SOE to Publish Vanguard

[SnakeCharmer]

ugh.  some old friend from sw:g are gearing up for this game...

Have they previously shown signs of being functionally unable to learn from prior experiences?

Seriously, there are ex-SWG players looking forward to a game built by Verant/Sigil and published by SOE?

Apparently. 

The love child of Blizzard and BioWare could make this game and I wouldnt want to play it.  The love child of Blizzard and BioWare could make ANY fantasy hack and slash game and I wouldn't want to play it.  I don't care how good/polished/full of content it is. 

[damijin]

Hehe. We have had a couple of them wander over here to defend their catasstastic honor too. They are definitely a special breed. And one that shouldn't breed, for that matter.

Shortwood posted for provocation over there, and Thosor Dow posted here for provocation.  Geddit?

Both worked.

I wouldn't have geddid it if you didn't say anything :/

[WayAbvPar]

Hehe. We have had a couple of them wander over here to defend their catasstastic honor too. They are definitely a special breed. And one that shouldn't breed, for that matter.

Shortwood posted for provocation over there, and Thosor Dow posted here for provocation.  Geddit?

Both worked.

Oh I fully realize that. The difference is that we all laughed at their rep, while they all leapt to the defense of the game with some hilariously quoteable bits to ours. In each instance, they were frothing retards for us to laugh at, which works just fine for me 

[Merusk]

Hehe. We have had a couple of them wander over here to defend their catasstastic honor too. They are definitely a special breed. And one that shouldn't breed, for that matter.

Shortwood posted for provocation over there, and Thosor Dow posted here for provocation.  Geddit?

What, that Anagrams are fun?

DataGod is a funny guy.

[WayAbvPar]

Jesus I am thick. I blame it on lack of caffeine, which I shall now rectify with a quick trip to Starbucks.  As soon as I get this hook out of my mouth...

[Simond]

September newletter
"We're on the home stretch, and nearly ready for launch! Coming soon - a whole bunch of untested stuff we should have finalised in alpha! Feedback wanted - does our game suck, or what? PS. Don't mention WoW"

Christ.

[Engels]

Good god, this one's promising to be a worse launch than SW:G. From the sounds of it, they shouldn't start to even think of releasing this game till summer. Then maybe they can start thinking about it.

[Oban]

I am not sure if the fact that rats are not in yet is worse than the fact that rats are npcs.

[Trippy]

What's the latest rumor on a ship date?

[Yoru]

22 gigs for a game client? Sweet crispy chocolate Jesus, I couldn't even think of fitting that on my gaming partition. Or any other windows-enabled partition. That's just out of control. Are they using 2000x2000 uncompressed bitmaps for textures or something?

[Simond]

What's the latest rumor on a ship date?

Bearing in mind that I've seen more than one Vanguard fan say things like "Another 6 - 12 months of development and it'll be a great game!", the most recent launch rumour I've heard is January.

[LC]

What's the latest rumor on a ship date?

Bearing in mind that I've seen more than one Vanguard fan say things like "Another 6 - 12 months of development and it'll be a great game!", the most recent launch rumour I've heard is January.

I'm still trying to find a tester that can say something good about the game. Even so I hope it launches soon. I haven't had a good laugh since the last turbine game was released.

[schild]

What's the latest rumor on a ship date?

Bearing in mind that I've seen more than one Vanguard fan say things like "Another 6 - 12 months of development and it'll be a great game!", the most recent launch rumour I've heard is January.

I'm still trying to find a tester that can say something good about the game. Even so I hope it launches soon. I haven't had a good laugh since the last turbine game was released.

I love me some NCSoft and MANY of the people there, including people on the AA team, but comeon. Auto Assault was a pretty good guffaw. But then, it was also strangely sad. Kind of like watching a movie about well, I don't know. But it hurt in all the wrong places.

[Sky]

AA was more sad than funny, because it was a genre that would be cool as hell, Car Wars! Blowing that hurts way more than blowing another goddamned fantasy diku.

[Miasma]

Yes, I think Auto Assault is the only game I have ever played that made me feel bad.  I downloaded the trial and there was just nobody around.  It's the same feeling you get when you wander into a store that's not doing so well and realize that of the six people in the store you are the only customer and that all the employees are casting desperate sidelong glances at you.  It's depressing and causes you to leave.  A bunch of people, who are probably very nice, worked very hard and created a world where you could have fun blowing up cars but no one came.

[Nija]

I'm still trying to find a tester that can say something good about the game. Even so I hope it launches soon. I haven't had a good laugh since the last turbine game was released.

I can say something good about the game!

When you first enter the world you run around for a few minutes before all of the art and objects fully load. So you don't have to look at the stupid looking crap for an extra few minutes, which is a good thing right?

You haven't lived until you've autoran into an invisible camel for 60-90 seconds.

[Morat20]

Man, I cannot wait for Vanguard to launch. It can't possibly live up to either the "If God made an MMORPG, it'd be Vanguard" hype, of course -- but I'm not so sure it can live up to the negative hype either. Can it really be that bad?

I intend to watch closely as other people find out. (I make it a rule not to buy an OS -- or join an MMORPG -- until it's been out several months. Let other people have the 'early experience' fun. I'll join when the shit works a bit better.)

