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honest question: what makes this game so desirable?
Valance
Member Posts: 189
I'm not starting a flame or anything negative. I've just been hearing people talk excitedly about Vanguard, and I know nothing about it, other than that it comes out in winter and it's a fantasy mmo. What is this game about? I know it's in beta, but from how excited everyone is, I want to know what seems to make this game great. Thanks for any info.
Comments
what makes this game great?
-- XP debt upon death (maybe some day, if we're lucky, XP loss)
-- no GPS magic radar maps
-- spawn camping for non-epic content
-- painful corpse runs
-- long travel times
-- decentralized auction houses
-- take a year to max out character level
-- requires grouping and raiding to get anywhere
-- requires MINIMUM 3 to 5 hour a night commitment, 7 nights a week. recommended commitment is probably 8 to 12 hours a day.
-- requires newest and highest end PC available on the market
-- requires absolute love and devotion to the dev "vision" and any dissent will be punished by other community members... vanguard is a disagreement-free casual-free zone thankyouverymuch
if you love all these things, you're gonna love vanguard !
don't listen to the poster above you, while some of the stuff he posted is indeed correct alot of it is speculation on his part and biased against this game.
if you want some good info about this game here you go http://www.vanguardsoh.com/forums/showthread.php?t=53263
also the faq has alot of info as well http://www.silkyvenom.com/pages/faq.php
The question was what makes the game desireable, not why Jonaku doesn't like the idea of Vanguard.
Anyways, most people, from what I can tell, find Vanguard desireable because the developers have been putting a huge emphasis on immersion and community and are trying to deliver a challenging game to oppose the recent rash of simplistic, one dimensional (popular) games as of late.
As Jonaku was probably trying to point out, although though a round about way, it's probably best to read through the games FAQ to find out if it is for you. In essence, if you found WoW and EQII were lacking and/or failed to present you with the living breathing world you hoped for, it may be worth looking into Vanguard.
I, for one, am extremely excited about the Diplomacy system. (And no...it isn't faction grinding)
The new diplomacy system is pretty sweet, imo
The new diplomacy system is pretty sweet, imo
So I've been hearing =P Aruspex is a chatterbox
Can't wait until I get to try it out for myself (hopefully test it). Put in a good word for my guild's Beta Application, would ya?
I don't see why you bash the time "requirements" as you put them. With the amount of time you spend on a forum of a game you dont like, I'd figure you'd have more than enough time for Vanguard...
Back to the OP: Vanguard is a pretty ambitious project with some lofty goals. It will feature a vast, non-instanced world. The Q4 2006 release will not take place, the game's lead dev has hinted at trying for a Marchish 07 release, but middle of 07 is probably most realistic at this point.
As you can see it is a controversial game, with many adamant supporters and haters. www.vanguardsoh.com is a good tool to preview the game and see if it catches your interest or not. However, the forums there have been rendered virtually useless by the fanatics, or "Vanbois", a term you will see a lot of if you continue to follow the game.
LOL! too true
Vanguard appears to be quite a complex game. The vision is to make a more challenging game, which incoprorates risk vs reward and brings back a sense of community and reputation through game meachincs. At the same time it attempts to appeal to all playstyles whether solo, group or raid by offering rewards of the best loot across all playstyles.
I will give you a brief list of its features.
1. Innovative cmbat system. The combat system incoportates many of the features from otehr games particularily DAOC. It adds reactionary attacks, positional attacks, chain attacks, stances, group chains along with its own innovation of being able to perceive mob attacks and mobs being able to perceive what you have in your attacj queue as well. The best source of combat information os Oloh's Book of Oloh. http://www.silkyvenom.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1901 It is a bit dated but it describes the philosophy of what they want with combat. They want planning, thought, knowledge and individual and group skill to make a big difference in the outcome of fights. Generally in my experience skilled groups can gain expereince at 2-4 times that of normal players. One would expect this to possibly be greater in Vanguard.
2. Innovative Endgame Rather than give raiders all the rewards. The endgame is designed to rewards those that use all of the games attractions. The best gear will come mainly from single group activities but will also come from solo/casual content, raid content, quests, crafting, diplomacy and other activities. If you want the best gear you will have to do all the activities or trade for the items that come from playstyles you do not want to do. Hard to be fairer than that.
