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vanguard's Biggest Mistake (Brad are you listening)?
Kelsonmac
Member Posts: 313
In your opinion, what is the biggest mistake Vanguard made? Here's mine.
The biggest mistake the developers made was not thinking out the sheer scope and size of the game. Let me explain.
I am convinced that Sigil used all of its money and resources to create this huge world. They didn't create the graphics engine. They obviously had a "headstart" because much of the feel of the game is borrowed directly from EQ2. So, the largest amount of effort went into creating this massive land mass, and then trying to populate it with artwork and NPC's.
What they should have done is started out much smaller.
Think about it, a smaller world has its benefits.
1) The developers could have concentrated their efforts instead of being incredibly spread out.
2) The community would be more centrailized in-game. Frankly, the players in this game are so spread out, it is not very unusual for me to go out solo hunting and not physically see another player for hours on end.
3) A smaller world would surely have allowed Sigil to optimize the game's code for performance, and also finish what they had set out to do.
Now, I am not saying that they could not have attained their much-publicised "vision". I think that it just needed to be done more intelligently.
For example, I divert your attention to Lineage 2.
Lineage 2 started out with "Prelude", and while the game world was fairly large, it was also "workable" . . . and by "workable" I mean that it was not only able to be optimized by the developers, but it was also a "community" for its players. Then NCSoft came out with their first free expansion called "Chronicle 1". This added more dungeons, castles, land-mass etc. This also added more armor, skills etc. This expansion was optimized for performance, and it met the community's expectations. It was an intelligent expansion.
Next followed Chronicles 2 - 5, with the same result. Level caps were increased. Land masses were added. New "side games" were added, as well as new armors and weapons. All very intelligently done. In a short while, Lineage 2 will once again offer its free expansion called "Interlude", with much more things for its players to do.
Now, I am NOT saying that Lineage 2 is a better game. Far from it. But what I AM saying is that as far as BUILDING the game went, NCSoft was much, much more intelligent than Sigil.
Here are some questions I asked when I initially heard about the sheer scope and size of Vanguard . . .
Why are they building such a giant world? Is the levelling so easy that people will quickly be able to experience high end content shortly after the game's release? Or, let's say I am level 15 . . do they have level 15ish mobs all over the world, in many many different areas? Isn't this kind of waste of land-mass? Isn't this just a way to spread the community out too thin? (Naw, they would never be stupid enough to do that!)
The biggest mistake the developers made was not thinking out the sheer scope and size of the game. Let me explain.
I am convinced that Sigil used all of its money and resources to create this huge world. They didn't create the graphics engine. They obviously had a "headstart" because much of the feel of the game is borrowed directly from EQ2. So, the largest amount of effort went into creating this massive land mass, and then trying to populate it with artwork and NPC's.
What they should have done is started out much smaller.
Think about it, a smaller world has its benefits.
1) The developers could have concentrated their efforts instead of being incredibly spread out.
2) The community would be more centrailized in-game. Frankly, the players in this game are so spread out, it is not very unusual for me to go out solo hunting and not physically see another player for hours on end.
3) A smaller world would surely have allowed Sigil to optimize the game's code for performance, and also finish what they had set out to do.
Now, I am not saying that they could not have attained their much-publicised "vision". I think that it just needed to be done more intelligently.
For example, I divert your attention to Lineage 2.
Lineage 2 started out with "Prelude", and while the game world was fairly large, it was also "workable" . . . and by "workable" I mean that it was not only able to be optimized by the developers, but it was also a "community" for its players. Then NCSoft came out with their first free expansion called "Chronicle 1". This added more dungeons, castles, land-mass etc. This also added more armor, skills etc. This expansion was optimized for performance, and it met the community's expectations. It was an intelligent expansion.
Next followed Chronicles 2 - 5, with the same result. Level caps were increased. Land masses were added. New "side games" were added, as well as new armors and weapons. All very intelligently done. In a short while, Lineage 2 will once again offer its free expansion called "Interlude", with much more things for its players to do.
Now, I am NOT saying that Lineage 2 is a better game. Far from it. But what I AM saying is that as far as BUILDING the game went, NCSoft was much, much more intelligent than Sigil.
Here are some questions I asked when I initially heard about the sheer scope and size of Vanguard . . .
Why are they building such a giant world? Is the levelling so easy that people will quickly be able to experience high end content shortly after the game's release? Or, let's say I am level 15 . . do they have level 15ish mobs all over the world, in many many different areas? Isn't this kind of waste of land-mass? Isn't this just a way to spread the community out too thin? (Naw, they would never be stupid enough to do that!)
Comments
Everybody is an expert. It's amazing.
