LOTRO, AoC, WAR, CoS, GaH are being released this year, and as much as I like Vanguard, I don't think they can compete with these big names. If Vanguard has any chance at all, they would have to put together their devs and do a overhaul on most parts of the game.
Whatever they choose to do, they need to do it fast. This game needs to take a page out of EQ2s book and fix the game at launch, instead of waiting over a year to get it right.
_____________________________
SWG- (retired) 2 year vet.
WoW- (retired) 3 year vet.
EQ2- (retired) 1.5 year vet
Waiting for:
AoC // WAR // Darkfall
A lot of us veterans (meaning year-long 1st gen players ) have now grown up into our 20s and 30s, and not just a few have tried a dozen different games. It seems a good community is more important to many than a list of features or bugs.
I dont doubt for a second that WAR and AoC will have a good initial fanbase, based on DAOC and AO the companies already have experience and fans anyway. But most likely, as in every PvP-centric game I have played so far, the community will have a large share of loud dramaqueens and wtfownzors. I dont care, but lots do, and what you may call "carebear" is actually a sort of gamer who really just has 2 choices atm: Play WoW on a small PvE server carefully selected for having little drama, or play Vanguard. WAR and Conan wont change that.
Vanguard's viability is dependent on whether the other games that are coming out this year are good or not. If any one of it's Competitors are good then Vanguard will be the next Planetside or Matrix Online.
Of course they could come up with some massive changes that will change it's situation but things do not look good for it. After the double XP weekend my friends list of about 20 people are all offline and have not logged in since. These folks were mid teens to mid 20s so and with the extreme grind in Vanguard I don't think they re-rolled. I know for me personally I would not re-roll a alt given the grind.
I think Vanguard has reached it's maximum number of Players. Their only hope is to try to keep them.
Edit: To continue with the OP's original topic, I think they could change the game around if they can somehow make grouping quick and easy. Grouping in Vanguard is really fun. The problem is the time it takes to gather a group, travel to a certain point, etc. I am not sure how to do it but they need to make grouping easy and most importantly, quick. Take out all the bad about grouping.
Plus, they need to fix all the grouping related bugs post haste. Once those elements are in place then they need to make a major announcement or a re-release with double XP for all 3 spheres. That is on top of increasing the current XP by double. I know there a small percentage that babble on about the "journey being more important", "slow leveling" , etc. That is fine if you want to do that but most people want to be at max level so we have more people to play with, have the best spells, and consume the best content. That is just the way this whole thing works. Other slow play styles can be in the game if you want but if they do not make some very major changes this game is in serious trouble. If they continue on the current path and cater to the Silky Venom crowd this game will go the way of Planetside and the Matrix online.