3. Crafting Suppsoedly there is skill in crafting. Hopefully it will not turn intoanoitehr EQ2. Crafetrs will eb able to build boats, houses, all furniture one sees in the game and more. Crafters will not get expereince by making items but by doing work orders, quests, for npcs. Craftres will also have a role in supplying player city npcs wioth gear.
4. Diplomacy. A war of wits between players. Cities essentially become the dungeons of diplomats. Gaining diplomatic skill allows one to gain faction and see parts of the game, npcs and quests that others will not be able to see. Diplomats are also palnned to have a role if helping player cities run healthily and will be needed to obtaiun rights to build on land.
5. Epic size of the game. The world is supposed to be huge.
6. Dynamic death penalty Dying to different mobs will provide a different death penalty. Each mob will ebassigned a threat meter. Teh higher the threat level the higher the probabibilty of good loot and the greater the death penalty. Some mobs will have no corpse runs, some will have some form of corpse runs and a few special mobs will have very hard corpse runs that will require perhaps killing the mob that you orginally died to. The idea is to implement risk vs reward. If you want better loot you have to risk more. The high threat mobs will be spread out across all playstles. For raid content, single group content and in the casual/solo dungeons.
7. Dungeons The one thing I miss most about EQ is the dungeons. Their size and scariness. According to Oloh the dungeons in Vanguard are huge. A small dunbgeon takles 2-4 hours to explore while the premere dungeons could take weeks (they will have some kind in dungeon prtal system to transport yoiu to areas you have already visited).
8. Localized economies and bringing back Community They want to encourage communities to form by isolating people in certain areas. They plan to do this by not having any AH's, making death meanigfull so player skill is important in picking group mates, and making travel slower. Although they seem to have moved off the idea of slower travel and are also putting in caravans to allow people to move wherever their freinds go (bind spot) while offline. If the slow travel does more harm than good they promise to change like many otehr ideas they ahve admitted has not worked. The overall idea here is to make player reputation matter. To make players dependent on each other by all three spheres being dependent. How much progress they can make in bringing back to community to a genre thats games have long since abandonded the idea is certainly questionable.
9. Planning Sigil are planners. They think out everything they do and often discuss it with the community. They claim to have the next seven years of the games development planned out. Including all new contiunentns, towns, villages, dungeons, raising of the cap levels and so on. They usually have back up plans for ideas that might fail. I have played so many games where the developers have randomly thrown ideas, game mecahnics and features togther with little thought as to how they might mesh together. Its refreshing to see an academic approach being made towards a games development.
10. Communication Bar none the best communication I have ecer seen by a development team. The amount of posts by Brad on the forums is simply amazing. One must wonder if he sleps. But what is mroe impressive is theri approach to hying this game. Most development cpmpanies promise everything under the sun. brad has done his best to underhyope this game and under promise. If there is doubt a feature will make it into release he doesn't talk about it or if he does he sattes the liklihood he sees of these features making it by release. A very good role model for otehr game develoeprs. It is refreshing to see some honesty in such a dishonest business.
11. Slow leveling Rather than making a game just like every other game where its a two to four week race to max level. Vanguard promises to bring back slower leveling and give meaning to a persons level. rather than having everyone having at least one maxed lvl character a month after release they would like a high lvl charcter to have earned that level. How this will play out I don't know. The example he gave in beta was a player who took 60 days to reach max level. While at retail I am sure it would be much faster hopefully this peaks to their intent. While many hardcore people hope the leveling will be slower it will probably be in the middle with average players taking 40 days played and skileld players taking 10-15 days played to reach max level.
12. How do we level We really do not know this. Brad has promised that there will be game mechanics to encourage us to move around and that oprue camping will be signifigantly slower. How they will accomplish this I don't know. I know they plan for players to learn some combat abilioties and skills by watching differnt mobs use these abilities during fights encouraging players to move around to get different skills. I would expect that quest expereince somewhat similar to WoW's might be involved as well to encorage fighting in different areas. Factions rewards and otehr ideas could lead us around as well. This to me is a very signifigant point. How the devs lead us around the world will have a great effect on peoples enjoyment of the game and its something we don't know. I am not sure if its fully fleshed out or something that they just are not ready to talk about yet. But bethere have been lots of cryptic dev quotes about how we will be led around by the game mechanics.