I'm starting to cringe when I see that 4 letter word "brad". Everybody throws out his name as if they know him or something.
1) I agree, while I like how Sigil provide multiple leveling areas for each continent, traveling between those continents is incredibly difficult. Not only due to transport, but also faction which can be corrected by allowing better transport between continents and reworking the faction system.
2) I havent played for about 2 weeks, but I was in Qalia on the Inifity (EU) server and I saw hundreds of players even during off-peak times?
3) Its difficult to predict the problems causing the performance glitches that are inherant in Vanguard, as we are not developers with a decade of experience in computer coding, it would probably be a good idea to assume that the fixes for such causes are not simple.
Frankly, alot of your post is doomsaying. Fact is Vanguard is already out. Theres not much point in whining faults in its core design, look towards solutions and hope somebody from Sigil is reading.
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http://aion.24-hrgaming.net
- Raid-enforcement is sooo old gen.
Raid-free servers at release and Vanguard would have been extremely successfull, despite all it bugs. Of course, these raid-free servers would have about 90% of the population, but 90% of 500k in raid-free servers would have been better than "50k in raid-lands only", and I am overly generous when I say 50k. Their propraganda says 150k accounts, including trials, buddy keys and all.
Players can bear many mistakes, many goofy things, many bugs, but they have to TRUST you in the long run. Raid-free servers would have been enought to make this game a jewel instead of what it is. Let's hope a successor will take these...BY RELEASE (post release raid-free would be bad, as no-lifers would aggro and you wouldn't get the support you would at release, you need the TRUST, and this has to be by release time).
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren
Vanguard is failing due to many other problems, none of which are Raiding. Performance, bugs, bad animations, lack of content, etc. Take your pick.
Just once I'd like to see you post something about an MMO and keep Raiding out of it.
Who knows? It might be good for you.
__________________________________
Playing - Waiting on GW2
Formerly played - Aion, CO, CoX, EVE, GW1, LotRO, RIFT, Ryzom, SWG, SWTOR, WAR, WoW
Trialed - AA, DDO, EQ2, L2, MxO, RYL, TERA, VSoH
Beta'd - HGL, GW2, PotBS, SWTOR, TCoS, TR
Anticipating - GW2, PS2
But Vanguard was released, and as you said - i was one of the people appaled how empty ,bland and generic world feels.
On other side LOTRO will come out incredibly small. I am sure one of the smalles MMOs around. My first impression was very negative.
But when i tried it and understand how content packed every square inch is. How it is enough to walk just a small distance and find something new and obviously hand crafted and thought out.
Perhaps Turbine went the right way. And Sigil made an error. But judging from bland lore and generic quests in Vanguard, i dont think their creative team would manage to make even the smallest world an interesting one.
"Before this battle is over all the world will know that few...stood against many." - King Leonidas
YES YES YES! Good point, OP. The size IS the biggest weakness of the game!
Compare my post: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/post/1296548/thread/122229#1296548
The lifeless cities are a direct result of them using all performance for size, so now they have nothing
left for events, animations, conversation, anything to make the world give more emotion. It is hilarious to put all
efforts into size! Funny, they thought it would be their biggest bonus, but it might proof to be their greatest
weakness, acutally. Like some clumsy uber monster, which grows bigger and bigger until it crumbles
under its own weight.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Does Vanguard use this or is it all one huge open area with everything loaded all at once? Why even do this from any point of view? That has to be hell on the developers themselves not to mention a bad idea for players. Why wouldn't you want to break things into pieces so you can work on one bit at a time?
Or am I wrong and Vanguard does have hidden zone lines ala World of Warcraft, Dark Age of Camelot, Anarchy Online (you still had to zone into dungeons or cities in those but not villages or outpost) but not traditional zoning ala Everquest 1 and Everquest 2?
I did not make my original post to BASH Vanguard. It was meant to be constructive (though there's little that can be done about it now . . but perhaps another MMO won't make this same mistake).
Honestly, the Vanguard World is sprawling . . for no apparent reason whatsoever. Had it been initially SMALLER and then expanded as the player-base got accustomed to the game AND each other, I think this game might have been damn near perfect!
http://aion.24-hrgaming.net
I can not for the life of me figure out why people can't just post this old stuff in another topic that was already made. Why does everybody feel it is on them to take the world on their shoulders and create a topic to really stick it to the man and let him know they screwed up. Let it go, or put it into one of the other 44 topics about the same stuff.
The OP has some good points here. One of the issues with the size is that the game was designed as a group centric game but with few tools to enable easy and quick grouping. A smaller world size with one two central hub cities, a good LFG toolset and some quick travel options and they would have had a lot more customer satisfaction I believe. The genre needs a good group oriented game but the players need to able to get those groups together.
