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Where can Vanguard go from here?

chryseschryses Member UncommonPosts: 1,453

First  let me just say that this is not a 'hate' thread. 

For the record I played VG for 4 months and I have 4 characters the highest being level 38.

I logged on today and I have to say it saddens me a little to see such a large fantasy mmo world (mostly fantastic graghics) that had so much promise but now feels like an empty husk of a game...

I really don't think VG can continue past 12 months in any real capacity.  Here is why:

* Reaching level 50 is not that hard.  I know 3 people in my old guild that maxed out Crafting, combat, diplo.   What do you do then?

* World is mostly empty and way too linear in the way people level.  So you never / hardly revisit the same place.   

* All the great things about VG such as Diplo, Crafting, mounts, scenery, toons etc.  Only keep you amused for 3 months.  Its all eye candy.

* There is no point to the game.  No storyline that is worth mentioning, no RvR, no factions at war....nothing.  Even the penalty for dying in PvP is pointless.

* Nearly all of the  80 people I knew that played in our guild have stopped playing and are waiting for WAR, AoC or something similar.  (Even the hardcore fanboys).   

For me the developers spent way too much time on making a beautiful world with great toons etc.  But somewhere along the line the RPG / gameplay element got lost and I fear that they have gone to far and its now impossible to implement the 'FUN' part into the game.  

Is there anything SOE can realistically do to VG to bring back the crowds and more importantly hold on to them when we get hit with the 08 releases?

(I say not a chance)

 

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Comments

  • DailyBuzzDailyBuzz Member Posts: 2,306

    Yes, and here's 3 methods they will employ:

    1. Reduce system specs

    2. Simplify crafting

    3. Introduce instancing

    All the recent updates and additions were Sigil concepts that hadn't been tweaked or debugged (with the exceptions being rest XP and canning the EE system).

    SOE has yet to dip their brush concerning content. Anyone who has played a SOE game in the past can tell you how "creative" this company is, and how "successful" they've been in that area.

    I'm sure SOE will eventually work the bugs out, since they are pretty effective in that regard. However, when the new SOE content starts rolling out it will be unwelcomed by the original VG fan base, as it was in old EQ.

    SOE knows this from experience and since the current population is so minuscule, they will market VG to a different demographic altogether. Come back and visit VG in 2 years and you will find a simple game with a 14 year old player base.

    As far as the new releases go, I believe people will be unimpressed with them as well.

     

    P.S.    Please don't demand that I provide proof by links that SOE plans to make these changes, as I have none. These are merely images from Ambien dreams.

  • BriarFoxBriarFox Member Posts: 34

    Hear me now believe me later.

     

    Vanguard will be a top 5 game in two years.

     

    My guess is that SoE will find some way to implement a RvR or team based contest.  It may not even be territory or combat related but based on obtaining some type of artifacts or gaining points in some type of side game.

    Player built cities will come into their own and many player will spend all of their time running these cities as their main form of game play.

    Vanguard is as many folks said from the beginning, best suited for a certain type of gamer (RPGers and those who like a SimWorld ).  There will be enough players to support this type of game forever.  People who do not like this type of game play confused the disaster caused by bugs as a statement about the game play style.  Had the game not been a technical Charlie Foxtrot this fact would have been more apparent.

    Many of the '08 games do not appeal to the type of player who likes Vanguard.  Some folks will only play in a Sword and Sorcery setting.  Some are put off by active combat (old, poor reflexes handicap them) and some will not want to play with the sorts of gamers they think that the new titles will draw.  For many of these folks anything that reeks of a FPS or Diablo will turn them off.

    The type of folks who like this sort of game are by and large older with a larger entertainment budget and more likely to stick around playing the same game for years.  As old EQers up grade their machines and Vanguard improves its stability more EQers will migrate to Vanguard.  Eventually EQ2 players will start to make the move and perhaps WoW players who want the player city experience.

    Mark my words,

     

     

  • IndeedIndeed Member Posts: 62

    Top 5 game seems a little exaggerated, but why not top 10.

  • truenorthbgtruenorthbg Member Posts: 1,453

    FIRST. 