13. Layered design of the beta. One of the inetresting aspects of the beta that has been reveleaed by the devs has been their focus. They have primarily spent the last 6 months of beta tweakinga dn revamping group combat. Combat IMHO is the key to any good game and it appears they realize that if the combat is bad everything else will fail. They have also spent a good eal of the beta tweaking and revamping the otehr core systems of crafting, diplomacy and harvesting. They have said they don't plan to add oteh content such as solo contemt, raid content, filling in the world with mobs and npcs until they have group combat perfected. It appears they must be happy with it now that they are moving on to beta 3. Beta 3 should be a telling point of this game. It is easy to make excuses for the game up to this point as the only part of the game they have focused on is the corse systems. But as they add more content and the core systems become finalized those who get invited to beta 3 should get a pretty good idea how well this game will turn out.
14. vanguard is not for everyone. Its focus is group play and risk vs reward. While they say they want to elimnate many of the tedoius game mecahnics of the past while providing challenging content this game will simply not be the game for everyone. Will it be a niche game? Maybe. If the game is good and fun to play people will most likley play it. If its not fun most likley bthen it will be a niche game. Whats most impressive to me here are the attempts of Sigil in its endgame design, new death penalty and oevrall philosphy to appeal to players of all sides without dumbing down the game. I did not think such a thing would be possible but i am highly impressed with what we have been told about these systems. There is no game that will make everyone happy and no playtstyle that is better than others. I respect people that like Vanguard just as much as I respect people that don't like Vanguard. I hope all of the new good games are good and everyone gets a game to play. Many people are so focused on putting down anyone who disagrees with their play style. Its very sad.
15. Vanguard is not just for the hardcore Many people put down Vanguard saying its just for hardcore players. Hardcore players think of Vanguard as their last hope because it offers challenge. But if one looks closely at the games design it is being designed to make all play styles happy. Raiders, single group players, solo players, crafters, questers and more. It is easy to stereotype people and games. But it seems the more that is reveealed abiout Vanguards design the mroe it appears their philosphy is one of inclusion but not at the expense of dumbing down the game. Keep in mind these ideas and designs they have given us are much easier to talk about in theory than in practice. Whne implenting these designs I would guess it will be much tougher to make everyone happy.
The thread below has all the recent Vanguard information, including previews, E3 coverage, all the videos, class information and more. Regardless of whtehr Vanguard is the game you want to play I hope you find the game you are looking for.
http://www.vanguardsoh.com/forums/showthread.php?t=53263
Vanguard is going to be a great community, an awsome place to explore...and somewhere were you are going to want to be for years to come. Vanguard says no to 1-6 month then quit. This game will last you for years, if done right.
Glad your interested in VG!
Total time played: 9125 Days, 21 Hours, 29 Minutes, 27 Seconds
Time played this level: 39 Days, 1 Hour, 24 Minutes, 5 Seconds
nice zippy! i couldn't ask for a better post than that. i'm in the middle when it comes to casual gamer/hardcore gamer, but i really do want a mmo that i don't play for 1-6 months than quit, maybe come back later for a couple months. I really liked the original EQ for that massive world that kept you in, though their death penalty sucked (die in a bad place and you could lose everything you had worked for). But that's old news now.
I'll keep an eye out for vanguard, hopefully they'll have an open beta a little bit before release.
Brad himself has stated that the game roughly is 60% core (group), 20%
hardcore( raids) and 20% casual (solo/small groups)
Another thing I'd like to add that's innovative in Vanguard is the grouped harvesting, with different harvesting classes that each govern different aspects of the harvesting (quantity, quality, byproducts etc.) Just like with adventuring it pays to have a group of mixed classes for the best results.
The interdepency of the three spheres (adventuring, crafting, diplomacy) also should go further than adventurers having some item made or so. Brad gave an example on how this could possibly work with a quest where you had to collect some dragon's eggs where you needed diplomacy to get into the dragon's cave (too many dragons around to fight), then in the cave while you progress the dragons in the cave would start to get suspicious, but inside the gave the number of dragons were such that you are able to fight them off...for a while. Then at the spot where the eggs are you'd have your harvesters harvest the eggs while the rest protects them from the dragons. Finally you'd possibly evac out when you had enough eggs. So for the same quest you'd need skills in all three spheres.
-Ren