SOE to Publish Vanguard

[Broughden]

I always thought people were kind of joking about Vanguard being the mother of all grinds, and I couldn't really comprehend it since I had never played EQ. Yeah, that's right, I never played EQ. Ever. Not once.

This sounds like a fucking nightmare conjured forth from the firey anus of Satan himself. How the hell could that be fun? Are hardcore grinders really masochistic?

Dont worry you arent alone.
I was still playing Legends of Drakkar in 2d.

[Margalis]

I think you people are wrong about "knowing what works". Brad is making a game for his peeps, and there are many of them.

I disagree with a lot of what you said, but the main point I would make is that he is making his game badly.

I think he vastly over-estimates the overall appeal of the concept, but the concept isn't executed well so it doesn't really matter.

According to Brad a "conservative" estimate is that half of all EQ players will play Vanguard. That's more a best case scenario than a conservative one even if the game was executed flawlessly.

[Engels]

Ok, gonna post my thoughts on this. Skip it if you don't want to read something a bit longwinded.

First, EQ. EQ was the first 'real 3d' game that came out. We were all wide-eyed and bushy tailed when Brad spoke those oft repeated words 'Working as intended'. He could say that back then because we had no basis for comparison. We grinded. We did horrible corpse runs. We screamed at our spouses to come to bed. Some of us lost our jobs, some of us developed new techniques to pee more quickly. A bond formed in pain.

Then other MMOs started trickling out. AO could have perhaps saved us all from Brad, but its launch was a disaster. By the time DAoC had come out, Tweety had been kicked out of EQ and was entirely bored of her own website, despite everyone's love for her. It would seem that perhaps we could all transition to a kinder, gentler MMO. I spoke to player upon player who had had it with EQ and was coming to DAoC as if it were the next nirvana. DAoC's launch was probably bigger than EQ's launch, but then something strange happened; people started going back to EQ.

This is the strange and mysterious part about all this. Why did this happen? For all intents and purposes, DAoC was not as grindy. It had interesting features EQ lacked. It had tradeskills that made some sense and were not mcquaidistic. It had possibilities that EQ simply couldn't provide. Yet the inexorable migration back to EQ started only months after DAOC's launch.

My theory is that the original years of EQ created such a level of shared trauma that folks had to go back. There's a psychological phenomena called Repetition Compulsion, wherein the subject relives in some fashion a past trauma, normally by emulating as best he can the original experience, in an effort to defeat the traumatic event. Much the same was occuring in EQ. People were going back to get that 'feeling', which was nothing more than grinding sweat, frustration and anxiety comingled with the understanding that others were undergoing the same experience as well.

EQ experienced a huge renaisance with Planes of Power because it catapulted the insanity into new levels of torment. The same feelings you had when you wiped that time in the depths of VP could now be reenacted within the halls of Mithaniel Marr or Saryrn, Queen or Torment. Furthermore, in an unwitting stroke of unconscious genius, SOE let your trauma reenactement take place in the halls of the gods. Nothing could have cemented the experience more than that.

I'm making this sound very sophisticated, but it probably can be boiled down to a Vegas casino metaphor. First time, you lost your shirt. You left the casino for DAoC's friendlier casino, restored your self-esteem enough to go back to SOE's casino, hoping to recoup your losses and show them who's really boss. The casino welcomes you back with open arms and sits you at the greater table, the gilded one with the cuter waitress. You get 3 complimentary drinks on the house, and boy, you're feeling grand again.

The truth of course is the house never loses, and you are inevitably fleeced again. No expansion that comes out can tap into any emotional reserves any more because you are basically tapped out.

Everyone retires to WoW, or CoH, or Eve, where the grind is small, the accomplisments smaller, the colors brighter and the world just that much duller because you just can't ever go back to who you were before SOE raped you.

Vanguard comes along, and much like the usual cycle of abuse in any relationship, its saying that this time it'll be different. "Remember the good ole days when we laughed at the bottom of the Hole? Boy, it took us forever to get that body! What laughs!" Vanguard all but guarantees you the same pain again. Some, perhaps many, are going to go to Vanguard to try to recapture their long lost dignity. Others will see the hat trick for what it is.

