Vanguard Round 2 - Post Mortem

[Nebu]

I didn't believe there existed worse than the WoW or VN forums until I went to that FoH forum.  Oooof. 

[Venkman]

After page 100 or so is when the LOTRO stuff really starts to take off.

Loving that. I have read a lot of "meh" about LotRO gameplay but those screens make me want to buy it. Almost.

LoTRO is what VG really should have been, except the latter started as an attempt to crib the "winning" strategy SOE was developing for EQ2... through payoffs from nVidiai :P

[Lt.Dan]

I still don't see the point of in-game houses... other than hideously expensive limited resources to have e-peen competitions over.

Listening to a guild crafter explain the grind of making bricks, one of the pinnacles of the crafting art, and the intense faction grind to be able to grind bricks of other nations, pretty much sank any interest that remained.

...what?

You have to learn how some completely foreign power makes bricks before you can even build a house?

How did any of the pre-existing architecture even go up if that was the case?

--GF

Intelligent design, obviously. 

[Jayce]

Brad says:

And I agree with you -- some of our biggest problems are LFG, performance, some PvP tweaks, and low server pop.

I like how he puts all these gameplay elements in the list, then snuck in at the end is the minor fact that there are in fact no players to enjoy all the preceding.

[Azazel]

I think the consensus here is that "what he thinks" doesn't quite match reality.  He may fully believe what he says (I don't think he does), but that doesn't make it the truth, or fact.

Besides, I also think that, for these boards, the game's been judged as "crap", interest has passed, and now there's the wish that he'd just shut up and stop hogging the microphone.  We're a little bit like forum whores; we should stop reading boards and messages that we're not interested in.

While I'm not interested in playing Vanguard, the threads and discussions (and Brad's posts) provide an endless source of cheap entertainment. It's a slow-mo trainwreck in progress..

[Azazel]

better LFG tools, etc. are all being looked at

Another thing I never understand, why do mmog developers *always* get lfg tools wrong.

Last time I was there, EQ1 of all games, actually had an excellent system in place. WoW's is shit-tastic by comparison.

[Simond]

Yeah, I never understood why WoW, after stealing so much else from EQ, didn't just rip off their current LFG system wholesale.

Anyway - ETA on server mergers for Vanguard?

[Falconeer]

I wanted to do this since a couple of weeks. I stopped playing Vanguard. And I have to admit that I was wrong about lots of things.

So yes, I was wrong, you all (not you Geldon) were right and yeah I'll stay grounded for the rest of the week.

I think it would be too long to list them all and explain why Vanguard ended up boring me to death, especially because many of the reasons already came up on these boards million of times turned out to be true.
I just want to point out what really killed me: the world.
Again, I was wrong: this game is NOT the explorer heaven I thought and preached it was. Because yes, as many of you said back in the days, it looks too much of the same wherever you go. It's huge, and there are for sure Points of Interests, but what really lacks is a "change of pace". I mean, you know in other games when you are bored of a certain zone/theme and you decide to go elsewhere just to have a completely different colour palette, theme, mobs, atmosphere? This basically can't happen in Vanguard. If you are in Thestra, that is the largest continent and it is VERY large, you will be in Thestra for the rest of your life! It doesn't matter if you'll go to the elven city or the dwarf/human/whatever city... it'll be more of the same! Don't get me wrong, New Targonor has beautiful buildings and architecture and I still thinks it's a beautiful world after all, but it completely lacks variations.
The game has slow progression so you are forced to stay in a single place for a long time anyway, but as soon as you learn that in 10 or 20 levels it will be basically more of the same, than your will to live starts crumbling to pieces.

Hiding and going into dungeons is the only way to save yourself from the attack of the too-real world but of course you can't go in there unless you have a good group (crappy group means endless Corpse Runs and usually some delevelling is involved too), so you are stuck to live in the usual green/brown hills killing the same old mobs for days hoping that maybe one day they'll patch in I don't know what maybe an alien world with some different colour or theme.

But I already wrote too much, and I'll sum it up:

- The seamless world idea turned out to be bad to me. I enjoyed gazing to the horizon but in the end it's best to have more foggy shortsighted old kind of worlds and more different places to visit. And I mean really different. The EQ2, EQ1, WoW.. well.. every other game's way.

- The graphics are bad in a not-fascinating way. So after 6 weeks of playing you are not so curious anymore about what will come, because apparently nothing will come. Not in a human sized time-frame. Mobs are just awful, seriously awful. Some of them are uglier than EQ1 ones. It's just uncanny.