    Character Customization

    Vanguard lacks fundamental elements people have come to expect and enjoy in MMORPGs:  1) character customization for a) unique spells, b) abilities, and c) appearance.  The reason why people quit at 50 is not merely a lack of raid content but a lack of character customization. 

    SECOND.

    PC Unfriendly

    System requirements are still too high, and they will be too high for some time.  I think the game community is less likely, today, to purchase new equipment for a game.  WoW was brilliant on making an MMORPG that was accessible because 1) you could get-right-in, 2) accomplish things in short amounts of time, and 3) and your system could run it.

    THIRD.

    Creativity.  Innovation.  Fun.

    Vanguard cannot distinguish itself other than by saying, "We returned to our 'roots,' which are 1) corpse runs, 2) stiff death penalties, 3) slow leveling, and 4) difficult [not meaningful] travel." 

    Innovative:  Diplomacy.  However, people are not so receptive to this concept. 

    Innovative:  The boat system is awesome.  I love to travel by ship.  But guess what?  They are pricey as hell and therefore lack accessibility.  Accessibility is crucial in 2007.  No.  Not the unthinking accessibility, but casual-friendly but sophisticated accessibility.

    FOURTH.

    More Missing Features

    Why is fishing not in this game?  Look at how gorgeous is.  People would love to fart around and fish in the game's many streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, seas, and vast oceans. 

    FIFTH.

    Potential

    The game has tremendous potential with its enormous world, beautiful graphics, fun class system, and a platform for 1) deep character customization, 2) player-run cities, 3) enhanced boat features, and 4) greater use of Diplomacy to make it a) more accessible, b) important, and c) fun. 

     

    The potential is so far-reaching my head is spinning a bit and requires more time to explore further. 

    -----
    WoW and fast food = commercial successes.
    I neither play WoW nor eat fast food.

  • chryseschryses Member UncommonPosts: 1,453

    All good comments.  I am not as pessimistic now! 

    The fishing thing came up a lot in our guild chat.  I always wanted to take my ship out and go fishing.   (higher skills could let you use nets etc)

     

    I think the only way VG can come back in force is by introducing RvR combat.  Bring in large amount of content for crafting around siege equipment for the builders.  However expansion of skills for characters is a must.  I saw the WAR blog on character development.  I would like to see that in VG.  PvP is boring because either you have exactly the same skills as your opponent (same class) or you know exactly what they have.  

    Overall I am not sure but you are right about the player base.  It is so tiny that they can pretty much do what they want and re-market it. 

    Shame because for an old RPG hardcore gamer like me I really loved the first 3 months but soon realised there was not much else to see. 

     

     

  • KenzeKenze Member UncommonPosts: 1,217

     

    Originally posted by chryses


    All good comments.  I am not as pessimistic now! 
    The fishing thing came up a lot in our guild chat.  I always wanted to take my ship out and go fishing.   (higher skills could let you use nets etc)
     
    I think the only way VG can come back in force is by introducing RvR combat.  Bring in large amount of content for crafting around siege equipment for the builders.  However expansion of skills for characters is a must.  I saw the WAR blog on character development.  I would like to see that in VG.  PvP is boring because either you have exactly the same skills as your opponent (same class) or you know exactly what they have.  
    Overall I am not sure but you are right about the player base.  It is so tiny that they can pretty much do what they want and re-market it. 
    Shame because for an old RPG hardcore gamer like me I really loved the first 3 months but soon realised there was not much else to see. 
     

    oh please PVP or RVR will not be VG's saviour. There are so many PVP games already out and many more games built  for PVP from the ground up being released soon, pick one of those if thats what you're looking for.

     If VG does turn into a PVP centric game  I know i will NEVER give it another chance.

     

    As far as VG being around in 12 months..Im sure it will. SOE have kept Matrix Online alive and running, i cant see them pulling the plug on VG anytime soon. Now wether  SOE will still be actively updating and advancing VG in 12 months....That Im not so sure about.

     

    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

  • OrphesOrphes Member UncommonPosts: 3,039

     



    Originally posted by chryses

     

    F

    * There is no point to the game. No storyline that is worth mentioning, no RvR, no factions at war....nothing.