But make no mistake about it; Brad McQuaid got away with his first cycle of abuse because noone knew better.

[Tale]

I'm afraid you are severely misguided if you think that's what the 'hard core' EQ crowd looked like.

You haven't understood what I'm saying. I'm not talking about the 'hard core' EQ crowd at all. I'm talking about people whose lives revolve around high fantasy. The kind of people who got into fantasy MUDs. That's why I think it is called Vanguard: they're building an enormous space for the vanguard who pioneered deep fantasy roleplaying, and their spiritual successors.

Who is Brad McQuaid? He's the guy who roleplayed Aradune the ranger through MUDs, pen & paper RPGs, and EverQuest, right into Vanguard. He's not a hardcore raider, he's a roleplayer. His ideal gameplay was on the Firiona Vie roleplaying server, not even reaching a high level.

But his roleplaying game style is to give the player infinite tasks. Vox and Nagafen were defeated earlier than anticipated in EQ1 and the bar was raised, but not for the sake of a hardcore raiding game. It was done for the sake of extending the fantasy. It cannot be permitted to end, so until you can expand it, you raise the bar.

The evolutions of raiding and catassing were side-effects of this. People started to see it as an end in itself, as did the developers who took EQ1 towards even harder core raiding when the Sigil crowd left. People kept trying to reach the end of something that was supposed to be infinte.

The Vanguard crowd are the people who stayed up for 8 hours in a row, weekend after weekend, chatting away in /gu while their raid leader bellowed commands at them.  They formed friendships and may even have vicariously enjoyed some immersion, supplied by the 1 or 2 RPer friends who were sort of dragged along to all this senseless raiding.

I don't think that's the case. I think many of those achievers are occupying the endgame of WoW (e.g. FoH, Afterlife, Legacy of Steel, etc). The loud people I see on the public Vanguard forums do want a harder core experience, and they will get it. But I don't think that's why Brad McQuaid is giving it to them. I think it's about building the biggest, longest, deepest, highest fantasy.

(BTW this is not about me. I've been playing "WoW lite" (casual raiding guild of experienced MMOGers) and I'm currently dabbling in DAoC as a noob. I just think the market and Vanguard should not be described in such concrete terms as I've seen above. It's not going to be that simple, unless the game just plain does not work.)

[Broughden]

This makes no sense. If these "high fantasy" people you speak of are looking for a "high fantasy" game they are going to go to LOTRO. You know....the one with the internationally recognized liscense and all those books of lore?

Not some dumb ass game where you have to kill trees in a group to make a fucking table leg.

[Merusk]

Everything Brad writes isn't about "high fantasy." It's about "time= achievement" and "time = rewards."   When it boils down to it, it's about the grind.  Sure, he loves fantasy and wants a deep and immersive setting, but that's just the mask, it's not the heart.

As to Engels and his 'batterd casino player' syndrome:  Perhaps for some people, but I know why I went back.  I started playing EQ and it took me a year and a half to get my first character to 50 (and by then the cap was 55.)  When I started playing DAoC I had 2 characters in the 50s in EQ.  I got up to 25 in DAOC and they cut the group xp gain and grouping ranges in half.  THAT is why they lost me.

 I'd been advancing ad an 'ok' pace, but had the rug cut out from under me.  I'd done the grind in another game, I was willing to tolerate a faster one, but then it was decided that we were going "too fast."  Fuck it, said I. I've done this grind, there's nothing new here for me, and went back to EQ.

At least there I was done with most of the grind and they were done with most of the balancing changes.  (Lest we forget the kagiggering that DAoC chars went through after release.)  I knew what I was getting, and I was able to move on to the Fun stuff  (Because, Yes, I do enjoy raiding.) a lot quicker than I ever would have been in DAoC.

[Tale]

This makes no sense. If these "high fantasy" people you speak of are looking for a "high fantasy" game they are going to go to LOTRO. You know....the one with the internationally recognized liscense and all those books of lore?

No, LOTRO is a WoW clone. Seen the E3 video? It's going for the movie mass market.

[Tale]

Just spotted a new E3 Vanguard characters/mounts video (featuring "train journey to E3" crap at the start - I thought I had downloaded the wrong video).