- The dungeons that should give that "different theme" feeling are just, in most cases, pretty ugly. I tried all the dungeon I could try hoping that the next one could refresh my will to play and expectations of good things to come, but it basically never happened. Dungeons are ugly. To understand what I am saying just consider Befallen in EQ1 and you'll have a dungeon that is 10 times better of any of the dungeons I visited in Vanguard in 6 weeks. Not to mention places like Unrest or Mistmoore, and I am talking about the original EQ, not EQ2 (that has incredibly good dungeons too, especially compared to VG ones). *sigh*

- It completely fails to recreate the EQ1 kind of magic in all aspects. I remember a Freeport where you could be slain by a NPC in an inn just because of some nasty ill faction stuff or just being the follower of the "wrong" god, or amazing "secret" places like the sewers with high level sunken corpses. Nothing like that is here apparently. I know it wasn't fun to be killed at level 5 in your city by a crazy NPC, but it made for a creepy gaming experience. So far, Vanguard couldn't surprise me save for a couple of starter quests (showing that they gave their best for the first introductory quests, and the rests is plain dull, and duller as you progress).

- The supposedly neat stuff like Diplomacy and Crafting is actually there, houses, boats.. it's all good, but it's not even remotely close to the "worldly" feeling of Ultima Online (an example that I guess will be fixed is the lack of a function to recall to your house. I am sure they'll add it later, but it's not in now) so part of their appeal is missing and the funnever really kicks in. Plus, if the world is boring you are not compelled to "live" in it.

My final note:

The game is good for a diku, and I am sure it will be even better in a couple of years thanks to improvements in all areas and especially addition of features on an already pretty solid base. But unless they put in some new ZONES with COMPLETELY DIFFERENT themes I doubt it'll be ever able to lure me back. I don't care how good are the special moves or combat animations in a MMO if it is unable to give me the illusion of visiting many different places or have me interested in exploring its dungeons.

I want to conclude with something I scavenged from my memory and my hard disk and I feel this is very important given that I am now convinced that it's the "seamless" world that killed it for me, especially thinking about all the goodness you can still have in zone-based games, even better when zones borders are of the soft kind like in WoW. It's a 2002 interview to Brad McQuaid mostly about EverQuest 1 where he said something that makes me want to kill him with a 9-iron. It's 2002 so I guess the design documents for VG were already inked on paper and preproduction was supposedly already started:

Another very important aspect of the game and a goal from day one is how immersive and vast the world is. EQ has been criticized for being zone-based (as opposed to seamless), but look at what it allowed us to do. Whereas seamless worlds, at least with today's technology, require less detail, texture variation, and variety of objects and other points of interest, having a zone based engine allowed EQ's world builders to create well over a hundred unique and interesting places to explore. And then it's not just the detail in the world, but also the content in terms of NPC models, quests, items, etc. I think EQ really set the high bar there and also proved just how important depth and detail really is.

WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU BRAD? ARE YOU DISCONNECTED FROM YOURSELF?! YOU TWO GO SEE A FUCKING DOCTOR, NOW!

But it's too late I guess. I am stuck with my mistakes and the time I wasted saying stupid good things about Vanguard, a game that, as for now, is about 5 times less interesting than its predecessor.
Once again I was wrong, you were right and I am sorry. Just thought it was fair to let you know about it.

[Trippy]

- The seamless world idea turned out to be bad to me. I enjoyed gazing to the horizon but in the end it's best to have more foggy shortsighted old kind of worlds and more different places to visit. And I mean really different. The EQ2, EQ1, WoW.. well.. every other game's way.

WoW is seamless as well (for the non-instanced parts). They just took the time and had the art talent to make each area look different and they put in transitions from one "style" to the next so you don't get that abrupt scenery change like you do in some games with separate zones. In other words there's nothing about "seamlessness" that says you have to make everything look the same.

[Venkman]

Seamless-world was a short-lived selling point. It just doesn't matter nearly as much as truly important things like core game play, appeal of the graphics/audio, social tools and so on. As such, it should never be used if the game can't also support those things. Very few have been able to combine seamless with the proper density of engaging content. Even WoW, which is technically seamless, very much is a zone-based experience by how the content is laid out, in the public and instantiated spaces.

Content is king. Zone it if you need to, make it seamless only if you can do it well.

Edit: Trippy said it better

I stopped playing Vanguard. And I have to admit that I was wrong about lots of things.

Falconeer, I can't speak for anyone else here, but the only reason I ever came down on you for the VG fanboi stuff is because I knew where you'd eventually net out. Geldon will too, though he may not have the courage to come here and admit it like you have.