     

    While there is more to be worked on and they add quests and lore, ofcourse, why would they not. The storys in Vanguard are not bad it is most of the time quite good, but it is not worked in and wellknown you don't have years of (wellknown) history to fall back on like in EQ/EQ2, Warcraft, LOTR etc.

    Alot of this can be found ingame if one bothers to do that part of the game. But honestly how many played 7/7 in WOW and bothered to read the books in the dungeons and so on.

    Here quoted below is an excerpt from the fall of Targonor story.

    http://vanguard.wikia.com/wiki/Lore-WillemsStand

    http://vanguard.wikia.com/wiki/Lore-willemsstand2

    http://www.thesafehouse.org/vanguard/lore.php

    No factions at war?

     



    Commander Askalon,

     

    The Red Blades have made it back to Targonor. We sustained heavy losses but are better off than most. The Golden Eagle Brigade, within a matter of minutes, was slain to the man... and then rose to fight against us.

    No matter how many times we struck them down, they kept rising to fight again, never once so much as making a sound. Our forces were decimated. We will be lucky if half of the men make it back to Targonor.

    I have never been so thoroughly beaten, and for all the damage inflicted the dead do not even appear to have been weakened.

    There is no time to rest. We must act quickly. They will come for Targonor next.

    Captain Rastus Willem



    ...[~]...



    "In two days time, the dead will arrive at the gates of Targonor," the king paused as startled gasps rose from the crowd, "They have come faster than we anticipated and they have caught us off guard. This does not leave you with much time. Tonight you must make haste and pack what you can. For tomorrow at sunrise, the final caravans to the north shall depart. Prince Garus will lead and will be charged with burning the fields, and evidence of any passage, behind you."

    ...[~]...



    After the remaining citizens had left the city Commander Askalon broke what was left, about a thousand men - some trained military, many not -- into groups and put us to work. We made preparations non-stop for the next two days. I don't think I had more than an hour of sleep the entire time, strangely though I did not tire.

     

    It was odd seeing the city I had grown up in abandoned. It was not just that it was quiet, but that it was a still silence. No merchants hawked their wares from the street side and no children ran playing through the alleys. I had never seen my home this way before... and it was unsettling.



    ...[~]...



    We had needed to stay alive for three days. Commander Askalon, King Targonor and Captain Willem all died, to keep the dead occupied for three days, so that the rest of Targonor could escape. With barely a thousand men, we had given them a week.

    I took one last glance back at the ruined city that had been home for my entire life, then took my first painful step north. I had a long way to go.

     

     

    I'm so broke. I can't even pay attention.
    "You have the right not to be killed"

  • keolienkeolien Member Posts: 198

    I voted no, cause I didn't even use up my free 30 day subscription before canceling my account.

    image

  • NeopsychNeopsych Member UncommonPosts: 324

    Personally I think VG is never going to really move much from where it is now albeit tey will probably old an official relaunch at some point. My reasoning is two fold:

     

    1) Lore - the game has none to speak of. All of the other elements mentioned exist in one form or another in other games but people are drawn and stay with a game for its specific lore / atmostphere. VG feels cold and barran.

    2) Players - MMO layers are quite eductaed on MMo history and I think that once the tarnish falls from a new game, the crowds generally never come back. SWG is somehar proof of this. Initially amazing but then the world turned and now its a tickle 3rd title. Games do not often get a good second chance ( whether they deserve it or not)

     

    Shame

    To err is human....to play is divine

  • LidaneLidane Member CommonPosts: 2,300

     

    Originally posted by BriarFox

    My guess is that SoE will find some way to implement a RvR or team based contest.  It may not even be territory or combat related but based on obtaining some type of artifacts or gaining points in some type of side game.

     

    This only works if the game is built from the ground up to support RvR or PvP playstyles. Vanguard was not.

    It is, at its core, a PvE game. The PvP rulesets were tacked on later, and in a half-hearted way. And there's no way they're going to up and change their entire mechanic to support RvR. That's simply not a priority for them.

    Their best bet is to polish, optimize and stabilize their client, reworking it from the most basic coding level to run more smoothly, and on lower end systems, since very few people would be inclined to spend a few grand on a new PC just to play this game.