[sarius]

SOE needs another fantasy themed arduous exclusionary time sink? How exactly is this going to do the very thing they really need: a massive influx of new people to discontinue their intra-library cannabalization?

Vanguard = EQ1 Velious is about exactly right from what I saw and played (and read). It's a hit for Brad, but a miss for the genre. Just another example of people not learning the right lessons.

Maybe this is part of a ploy by SOE to get SWG to look better. I mean, SWG sucks donkey balls, but I'd rather play that than Vanguard. (Assuming, of course, that what's leaking out is accurate).

No, you'd REALLY want to play Starcraft MMOG! Muh ha ha ha ha ha!

[El Gallo]

Shit like the diplomacy system won't be VG's downfall because they are too slow or too grindey.  They will be VG's downfall because they are (a) click-intensive and (b) stupid as fucking hell. 

I'm sure there is a substantial (not WoW-like) market out there for a "fishing expedition" virtual-chatrom style of game like EQ.  Fishing expeditions work because (a) there's plenty of time to shoot the shit (which is the real reason people go) and (b) the "excuse to socialize" activity is something a lot of people find to be an acceptable excuse.  People don't go on day-long rock-paper" expeditions because (a) the activity is not conducive to shooting the shit and (b) the activity is laughably trivial.

Everquest was an almost perfect example of a virtual fishing trip.  That's why I think it was successful.  Vanguard appears to be an almost perfect example of a virtual scissors-rock-paper trip.  That's why I think it will fail unless it makes some pretty huge changes.

Really, fuck minigames.  I'd rather do nothing at all except watch a slow progress bar crawl across my screen while I chat or watch TV than play some retardedly simplistic minigame that requires my attention.  If I had to click my fishing rod to match flashing icons a la EQ2 crafting or the almost-equally-asinine Oblivion parley system I'd never go fishing again.

McQuaid learned exactly the wrong lesson from EQ1.

[Miasma]

Just spotted a new E3 Vanguard characters/mounts video (featuring "train journey to E3" crap at the start - I thought I had downloaded the wrong video).

Some of that looked ok, the character customization isn't as bad as some of the beta leaks were saying.  I'll wind up buying it, mostly out of morbid curiosity to see how bad it turns out.

The game looks like it might be rife with furries though.


The rig and cooling system needed to run it doesn't fill me with confidence.

[Modern Angel]

That's why I never roll animal people in these games. I know someone's going to send me a breathy tell asking me for extra special yiff fun.

[WindupAtheist]

You haven't understood what I'm saying. I'm not talking about the 'hard core' EQ crowd at all. I'm talking about people whose lives revolve around high fantasy. The kind of people who got into fantasy MUDs. That's why I think it is called Vanguard: they're building an enormous space for the vanguard who pioneered deep fantasy roleplaying, and their spiritual successors.

[Tale]

Myopic Turd Burglar.

That said, there are a couple of words missing. I intended to convey "I think they believe they're building an enormous space for the vanguard who pioneered deep fantasy roleplaying, and their spiritual successors".

People mentally incapable of advancing beyond UO are a different category.

[WindupAtheist]

Oh noes, he remembered that I play UO!  Ice burn!   

Please post another rambling fanboyish torrent of drivel about how McQuaid wants every single thing in his game to be a hideous timesink because he's a leet roleplayah and making every fucking thing take forever = "extending the fantasy".  I promise not to laugh as hard this time.

[Tale]

I'm no Vanguard fanboi. I'm retaining my neutrality and speculating on what might be, as opposed to constantly rephrasing someone else's McQuaid-bashing post to keep up the appearance of maintaining teh hate.

[Nija]

catcat.jpg is one of the creepiest things I've seen on the internet, and having a hand in running r33t.org I've seen a lot of things.

[Phred]

. I spoke to player upon player who had had it with EQ and was coming to DAoC as if it were the next nirvana. DAoC's launch was probably bigger than EQ's launch, but then something strange happened; people started going back to EQ.