It's not that I know better or anything. It's that VG is not the sort of experience that can survive the veterans experience in the genre well. At best it's something experienced MMOs can accept and apologize to others for, sorta like early SWG. But someone who both has played a lot of these games, a lot of diku-based games, and who spends enough time in places like this talking about them can't help but be affected by what becomes obvious as fundamental flaws with an experience.

VG is broken for most people in enough ways to keep them from flocking to it. Maybe it'll be fixed in time, but it's not worth funding that advancement.

[Jayce]

- The seamless world idea turned out to be bad to me. I enjoyed gazing to the horizon but in the end it's best to have more foggy shortsighted old kind of worlds and more different places to visit. And I mean really different. The EQ2, EQ1, WoW.. well.. every other game's way.

WoW is seamless as well (for the non-instanced parts). They just took the time and had the art talent to make each area look different and they put in transitions from one "style" to the next so you don't get that abrupt scenery change like you do in some games with separate zones. In other words there's nothing about "seamlessness" that says you have to make everything look the same.

The funny thing is that WoW's landscape does abruptly change from one type of terrain to the other, but something about the "soft" message in your face saying you've just changed zones makes it OK.  In three years of playing, the abrupt transition has never been more than a minor curiousity for me.

BTW, I think Falconeer wins the thread for having the guts to come clean about his changing opinion of VG.

[Signe]

He used too many words. 



would have sufficed.

[Simond]

Yeah, fair play to Falconeer for owning up to buying into the hype.
Meanwhile: http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/newsArchive.vm?id=088&section=News

Adventuring Kill Experience Update

Experience rates for killing NPCs have been increased significantly. The experience changes start as a small amount at low levels and scale up to a large amount in the early twenties. From then on, the increase remains fixed. This increase should be very noticeable for players above level fifteen. This change is in response to actual player leveling times not meeting our original target times within many different subsets of the player population. This increase will bring us much closer to our goal without exceeding it.



NPC Hit Points

Challenge level two and three NPCs have had their hit points reduced at levels above ten. It will be a small, but increasing reduction per level.

Lolz.

[Oban]

[Murgos]

Whereas seamless worlds, at least with today's technology, require less detail, texture variation, and variety of objects and other points of interest

See.  Now I would have thought that the opposite was true.  Having a seamless world means that pretty much every corner, nook and cranny needs to have something interesting there.  In a zone based world you can do one major POI for a zone and move o as that's it's reason for being.  If the world is contiguous there then has to be continuous reasons to advance in any one direction.

[Falconeer]

WoW is seamless as well (for the non-instanced parts). They just took the time and had the art talent to make each area look different and they put in transitions from one "style" to the next so you don't get that abrupt scenery change like you do in some games with separate zones. In other words there's nothing about "seamlessness" that says you have to make everything look the same.

Uhm yeah, but I used the term "soft" as I don't think (but I am not sure) you can look across the soft zone borders in WoW. Can you? From that point of view, I think there' s some kind of zoning involved, although managed 1000 better than the crappy VG one.. so I am not sure it can be called seamless technically. Yeah, there are no loading times but the zones are tightly separated.

This is somehow not true in Vanguard where adjacent zones are fully loaded to the point that you can see "inside" them even while staying on a different one (This is what allows to see 4 and more kilometers of horizon in every direction). Or let's just say that mobs can follow you in a different zone, and I am not sure if that can happen in WoW. Anyway just correct me if I am wrong.

But if I am wrong the whole thing is even worst! The "no loading at all" zones of WoW beats the "you can see for miles at 360 ° inside other zones while just standing in the one in the center cause they are preloaded, but unfortunately they will look almost the same as we don't know a way to load different assets without a loading screen, and still we have a 3 seconds loading hiccup when you cross the zoneline".

In fact, this is the thing that amazes me:

Game A (WoW) has a world that doesn't need zone-loading-pauses and it manages to look so widely different from place to place. It has the variety of the EQ1 zones without the loading. Impressive.

Game B (Vanguard) still make some kind of very quick load when you cross a zone border AND the zones all look the same BECAUSE of it being seamless? What's even more scarier is that Brad said something on the FoH boards about the fact that PS2 games can access the dvd in a way that's not doable for windows/PCs, and this is way you can't have the same kind of variety of a certain game he was talking about. Still, what's with WoW then? Did I played it on the PS2 and didn't notice?
Just top class programmers vs. c-grade ones? Just different poly counts? What's Sigili excuse for that?

And what's with the things he said in 2002 and I quoted? Did he thought just a month after that interview that the technology needed (and he said was missing at the time) to add variety without zoning was suddenly available?! If so, then why did he sell it to Blizzard?