    Add in more character customization elements, more streamlined gameplay and quest lines, and things that actually cater to their current playerbase, and the game stands a good chance at recovery. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. VG's got a ways to go before it would ever be in the Top 10, much less the Top 5 of any lists.

  • TalynTalyn Member UncommonPosts: 587

    Let them finish the game and get it ready to be released first. Right now it's Beta in a Box and we all know it. No, I'm not flaming when I say that, either.

    It does sound like the new art assets should either lower system requirements a bit (although it's the Unreal3 engine, so it's not going to go WoW low) or at the very least give existing machines a marked improvement in performance.

    The lore does seem to be there but right now it's too entwined in Diplomacy so the non-Diplomacy players don't get to see it.

    I've still yet to hear from anyone just what the hell "meaningful travel" is supposed to be. I don't mind the travel in VG at all when I'm just doing my own thing, but when it takes 20+ minutes to get a group together because of traveling, that's just a pain in the ass. As I've said before, I could drive myself from NYC to LA and the only thing "meaningful" about it is now I'm exhausted and my back hurts. Travel is a means to an end, that's as "meaningful" as it gets.

    PvP alone will never save any game that isn't simply a PvP game to begin with. VG does seem to have the world and factions to give legitimate reasons for wars, either normal PvP or full-on RvR but, going back to my first statement, they need to finish the game first and get the engine tech optimized and up to speed before it could handle anything of the sort. Even grouping in dungeons is a noticeable hit on performance, I couldn't even imagine the slideshow a crowded and hectic PvP battle would create.

  • finnmacool1finnmacool1 Member Posts: 453

    It can only go up. Vanguard release reminds me of a poorer version of eq2's release. According to the sheep that footed the bill for $oe to finish the game its much better these days. My guess is vanguard will follow the same path.

  • TambourineTambourine Member UncommonPosts: 181


    Originally posted by Chikaca
    <Mod edit>

    I can see into your future, and a bleak one do I see.

    image
  • smg77smg77 Member Posts: 672

    Vanguard will limp along on the station pass life support system for years. It will be run like SWG and Matrix...skeleton staff and very few content additions.

  • ElikalElikal Member UncommonPosts: 7,912

    I am quite over the fence, both if VG survives and if I keep my interest in it. Here is my personal list of things to do.

    1) REWORK DEATH PENALITY

    As it is its only a timesink. You loose time to recover the corpse or loose time to get the lost XP back. My suggestion is to make it like in EQ2. You get a debt, but minimal, and debt is also being automatically repaid after being offline a while. I just think it doesnt fit into our time anymore.

    2) REWORK QUESTS WITH MORE STORIES

    Self-explanatory; msot quests are nonsense in terms of story-telling.

    3) SHAPE QUESTS TO LINES OF STORIES

    Now quests feel very randomly scattered, it tells little about the world, and I never got this "feeling" for some kind of world-wide story as I did in LOTRO or WOW.

    4) ADD INSTANCES FOR STOY-TELLING

    A good thing LOTRO did. If you end a story-arc you experience the climax of the story with mini-events, scripted dialogue asf. It really gave me the feeling to be INSIDE of a story, not just listen to a story told by an NPC.

    5) MORE CITY LIFE

    As it is the villages and cities are boring, NPCs stand like glued to the ground, nothing happens around you. Just take Stormwind from WOW: there are kids playing chase, guards exchange, all those things.

    6) MAKE NEW TORGONOR & AGRHAM WORLD HUBS

    Somehow I miss those feeling of having a few big cities centers of meet and greet, as I know it from EQ2, WOW and the like. You always could go to Bree, Qeynos or Ironforge and meet losta ppl. In Vg all are far too spread over.

    7) REPLACE THE RIFT SYSTEM WITH A USUAL GRIFFON TRAVEL

    Or teleporters. They must be unlocked, by reaching them normally, once, and then you can use them like the WOW Griffons or the EQ2 Griffons. Lets face it: in VG travelling will NEVER be an "exciting experience", so why not skip the pretense and go ahead with buisiness. Might be teleporters if you dont like to copy Griffons, but something in every region.