[Endie]

22 gigs for a game client? Sweet crispy chocolate Jesus, I couldn't even think of fitting that on my gaming partition. Or any other windows-enabled partition. That's just out of control. Are they using 2000x2000 uncompressed bitmaps for textures or something?

OK, I'll risk annihilation by seeming to almost defend the thing, but what is *in* the 22gig client?  I mean, if it's all textures and sounds and things then I don't mind, really, so long as only the appropriate bits are needed at any given time.

And if you really do mean the client itself is huge, then presumably they're compiling to a debug target to allow more efficient error reporting.  In which case when they compile to the release target it'll shrink massively.

My own, utterly-unfounded-not-even-tempted-to-be-in-Beta and therefore fairly worthless opinion is that the gameplay will be unpleasant but that the technical elements will be relatively ok (as in way below Blizzard but way above SWG/DnL/Seed etc).

[Venkman]

Holy carp, I missed that earlier. 22gb?! Are they trying to fill a Blu Ray disc?

Put to your point, this is likely unoptimized for testing and whatnot.

[Yegolev]

I thought that we were playing "debug" or "unoptimized" code when I was in the AO beta.  Boy, was I wrong.  I will put a crisp Lincoln on there being no significant change in size at retail.

[Nija]

Can I post a text file output of the directory structure / file sizes or is that too much?

I was flipping through the Shaders folder and there's a 180 meg file dealing with speedtree. Rest of the shaders are pretty small, 5-10 megs. Then there are about half a dozen that are 100+ megs with the speedtree one being the biggest.

Most data is contained in the models I THINK, I skimmed it last night but i couldn't really recognize the file types. I'd guess it's a container for the model+some textures for it combined.

You can't really compress the graphics that much, as they need to be frequently accessed, or so I'd assume.

[HaemishM]

I don't think I've ever seen a beta client that SHRUNK before release. So expect that 22gb to be about what it is on release, especially if they are rushing it as they appear to be. I wonder how long before someone discovers the Hot Coffee bits that got left out but not taken out.

22GB for a client is fucking obscene. There's no excuse, none, nada, zip, not even for a beta client. It screams bloatware.

[Yoru]

Given the way Nija posted it, it appears that it's about 22GB for the entire Vanguard directory tree - so yes, I'd suppose it's primarily locked up in models, textures and sounds. But even then, 22GB of models, textures and sounds? My gaming partition is 40GB, but I'm not going to wipe every other app off there for one game, even if it was Digital Fellatio Online. Some of the other clients I've seen have been no more than 5-10GB.

Given what I saw of Vanguard at E3, they spent about half of the 22GB on polygons in hilariously disproportionate elf and catgirl boobies.

For fuck's sake, when I saw it, they still hadn't managed to implement capitalization - attacking 'a toad' meant that all lines like 'a toad hits your face for 15 acid damages' started with a lowercase 'a'. It's text, it's not that hard to detect when you're starting a sentence and capitalize the words there.

[Rasix]

For fuck's sake, when I saw it, they still hadn't managed to implement capitalization - attacking 'a toad' meant that all lines like 'a toad hits your face for 15 acid damages' started with a lowercase 'a'. It's text, it's not that hard to detect when you're starting a sentence and capitalize the words there.

The guy working on text output was moved to the dynamic nipple-resizing system. 

[Yegolev]

I hope there's a free trial.  I don't want to have to spend any time on the official forums.  Space won't be a problem, my game disks are not partitioned.

[LC]

Can I post a text file output of the directory structure / file sizes or is that too much?

I was flipping through the Shaders folder and there's a 180 meg file dealing with speedtree. Rest of the shaders are pretty small, 5-10 megs. Then there are about half a dozen that are 100+ megs with the speedtree one being the biggest.

Most data is contained in the models I THINK, I skimmed it last night but i couldn't really recognize the file types. I'd guess it's a container for the model+some textures for it combined.

You can't really compress the graphics that much, as they need to be frequently accessed, or so I'd assume.

If you still came to IRC you could.

BTW is the game really as brown as the screenshots depict? Even blue starts to look brown in their screenshots for some reason. Maybe they could partner up with UPS, and offer free delivery. What can brown do for you?

[HaemishM]

If we're talking about Vanguard, I'm sure brown can fill up my harddrive and make me weep from killing level 1 rats for days.

[SpaceDrake]

We're in the "home stretch" of beta and one of the continents isn't implemented yet, much less tested.

Vanguard's a winner!

[Signe]

Geez, this thread doesn't even need green!

[damijin]

I'm going to be buying a new hard drive to play Vanguard. Any recommendations?

[Venkman]

I'm going to be buying a new hard drive to play Vanguard. Any recommendations?

Oh man, that's just too easy.

Unless you're serious. In that case, carry on.

I'd recommend 10kpm at minimum, internally ideally. MMOs are hard drive junkies. Beyond that, I'll let the smart people cover.

[Nija]

Seagate stuff.

10k rpm non-scsi isn't worth the cash to me.

[Signe]

Maybe it does need just a little bit of green.   

[Yegolev]

We're in the "home stretch" of beta and one of the continents isn't implemented yet, much less tested.

Is that the continent that they will put all the PvPers on after release?

[Yegolev]

I'm going to be buying a new hard drive to play Vanguard. Any recommendations?

You are going to want something big.

Actually I'm looking hard at that one.  I hate deleting porn.