[Tige]

Yea Vanguard sucks.  Now on to more important things....

Oban, have you found anything that is close to Oban that doesn't cost elevenitybillion dollars?  Dalwhinnie is the norm around here but every once in awhile Oban surfaces.

[Falconeer]

Whereas seamless worlds, at least with today's technology, require less detail, texture variation, and variety of objects and other points of interest

See.  Now I would have thought that the opposite was true.  Having a seamless world means that pretty much every corner, nook and cranny needs to have something interesting there.  In a zone based world you can do one major POI for a zone and move o as that's it's reason for being.  If the world is contiguous there then has to be continuous reasons to advance in any one direction.

I think he meant "requires" as in: "if you go seamless you can't technically do all that stuff (cause there's no way to load it all and blah blah as he said elsewhere), so we went the zone way as we liked more details, texture variation, and variety of objects and other points of interest...". At least this is how I read it.

[ajax34i]

I don't know if mobs in WoW cross zone lines, because in most cases the mobs are far away from the zoneline, and even their aggro range doesn't extend into the next zone...  you try to pull one and it will de-aggro long before you reach the zone line.  The only place to check would probably be the area where Dalaran is, trying to pull stuff into the mountains.  Oh, actually, nevermind, I remember pulling NPC's from the Plaguelands across the bridge right up to the Stratholme gates, and you get the zonechange message before you reach the gates.

As far as what happened with Vanguard, my theory is that not all devs are equal, and you judge who's good and who's "c grade" by the products, just like with any other industry, sorry.  Although it's possible that a dev team can shine at some aspect of a game and utterly suck at others (example:  CCP, nice graphics for the time when they released EVE, horrible UI and horrible bugfixing methods).

[Simond]

A lot of WoW's zone bondaries are carefully managed, especially when going into old world cities (the statue-lined walk into Stormwind, the corridors into Org & IF, the lifts to UC & TB, the boat+teleport to Darnassus). Even some zone changes are similar to this (i.e. any of them with narrow, winding canyons or tunnels seperating the zones).

However, there are also a bunch of zones where the 'zone boundary' is fairly wide open - Goldshire/Duskwood/Westfall are all 'clear' boundaries, as is Durotar/The Barrens and a quite a few more.

[Merusk]

Uhm yeah, but I used the term "soft" as I don't think (but I am not sure) you can look across the soft zone borders in WoW. Can you? From that point of view, I think there' s some kind of zoning involved, although managed 1000 better than the crappy VG one.. so I am not sure it can be called seamless technically. Yeah, there are no loading times but the zones are tightly separated.

This is somehow not true in Vanguard where adjacent zones are fully loaded to the point that you can see "inside" them even while staying on a different one (This is what allows to see 4 and more kilometers of horizon in every direction). Or let's just say that mobs can follow you in a different zone, and I am not sure if that can happen in WoW. Anyway just correct me if I am wrong.

As has been mentioned the seamlessness of WoW is very controlled. Draw-distances in WoW are small enough you usually can't see into the next zone anyway.  The biggest exception to this, however, is the zoneline between Elwynn Forest and Duskwood.  If I remember, tonight I'll go there with the wife and see if we can see each other on the opposite bank.

Also, mobs CAN and do chase you across zone lines, if you try for it.  As ajax mentioned, they're usually far enough from the entrance that you don't see them.. BUT there have been many famous occasions where Raid-Level bosses were taken from high-level zones into newbie zones for the mass carnage 'fun' to be had.

[WindupAtheist]

Mobs can cross zone lines, and you can see across them.  They're not really "zone lines" at all, except to your map.

[Falconeer]

Well, so as I said it's even worst.

I'll quote him once again:

Another very important aspect of the game and a goal from day one is how immersive and vast the world is. EQ has been criticized for being zone-based (as opposed to seamless), but look at what it allowed us to do. Whereas seamless worlds, at least with today's technology, require less detail, texture variation, and variety of objects and other points of interest, having a zone based engine allowed EQ's world builders to create well over a hundred unique and interesting places to explore. And then it's not just the detail in the world, but also the content in terms of NPC models, quests, items, etc. I think EQ really set the high bar there and also proved just how important depth and detail really is.

And still he made his new game seamless.
And it even managed to do it as badly as he said it could be.
He basically said: "I don't like to go from New York to Boston delivering gremlins in a rainy day with a bicycle, as I'd get wet and the gremlins would multiply and things would get nasty, no... I'd take my armored van, so I'll stay dry and should the gremlins decide to do anything funky they'd stay locked in. I used the van already in the past and it went very well, while the bicycle would be a shot in the foot...", and still on delivery day he went in the garage looking for the bicycle.
The two battling guys in Brad's head are funny.