    8) MORE SOCIALIZING ELEMENTS

    What I think of is what I know from SWG: ppl went to cantinas, or WOW, ppl go into Taverns and roleplay and socialize. VG needs to build hubs and give reasons for ppl to meet and do that. Now ppl just stand around in Tursh in front of the tavern and nothing happens, no RP, no socializing. I guess something is missing in that area.

    People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert

  • chryseschryses Member UncommonPosts: 1,453

    Originally posted by Elikal


    I am quite over the fence, both if VG survives and if I keep my interest in it. Here is my personal list of things to do.
    1) REWORK DEATH PENALITY
    As it is its only a timesink. You loose time to recover the corpse or loose time to get the lost XP back. My suggestion is to make it like in EQ2. You get a debt, but minimal, and debt is also being automatically repaid after being offline a while. I just think it doesnt fit into our time anymore.
    2) REWORK QUESTS WITH MORE STORIES
    Self-explanatory; msot quests are nonsense in terms of story-telling.
    3) SHAPE QUESTS TO LINES OF STORIES
    Now quests feel very randomly scattered, it tells little about the world, and I never got this "feeling" for some kind of world-wide story as I did in LOTRO or WOW.
    4) ADD INSTANCES FOR STOY-TELLING
    A good thing LOTRO did. If you end a story-arc you experience the climax of the story with mini-events, scripted dialogue asf. It really gave me the feeling to be INSIDE of a story, not just listen to a story told by an NPC.
    5) MORE CITY LIFE
    As it is the villages and cities are boring, NPCs stand like glued to the ground, nothing happens around you. Just take Stormwind from WOW: there are kids playing chase, guards exchange, all those things.
    6) MAKE NEW TORGONOR & AGRHAM WORLD HUBS
    Somehow I miss those feeling of having a few big cities centers of meet and greet, as I know it from EQ2, WOW and the like. You always could go to Bree, Qeynos or Ironforge and meet losta ppl. In Vg all are far too spread over.
    7) REPLACE THE RIFT SYSTEM WITH A USUAL GRIFFON TRAVEL
    Or teleporters. They must be unlocked, by reaching them normally, once, and then you can use them like the WOW Griffons or the EQ2 Griffons. Lets face it: in VG travelling will NEVER be an "exciting experience", so why not skip the pretense and go ahead with buisiness. Might be teleporters if you dont like to copy Griffons, but something in every region.
    8) MORE SOCIALIZING ELEMENTS
    What I think of is what I know from SWG: ppl went to cantinas, or WOW, ppl go into Taverns and roleplay and socialize. VG needs to build hubs and give reasons for ppl to meet and do that. Now ppl just stand around in Tursh in front of the tavern and nothing happens, no RP, no socializing. I guess something is missing in that area.

    Great post as it sums up mostly why I left / leaving VG.  I found myself walking around NT on my own and it just feels horrible.  Performance is a major issue since 5 people in NT causes major lag.  Like an earlier post stated the world just feels barren and cold (even if its not graghically).  BTW I know there is faction warfare on the storyline front but its all static and nothing seems to contribute to it. 

    E.g. seeing mostly stationary dwarves staring at stationary undead with catapults is not immersive.  

    I guess the game just doesn't have that warm, immersive feel you should have with an RPG.   

    Some quick ideas they could do to help may be:

    Card games (pub games) in taverns to encourage social network.

    Public grouping for dungeons.  Log on and jump straight into a dungeon with a large group.  Cut the lonely travel out! 

    You are right though.  Station pass will keep VG ticking over as people will log on to see what has changed every 6 months or so.  Still a shame because all those hours I played I really did enjoy the scenery and thought it has / had so much promise.