As Ratrap pointed out LoTRO is small in world size but every inch is packed with content. It is easier to start with a feature packed small world and then ad landmass and content as the players mature than it is to make a huge world then try and make it interesting.
I miss DAoC
In other words . . if you don't like the opinions, go play "Hello Kitty". This isn't the place for you.
http://aion.24-hrgaming.net
By level 15 in VG I had already been on plenty of dungeon crawls, and had also missed far far more dungeons that I simply wouldn't have time to do, by 5% into VG I'd already done far more than are contained in the entire game of LOTRO. You really can't bring LOTRO to the table in a head to head contest over levels of content, it is literally about a 30th of the size of VG both in terms of landmass but also in terms of fun things to do. I don't count moving to the next zone and harvesting boar snouts(again) then boar hooves(again) then boar tails(again) then boar shoulders(again) then boar haunches(again) and now its time for cats... again...... as lots of fun things to do. However I do find fun in epic questlines for end rewards you'll really cherish and want to earn in huge dungeons with rare named to find and defeat with defined and useful! loot tables (little loot actually matters in LOTRO, none of it really makes any difference bar weapon dps and the rare % items that do a tiny bit, stats are worthless, most gear is just stated - I fought for a level with no gear equipped bar my weapon in LOTRO in the late 30's just to see what difference it made... none)
I want to explore places and feel that OOOH factor when I find somewhere grand and inspiring, alot of vanguard dungeons are larger than entire zone allocations in LOTRO. A /who in Trengal keep revealed 116 players yesterday, there's enough size and scope for them all to be in there exploring the dungeon - it's just one of the many many 20's dungeons. Even the 1 or two dungeons that aren't completely tiny in LOTRO like Garth Agarwen, it's just a drag spending far less time in them than the typical VG dungeon because not breaking it up with running back and forth to quest givers really grinds our face in how shallow and weak the LOTRO combat and group dynamics are, how there is no sense or peril or excitement or challenge even with half the group afk.
The general points about things being a bit spread out, and it being difficult sometimes to get group members together, are valid. I think Sigil haven't yet created the density of content they wanted, but the sheer volume of content cannot be argued with, despite the proviso you will have to travel to reach it all.
I 100% agree with the OP and have actually made mention to this exact problem in previous posts.
Sigils notion of a massive world is novel and intriguing, but highly unrealistic and what we get is a terrible execution.
The huge world has created a ripple that has pretty much caused any problem I have experienced with the game.
- The players are spread out all over the place, making it difficult to group at times- which is horrible with the games focus on grouping. Compounding this is the fact that you have an overabundance of races. Now the different races aren't exactly the problem, it's the fact that each of them have their own starting area. From there, starting areas vary in quality of content and player population, very bad.
- The huge world created a problem for Sigil in that they had to populate the entire damn space. They spread resources to pack in as much as they could to the corners of the earth. The problem that resulted is a ton of bug ridden, half- finished quests spread out all over the place. On top of that, they still left a TON of empty land with no other purpose than create an arduous space to cross from point A to B with little to no quality content.
- The graphics also suffer as a result, which also hurts the performance (a huge problem in the game right now). Now I won't bash their decision to go with the Unreal 2 engine because personally, I have no idea how an MMO works with that, but this MMO has a ton of graphical issues. Aside from the glitches and performance issues, textures and lighting are extremely mediocre. Textures are standard with very basic application, textures were not created for specific uses, they created a set of textures and just applied them all over the world to their over-polygonallized meshes because it was easier in the case to create more polygons than stronger textures specific to locations- basically there is no personality or styling in their textures to help create a more vivid world (that may be difficult to understand, and I apologize. I am a 3d environmental artist, so I know what I am talking about, and hopefully other people can get an idea). And as I said, the lighting is god-aweful. With all of the technological things included in the graphics engine, with the horrible lighting, it makes it all moot. What we get is an overbright world with washed out textures and no depth. Some interiors do look alright, ALRIGHT, but the overworld just looks horrible and the lighting is to blame. We need shadows, an not just half-assed shadows created only by the normal maps, real shadows. The world is very flat in appearance, shadows would create depth. Everything seems like it's being affected by light in the same ways (I think they just added a bunch of omni lights all over the world- causing faces even on opposite sides to both appear rather bright. And Interiors that can be over-dark). It's weird because it seems like they didn't rely on any artificial forms of lighting, like baking it in to textures - which is pretty common for at least interiors. Who knows maybe trying to use an active lighting (with the day/night system) in the Unreal 2 engine is to blame.