Oh, and on top of that, couple of years later, Blizzard managed to do the Great New York - Boston Gremlin Delivery just by attaching a large umbrella over the bicycle. And poor Brad thought it was impossible. Duh...

[Simond]

As has been mentioned the seamlessness of WoW is very controlled. Draw-distances in WoW are small enough you usually can't see into the next zone anyway.

IIRC, the in-game draw distance control slider for WoW is actually limited & controlled by a config file...so if your computer is powerful enough, you could set the max draw distance to, say, 400% of the normal limit via editing that file.

If one were so inclined.

[Jayce]

Oh, and on top of that, couple of years later, Blizzard managed to do the Great New York - Boston Gremlin Delivery just by attaching a large umbrella over the bicycle. And poor Brad thought it was impossible. Duh...

This has got to be the most bizzare analogy I've ever read.

BTW, AC1 did seamless world with distinctive areas in 1999.

[Endie]

Oban, have you found anything that is close to Oban that doesn't cost elevenitybillion dollars?  Dalwhinnie is the norm around here but every once in awhile Oban surfaces.

I initially thought that being Scottish would help me here, but I still have no idea what you're on about Dalwhinnie for.

Edit:  Ooooohhh, I get it.

[Oban]

Yea Vanguard sucks.  Now on to more important things....

Oban, have you found anything that is close to Oban that doesn't cost elevenitybillion dollars?  Dalwhinnie is the norm around here but every once in awhile Oban surfaces.

If the twenty year old is too expensive in your area, try the fourteen year old.

Also, try to hit a duty free store.  LHR & CDG usually have good prices.

[Driakos]

As has been mentioned the seamlessness of WoW is very controlled. Draw-distances in WoW are small enough you usually can't see into the next zone anyway.  The biggest exception to this, however, is the zoneline between Elwynn Forest and Duskwood.  If I remember, tonight I'll go there with the wife and see if we can see each other on the opposite bank.

Also, mobs CAN and do chase you across zone lines, if you try for it.  As ajax mentioned, they're usually far enough from the entrance that you don't see them.. BUT there have been many famous occasions where Raid-Level bosses were taken from high-level zones into newbie zones for the mass carnage 'fun' to be had.

You can see each other across the river.  Same for places like Loch Modan to the Wetlands (waterfall) or Felwood/Ashenvale/Azshara

There are quest mobs in the Blasted Lands, that once they get to a certain amount of health, stop taking damage.  You can drag those from the Blasted Lands, all the way to Stormwind, or if you're really motivated, Ironforge.  Droves of guards and players will beat on them till a GM shows up and despawns it.

The videos I remember, were players dragging Kazzak to Lakeshire or Goldshire.  He becomes essentially unkillable because he gains health, everytime a player dies near him (maybe NPCs too).  With all the newbies around, its crazy amounts of healing.

[Calantus]

If the twenty year old is too expensive in your area, try the fourteen year old.

I clicked the "last post" link and read backwards to this, and yeah... I didn't know wtf you were going on about but it sounded about as wrong as you can get.

[Signe]

 

[WindupAtheist]

This has got to be the most bizzare analogy I've ever read.

Especially since he has Brad taking the gremlins out on a rainy DAY, in which case they'll all melt into slop and die.

 :-D

/nitpick

[Oban]

I agree, no one should ever drink a single-malt Scotch that is less than eighteen years old.

[Nija]

I love the fact that it took me literally 3 hours of playing Vanguard to come to the same conclusions. Experience pays off, I guess. Don't look at all your VG time spent as wasted. You've learned some valuable criticism skills, and the next time you approach a burning paper bag on your porch you'll at least have a strategy.

[Falconeer]

This has got to be the most bizzare analogy I've ever read.

Especially since he has Brad taking the gremlins out on a rainy DAY, in which case they'll all melt into slop and die.

 :-D

/nitpick

Pfft. That was just to see if you were paying enough attention. (fuck Brad and stupid deliveries he can't even do right)

[Falconeer]

I love the fact that it took me literally 3 hours of playing Vanguard to come to the same conclusions. Experience pays off, I guess. Don't look at all your VG time spent as wasted. You've learned some valuable criticism skills, and the next time you approach a burning paper bag on your porch you'll at least have a strategy.

Honestly, I had great fun for 3 weeks. Seriously.
Too bad the other 3 weeks were painful. I guess there's something wrong with your game when people are supposed to start paying for AFTER 4 weeks, but they get bored to death in a time frame between 2 seconds and 20 days.