     

  • KraeneeKraenee Member Posts: 166

    I play it and I can tell you it can only go up lol

    image

  • OrphesOrphes Member UncommonPosts: 3,039

    Originally posted by Kraenee


    I play it and I can tell you it can only go up lol
    My... You're positive enough it seems. ;)

    I'm so broke. I can't even pay attention.
    "You have the right not to be killed"

  • SilverPhenixSilverPhenix Member Posts: 96

    Originally posted by Neopsych


    Personally I think VG is never going to really move much from where it is now albeit tey will probably old an official relaunch at some point. My reasoning is two fold:
     
    1) Lore - the game has none to speak of. All of the other elements mentioned exist in one form or another in other games but people are drawn and stay with a game for its specific lore / atmostphere. VG feels cold and barran.
    2) Players - MMO layers are quite eductaed on MMo history and I think that once the tarnish falls from a new game, the crowds generally never come back. SWG is somehar proof of this. Initially amazing but then the world turned and now its a tickle 3rd title. Games do not often get a good second chance ( whether they deserve it or not)
     
    Shame

    You don't get the lore spoonfed but its there, masses of it. Ever done a writ? URT (now there's a "grind", har har)? Anything that involves a quest-arc instead of single quests? Hell, any diplomacy starter quest arc?

    Also, I wanna point out the incredible irony of mis-spelling "educated"

     

    Vanguard will easily survive 12 months. What are you expecting, the server to up and die in 11 months and 30 days? The two main threats to Vanguard (AoC and WAR) are both pvp-oriented while VG is pve-oriented. Kinda diminishes the threat. Given time and more content (and more content is coming), Vanguard will stand out as one of the finer PvE MMO's around.

    Now playing: City of Heroes/Villains, Age of Conan

    Played: Eve, Hg:L, Vanguard, WoW, FFXI, Planetside, Neocron, Battlezone, EQII, AO, CoX, AA, DDO

    I win at Vanguard.

  • BlurrBlurr Member UncommonPosts: 2,155

    You know, someone said it'll be a top 10 game in 2 years.

    Vanguard certainly has a lot of potential, and it did when it launched. However, I'm left wondering if SOE's team can actually pull it off. They've got alot of work ahead of them and the game certainly has a long way to go.

    I wonder though, if 2 years won't be too late? The game has suffered a great loss in being thrown into the gutter as it were by all the problems it had. It may be able to climb out, but at that point, wil it be too late? Will people have forgotten about the game and moved on to newer games such as the ones coming out in 08 or 09?

    "Because it's easier to nitpick something than to be constructive." -roach5000

  • SamuraiswordSamuraisword Member Posts: 2,111

    It's going nowhere. 2008 will see Spellborn, Warhammer, Age of Conan; and Vanguard will fade even farther into oblivion.

    image

  • suskesuske Member Posts: 714

  • ethionethion Member UncommonPosts: 2,888

    I think vanguard has a lot of potential and where many games start out limited but maybe better in there niche they are tied down in terms of breadth.  Vanguard started with every possible game system implemented with a lot of depth.

    Get rid of the bugs, fill out the content, add raids and maybe some arena pvp stuff and I'd say you got a game that can stand with anything coming.  VG is a game that is set to go for many years and it will only get better.

    What will really be interesting is to see what SOE does with the trial island.  I think that will be a great indicator of where they game will go in the coming years.

     

     

    ---
    Ethion

  • ThillianThillian Member UncommonPosts: 3,156
    Originally posted by Elikal

    I am quite over the fence, both if VG survives and if I keep my interest in it. Here is my personal list of things to do.

    1) REWORK DEATH PENALITY

    As it is its only a timesink. You loose time to recover the corpse or loose time to get the lost XP back. My suggestion is to make it like in EQ2. You get a debt, but minimal, and debt is also being automatically repaid after being offline a while. I just think it doesnt fit into our time anymore.

    They want you to play, not to not play so any rules that increase something or give you some bonus while you're offline is stupid. I was pretty angry when they added the resting bonus.

    2) REWORK QUESTS WITH MORE STORIES

    Self-explanatory; msot quests are nonsense in terms of story-telling.

    Stories you have in all diplomacy quests. Some adventure quests could be done better yeh, but usually when I want to read all the lore stuff i do some diplomacy.

    3) SHAPE QUESTS TO LINES OF STORIES

    Now quests feel very randomly scattered, it tells little about the world, and I never got this "feeling" for some kind of world-wide story as I did in LOTRO or WOW.

    That's another bad aspect actually. If you have too many chained up quests you will never get a party for them. All will be on different chains etc. If you want to add this you also need to add a chance to get XP by helping someone else quest, but thats a different story.