With a smaller world, the developers could have spent their time fixing all of the above. Polishing the content and graphics to create an overall much nicer presentation for the players. Over time they could have added more space, meaningful space, but at this point I don't see how the world could possibly exand other than adding content to their vast emptiness.
People bash LOTRO for being so small, but everything is excellently crafted and so full of content. The graphics are wonderful and the overall presentation of the game is sound, polished, bug-free. We know they are going to expand it too, including more quality/polished content. I'll take that any day over the alternative.
I know graphics are the be all and end all for some - but if the gameplay is bland insipid mediocre and totally devoid of any peril, excitement or challenge, no amount of art direction can ever make it a space I'd be happy to call home.
I'm not saying LOTRO is a bad game, it will appeal nicely to many and probably do very well, for a while at least. I'm just saying for me there's no amount of pretty fluff or new content that can redeem the fact it's completely shallow and easy and the core dynamics of the design are devoid of fun. Yes it's easy to get around and the UI is polished etc.... it's easy to do stuff in LOTRO great! But that can't solve the basic problem there is nothing I WANT to do in LOTRO, and unlikely to ever be. I played both PvE and PvP to the top level to give it a fair chance, it only got duller blander and more easy as time went by, the few interesting quests dried up to a bare trickle, my character got steadily more overpowered and invincible, and group dynamics got worse not better as your progressed in levels.
Although Kojan is one of the more interesting areas, they would have better on scrapping it, or putting it on the back burner much earlier in beta, and focused on the other two main continents. As such they have a larger world, but at the expense of the game overall.
If you are going to bash personal preferences and design choices of LOTRO and not actual problems, like performance, bugs, etc, could you please at least relate them in some way to the actual forum topic? Oh, and in case you forgot, this thread is about VANGUARD and the argument that the choice to make an unbelievable massive world has created problems in creating a quality game where it counts.
The absolute base of all these problems in VG begins and ends with whatever the hell they did to the Unreal engine in order to tweak it. Add to that the fact that they seriously overreached in terms of just how big the game world should be, and how much the engine should render at the same time, and it was all bound to be a mess.
They might be able to fix it eventually, or they'll end up selling the game off to SOE, who will polish it up instead. But honestly, it's a damned shame that they fubar'd the development of this game so badly. It has the shell of a great game buried under a mountain of mediocrity. It's sad.
I could see what they were aiming for, but the execution of it was absolutely lousy. While VG is nowhere near the worst launch I've ever seen (that dubious distinction goes to both Anarchy Online and World War II Online), it's also nowhere near where it should have been, given who was in charge, the money they had to work with, and how long they had to develop it. You'd think Brad and Co. would have learned by now, and that they had followed the evolution of MMO's since the first EQ. If they had, they might be in better shape now.
As for LOTR, I've had a beta invite for months now, but I've never once logged in to the game, or even downloaded the client, just because I wasn't interested in a fantasy game at the time. And now, between CoH/CoV and WoW, I simply don't have the time to add another game. I don't know anything about LOTR except for the screenshots I've seen, all of which look like what Vanguard could have been if they'd coded and designed it properly in the first place.
It's funny. I think the worst case scenario for VG is SOE buying the game out from under Brad McQuaid and giving it an NGE/CU style "upgrade" in order to bring in players. I don't see that happening for LOTR, for the simple reason that SOE isn't in charge. *shrug*
What do you mean by Raid free ? There is no raid content in vanguard.
-Allegria
Raid content is planned and if not present atm, going to be applied later on according to the FAQ. 20% of the best l33t items are raid-acquired exclusively.
This is their worst mistake, and it isn't acceptable anymore for a "next gen" MMO, if I want to group, I have the right to expect a warranty that I can group to my heart's content, all the way to the end of grouping. It is really important that the optimal path to group uberness is by grouping, I could cope with solo/tradeskills, but I won't cope with raiding/PvP anymore...and I am not alone.
"The Vision(tm)" has to be adapted accordingly for any game that intend to have players such as me, the "PUGers-elite" (I find this term hilarious in itself
). I left EQ, EQ2 and WoW because of the raiding, not going to leave CoV for a raiding game, of that you can be sure. In CoV, you doesn't have to raid, not even after I9 comes out, unless you actually prefer raiding over grouping, which is a legitimate choice. But, you can group, all the way to the end.
In Vanguard, for about 20% of the best l33t, you will have to raid. This is their worst mistake. Now that the game is released as is, they are trapped. If they add raid-free servers, they will aggro no-lifers raiders and possibly lose more than wins, since peoples who doesn't want to raid, they already turn away...it was a release-thingy. If raid-free servers would have been present by release, raiders would have accept it with a few grunts, but they would have attract a LOT more players...it is too late for Vanguard now.
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren