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Vanguard: Saga of Heroes: Producer's Letter
Szark
News ManagerMember Posts: 4,420
Vanguard Producer Thom Terrazas has posted a lengthy letter to the community detailing the issues and areas that the Vanguard team will be focusing on in the coming months.
These are pretty exciting times for Vanguard right now. The team is currently putting the finishing touches on Phase 2 and 3 of Update 3 after having launched an astounding performance update in Phase 1. We received a lot of great feedback from you on Phase 1, and we're going to continue our focus in delivering consistently high quality, engaging and in-demand content in each update.
I'd like to introduce myself to many of you that do not know me. My name is Thom Terrazas, Producer for Vanguard. In a few words, I've been with Sony Online Entertainment over 9 years (unofficially). During that time, I have and still do work, with some of the greatest people in the MMO world of whom I intend to solicit feedback from and use to my advantage. One of the best things that I have learned in this industry is to work closely with your team, while at the same time allow them to do their jobs and show off their talents - and we have some amazingly passionate and talented developers working on Vanguard. I give them a lot of credit for launching an MMO of this caliber, and you'll continue to see their talents shining through in our future updates.
;)
Read more here.
Comments
It all sounds good to me, but the forums community is throwing a tantrum and threatening to quite over the proposals. I wish they wouldas a poster suggested, Poll the player population and not let the vocal "hardcore purists" bully the devs into back down from the changes.
Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
Lao-Tze
You cant bully him, hes used to be the Planetside lead, and he did use the forums.
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"Anyone posting on this forum is not an average user, and there for any opinions about the game are going to be overly critical compared to an average users opinions." - Me
"No, your wrong.." - Random user #123
"Hello person posting on a site specifically for MMO's in a thread on a sub forum specifically for a particular game talking about meta features and making comparisons to other titles in the genre, and their meta features.
How are you?" -Me
Its a shame they are trying to watter down one of the last *Hardcore* MMOs...its a niche that needs to be filled! However I see how its needed for them to stay afloat, besides just wanting some of the WOW pie ^^.
"Optimizations; stability; optimizations; stability; optimizations; stability."
At least they are adressing the main problem with the game...
On a personal note, im interested to see how they change the characters...could be for the better b/c some races just look awful...maybe Raki will finally get a tail?
~HappyGaming
The only changes that catch my eye as possible drawbacks to the game are the ones that make the experience easier like death penalties and faster leveling.
That being said, I'm not going to jump nor even stand at the edge of a bridge until I know what that entails. To many people flip out whenever a dev posts an idea and it really needs to stop. I'm all for constructive criticism and petitions to prevent moves the community doesn't like, but all of this "I'm quitting" garbage needs to stop. At least wait to see how a change will be implimented and what kind of affect it will have.
I couldn't agree more, they are just ideas they have been throwing around. He even says he wants player feedback. It is not going to do any good if everyone just goes "I'm quitting". If you have better ideas let them know, he said they created a thread for people to say what they would do if they were in the driver seat. Instead of complaining write up (get your friends to write up) ideas that could make the game better.
Worst idea ever.
Mc Quaid ruined that game by listening too much to the players, trying to catter to everybody, and slipping away from their initial design ideas (aka the well known "vision").
How can the current producer believe it will be different this time ?!
All these ideas are great but I won't personally play vanguard until they get rid of or change the whole running back to find your corpse aspect. To me it's a game killer, nothing more boring or droll then having to fight through 15 respawned mobs 1 minute after I already cleared them just to find my equipment. Its tedious and annoying.
Your in the wrong game genre then. MMORPG's are not meant to be easy...
I wish them luck. As to Mr McQuaid's vision, he never had any, he was constantly chasing it and never did find it. Lay the blame for all the layoffs to McQuaid, he is the one who took the money and ran.
Maybe it's just me, but this letter sounded strangely familiar. Kinda reminds me of SWG's pre-CU hoopla.
SOE: "We're going to add fun back into SWG... blah blah blah"
SWG Players: "WTF is this? This isn't what we asked for! This isn't Star Warsy!!! Holy Crap how could they screw up THIS bad?!!!"
Making the game fun is fine. But "fun" is totally dependent on who's fun we're talking about here. I REALLY don't think SOE Devs are the ones to be defining fun. Let the players decide. Let those players who have been with the game the longest have the biggest say. VG simply isn't going to be for everyone and it shouldn't try to be.
Fix what truly needs to be fixed, but be very very careful about going beyond that.
Playing WoT now.
Favorite All-Time Games: Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Lord of the Rings Online
You don't have to go back to your tombstone. You can turnaround when you respawn and right click on the alter and summon your belongings. You do however take a hit on the durability of your items. All in all it's not that big of a hit though, at least not from what I've seen.
Exactly!!!!!!!!!
Wrong McQuaid failed because he catered to a niche market - the hardcore gamers. There just isn't enough. Personally i'm happy that this is happening. Who knows, they might make the pvp great.
What exactly is so hard about retracing your steps? Seriously, corpse looting is either possible or impossible. If it's possible it's easy. If it's impossible it just ruins the game for everyone. Corpse looting is a bad mechanic. It makes no sense what so ever to have corpse looting unless their is a threat that someone else will loot your corpse. Otherwise its a timesink. Timesinks are not hard, they are time consuming and painful. Hard is like level 30 in HGL. Try that. It doesn't take time and it's hard.
Thanks for the NGE- thats a proven record of success...
Isn't that what the dev wrote?
Well so much for the vision hehe..
well to be honest...im sad this game got and will be watered down even more.
____________________
It`s alright
AC2,AO,D&L,Lotro,VsoH,SWG,Uo,HGL,Drunners,CoH,GW,Potbs,PWI
Eq2,Dofus,WoW,WWIIO,Ryzom,Planetside,EvE,TR,DDO,RFonline,FOM,VC,..etc blabla
also hobbies....staring at loadingbars
tell that to the panzies who PvP in a consequence-free game like WoW and call themselves "UBER".
there are a lot of them, which is why so many companies are trying to duplicate it. Investors what to be certain the game will earn them a nice return on their cash, so developers point to WoW and say "look at all those people who play that" so investors get exciting, until the developers start moving away from teh design paradime that they were initially shown....then the get nervous. It sucks, but lets face it, making a AAA mmorpg these days is an EXTREMELY expensive proposition.
I have a lot of wild ideas and things I'd love to see in a game, but if it was me who was paying the tens of millions, out of my own pocket, I'm not so sure I'd have the balls to drift to far away from what I'm certain will earn me a return on the investment. It's easier to get crazy with other peoples money, but then you still have to answer to them, lest they pull the plug and leave you with a payroll to meet and no cash.
Writing innovative games was a lot easier then the art was 256 colors or less.......
Frank 'Spankybus' Mignone
www.spankybus.com
-3d Artist & Compositor
-Writer
-Professional Amature
They lost me when they said "remove EE" ... actually, it was a bit before that when they decided to add portals, consolidate the economies and put little effort into the dungeons and underworld of VG for the mid-level players (20-40)... (but EE was the straw) Then with update after update and the mentions of Raiding, and guild focus... I'd like to say it was around Beta 2.5 that it all started to go downhill, but the only thing I can think of around that time was the plugging in of the generic combat and dumbing down of the class differentiation. I want the old AE Dreadknights back damnit! Oh yeah, and make people afraid to travel at night!! No all around infravision for everyone....
Ugh, I guess there was a lot that pissed me off about the evolution of that game now that I think about it.
Testers with a sense of "entitlement"....elitism to newer testers...massive one or two person campaigns to get their own way on certain matters....whether it fit the game or not..or was good for the game on the whole...the big picture. Loudest squeaky wheel getting the grease. I am betting that most of those people don't even play Vanguard now.
Some of that did ...indeed far as I am concerned put VG on the wrong path. I think McQuaid strayed from the "Vision" because he was too worried about trying to please everyone so they would buy his game.
As I've said before, its really too bad there wasn't a better way to pick and choose testers.... some of us were dedicated....some weren't. So some of the blame lies there at the feet of the testers...in that regard, the rest well...was poor management and running out of time and money.
I still think its a shame..and really am not convinced that SOE will fix whats broken entirely. Been a customer of theirs since 1999.....heh.
Logged into the game again a couple days ago...still the hitching and lag etc, ...I have a dual core machine with all the bells and whistles. Still obligated to use /flush and small things like invisible chickens, no bird ..just the yellow name running around...things like that ...that should have been fixed way back when.
Cend
People who can't stand a little bit of hardship ...shouldn't be playing this game. This is a gamer's game...for experienced players. Now that sounds elitist I am sure...but its the truth. I have seen too many people come and go with their "ideas" on how to dumb this game down even more than its been already under the new ownership. Its sad. Some of these dumbing down ideas seem to be promoted by the new producer.
If this continues...the original Vanguard will end up being a pale shadow of what it should have been...or a sorry clone of Wow's.
Cend
Its all about the bottom line and stealing away some of those Wow players...heh. Then we get to see complaints of VG is too hard!! I am taking my marbles and going home..type of threads. Unfortunately.
Seen it happen too often ....I really don't hold any hope for any sensible solutions...when looking for that extra buck is in the middle of that equation...someone is gonna lose and its not the easy mode players thats for sure.
I am almost resigned to this fact.
Cend
There is always the "try-before-buying" crowd...and alot don't bother reporting anomalies, bugs etc. They're there to play..period. But then again..finding out after the fact that there was only ONE QA tester..kind of puts things into perspective as to why things that got reported ...never got fixed. Too many problems and not enough hands to work on them. I am positive there was a long long long list of bugs and problems that just never got to see the light of day, because there weren't enough people to do work on them.
Cend
From a devs perspective, making a game strictly for the hardcore elite is a Lose / Lose / Lose proposition :
1. There's just no pleasing leet players. Nothing you do is ever right, nothing is ever good enough.
2. Even if you could please the majority, there's so (relatively) few of them that there's no profit in it for large mainstream developers/publishers.
3. And the resource requirements of a Vanguard-sized project puts it out of reach of small devs who maybe could make a profit of such a niche hardcore-only market.
The result is what you see happening now - compromises to soften gameplay in order to widen the audience.