    The game has a good amount of chained quests at the moment (UPC, CiS..)

    4) ADD INSTANCES FOR STOY-TELLING

    A good thing LOTRO did. If you end a story-arc you experience the climax of the story with mini-events, scripted dialogue asf. It really gave me the feeling to be INSIDE of a story, not just listen to a story told by an NPC.

    You would like to see instances in a complete non-instanced world? I pray they will never fall that down to add instances to VG. It's one of its great features.

    5) MORE CITY LIFE

    As it is the villages and cities are boring, NPCs stand like glued to the ground, nothing happens around you. Just take Stormwind from WOW: there are kids playing chase, guards exchange, all those things.

    Some guards actually do move. Yeh most of them just stands passively on a place. But I don't need to see running around two kids and feel okay this is immersive. Don't tell me WoW had more NPC moving in town, Darnassus had like 10 guards on patrol in the wholo town, Ironforge had like 5. Each VG capital town has much more actually.

    6) MAKE NEW TORGONOR & AGRHAM WORLD HUBS

    Somehow I miss those feeling of having a few big cities centers of meet and greet, as I know it from EQ2, WOW and the like. You always could go to Bree, Qeynos or Ironforge and meet losta ppl. In Vg all are far too spread over.

    How you want to do that in a world like Talon? You want to remove exchange brokers from all other towns so people had a reason to go there? It's obvious in Lotro why Bree is full of people or why Ironforge was full in WoW when it was the only town with auction house. But I wonder how you want to do that in VG.

    7) REPLACE THE RIFT SYSTEM WITH A USUAL GRIFFON TRAVEL

    Or teleporters. They must be unlocked, by reaching them normally, once, and then you can use them like the WOW Griffons or the EQ2 Griffons. Lets face it: in VG travelling will NEVER be an "exciting experience", so why not skip the pretense and go ahead with buisiness. Might be teleporters if you dont like to copy Griffons, but something in every region.

    If you didnt notice it's there already. You can lend a flying mount for 20s for 5 minutes, which is enough to fly almost anywhere you want on the continent. It's actually much better thing to have those stationed flying mounts that you can burrow and fly anywhere you want rather than having fixed points and watch and wait til your gryf gets to its fixed destination. Don't you think?

    8) MORE SOCIALIZING ELEMENTS

    What I think of is what I know from SWG: ppl went to cantinas, or WOW, ppl go into Taverns and roleplay and socialize. VG needs to build hubs and give reasons for ppl to meet and do that. Now ppl just stand around in Tursh in front of the tavern and nothing happens, no RP, no socializing. I guess something is missing in that area.

    No game I played before people went into tavern and socialize. Yes there are guild meetings and roleplaying events, but I never saw random people going into tavern and wait for other random people to come in and chat? I don't get that.

     

    REALITY CHECK

  • boojiboyboojiboy Member UncommonPosts: 1,553

    The OP made some 'assumptions' that I absolutely don't agree with.

    But yes, this game will easily be around in 12 months.

    1) I agree, leveling is too easy.  They need to slow it down because there is SO much in this game to explore.  I leveled to 50 in about 6 months (I play casual and take it as it comes).  But I found that I missed 75% of the dungeons in this game and probably 50% of the cool quest lines because you out level them.  For example, I never explored some of the best dungeons in the game (Sunset Pointe, Dargun's Tomb, Pantheon, Old Targ,  Vault of the Hidden, Graystone).  On the other hand, when our guild reached 46-50 there were just a few places to go and we've spent a lot of time there.  Sony must slow leveling.

    2) Higher end content and advancement is needed for all those that have leveled out.  One could start an alt and go through the game again and never repeat a dungeon or quest line because of the diversity, but many are like me and are not all that interested in alts.

    3) Game optimization and crash fixes.  This is the single because reason for the people I know leaving.  Their computers can't handle the game.  This will be a big week with the update.... hopefully it works.

    4) Sony has all hands on deck for AWP, optimization, crash fixes and bug fixes.  Which means they've pulled folks off the other spheres.  As soon as they can, they've got to get back to crafting, diplomacy etc. and get the rest of the planned content in.

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