This is the strange and mysterious part about all this. Why did this happen? For all intents and purposes, DAoC was not as grindy. It had interesting features EQ lacked. It had tradeskills that made some sense and were not mcquaidistic. It had possibilities that EQ simply couldn't provide. Yet the inexorable migration back to EQ started only months after DAOC's launch.

My theory is that the original years of EQ created such a level of shared trauma that folks had to go back. There's a psychological phenomena called Repetition Compulsion, wherein the subject relives in some fashion a past trauma, normally by emulating as best he can the original experience, in an effort to defeat the traumatic event. Much the same was occuring in EQ. People were going back to get that 'feeling', which was nothing more than grinding sweat, frustration and anxiety comingled with the understanding that others were undergoing the same experience as well.

I was one of the ones who left DaoC shortly after it released and eventually went back to EQ. For me it was the "experience bug fix" patch that pushed me out. DaoC at launch was a lot less grindy than EQ but then someone there decided to patch in more grind. Under the guise of fixing a bug with shared experience they made one of the main appeals, that of being able to group with a wide range of levels and everyone getting decent experience, vanish; to the point where you actually lost experience by grouping with someone out of your range by a mere 1 to 2 levels. Even when exact numbers were posted confirming this, the only responce I remember was Sanya saying "if you don't like it, quit" so I did.

However, I found combat in DaoC to be a lot more boring as well. As a cleric in EQ, maybe I couldn't solo worth a crap but at least I felt that with a bit of attention to what was going on, I could influence the outcome of some overpulls and things. In DaoC, with the poor mitigation and low hp of non-tank classes, if one got agro on an overpull they died. Faster than a heal could cast. I loved the feeling you got when you got a good Captain group in Karnors and were pulling everything you could because the group clicked so well and you felt unbeatable. I liked tossing a stun to stun a mob beating on an enchanter so he could channel a mez.  I never felt the same in DaoC. The combat pacing just seemed off to me.

 Having the game encourage smaller groups by punishing you if you took more people and then giving you the exact numbers for the experience just to rub your face in it was the final straw. I had a character 5 levels below a RL friend who got better experience ungrouped beating on a mob while my  friend tanked it than he did grouped. That's just broken.

[Threash]

I'm no Vanguard fanboi. I'm retaining my neutrality and speculating on what might be, as opposed to constantly rephrasing someone else's McQuaid-bashing post to keep up the appearance of maintaining teh hate.

I played EQ for nearly five years and i dont think i ever met any of those people you are talking about.

[Righ]

I'm no Vanguard fanboi. I'm retaining my neutrality and speculating on what might be, as opposed to constantly rephrasing someone else's McQuaid-bashing post to keep up the appearance of maintaining teh hate.

Walk away now. This is not a 'game' to be 'neutral' about.

[WindupAtheist]

I'm no Vanguard fanboi. I'm retaining my neutrality and speculating on what might be, as opposed to constantly rephrasing someone else's McQuaid-bashing post to keep up the appearance of maintaining teh hate.

I played EQ for nearly five years and i dont think i ever met any of those people you are talking about.

What about their spiritual successors?

[Engels]

 Having the game encourage smaller groups by punishing you if you took more people and then giving you the exact numbers for the experience just to rub your face in it was the final straw. I had a character 5 levels below a RL friend who got better experience ungrouped beating on a mob while my  friend tanked it than he did grouped. That's just broken.

Your experience rings true to me. Then again, I quit DAoC to back to EQ long before the started hitting stuff with the nerf bat. Don't get me wrong when I talk with only vaguely vieled hostility towards McQuaid. I was one of the people who played EQ for years and year.

You are right about combat mechanics in EQ. They were better, after, what, 3 years of tweaking, than DAoC's were. They probably still are better. There are any number of things that EQ may to this day do better than any other MMO out there. That said, McQuaid's insistence on time sinks as an 'immersion factor' is patently lidicrous.

[Tale]

I played EQ for nearly five years and i dont think i ever met any of those people you are talking about.

OK, that seems to be the majority reaction. But I know a guild forum that is almost 100% those people. I don't have much in common with them - I helped start their guild in 1999, and left them to their nerd talk a year later.

Walk away now. This is not a 'game' to be 'neutral' about.

I've changed tack several times in this thread. I laughed at the SOE news. Then I quoted a Vanguard fanboi being in denial about its apparent problems. Then in an idle moment, I had verbal diarrhoea. Now I'll probably say something else, or nothing. But one thing I won't be is the boring fuck who posts "LOL EQ in space" in the SWG thread, "LOL Furor Tigole" in the WoW thread and "LOL poopsock catass cockblock" in the Vanguard thread. Sorry.

[Tale]

What about their spiritual successors?

Laugh it up. In the wankery of my expression, I meant people who were very young when MUDs were being pioneered. Now they're grown-up fantasy nerds who wouldn't play a WoW. Oops, sorry, cue another three posts saying they don't exist.

[stray]

"LOL poopsock catass cockblock" in the Vanguard thread.

It's hardly a shallow complaint (like your other examples).

[Yegolev]

catcat.jpg is one of the creepiest things I've seen on the internet, and having a hand in running r33t.org I've seen a lot of things.

I agree, and in keeping with my "judge a game by screenshots" schtick, I can say that this game is doomed just by that shot.  It reminds me of the "jailcat" monsters in Dragon Quest VIII, but in a very, very bad way.

[Phred]

You are right about combat mechanics in EQ. They were better, after, what, 3 years of tweaking, than DAoC's were. They probably still are better. There are any number of things that EQ may to this day do better than any other MMO out there. That said, McQuaid's insistence on time sinks as an 'immersion factor' is patently lidicrous.

Brad's main problem, IMO, is his inability to see his way around problems even though he recognises them. The spellbook issue in EQ is my favorite example. In some interview or posting, he said he knew it was broken, knew players hated it, yet he still had some idea that the book could be made to fade out as you leveled. Because none of his programmers could figure out how to do this, he left it in, rather than removing it completely as a later live team did. This stubborn insistance that if it can't be done to match his vision it will just stay broken sums up the reason I wouldn't play another of his games.

The whole camp syndrone came about as a reaction to the broken spellbook mechanic, and he knew it but left the book in anyway.

[Engels]

Tale, to be fair to you I do know the demographic you are talking about, but I think you are mistaken in thinking that they are going to flock to Vanguard. Maybe initially there was some hope that Brad's genius had somehow infused Vanguard with the lore that attracted the RPers to EQ.

Maybe you're right, and that there's an overemphasis on the grind aspect of Vanguard and that the RP-friendly immersion factor will be present in Vanguard like it was in EQ. Maybe you're right, and that the great storytellers from EQ, with their intricate lores of the Iksar Empire vs the Sarnak Horde, the legends of how the Dark Elfs were an experiment of Innoruuk, etc, have all started writing for Brad's company. My strong suspicion is that they haven't. I wouldn't be surprised if they were lost along the way.

[Mesozoic]

catcat.jpg is one of the creepiest things I've seen on the internet, and having a hand in running r33t.org I've seen a lot of things.

I refuse to believe that the animal being ridden in that shot is a cat.  I'm going to call it "human in fur mask riding giant striped badger."  Makes way more sense.  Somehow.

[Miasma]

You can see the kitty running around at about the five minute mark in the video tale linked.

[bignatz]

Sigil diverts the hate (from a "tipster" talking to Joystick):

WHY did Sigil buy the publishing rights back from MS?

Because MS, the bastages, wanted Vanguard to be Vista EXCLUSIVE, hence seriously limiting gamers' access and also Very Probably delaying Vanguard in the process.

ehehe, that's quite creative.

[Yegolev]

That is possible, but it seems more likely that a Microsoft suit dropped by Sigil, saw a cat riding another cat, and demanded everyone clean out their desks.

[Simond]

Am I the only one wondering at this point where the talented grpahics artists from original EQ went.
I mean, I saw SoL (and so on) and then EQ2 and figured "Hey, they must have gone to Sigil"

After those pics?
I'm beginning to suspect that Milo sold them into white slavery to buy some more upgrades for his Porsche or something.

Human-with-cat-head 'riding' a giant mutant housecat?

[Hellinar]

EQ1 did have an advantage if you were a storyteller type roleplayer, like me. It was hard. Not in the stupid sense of repetive grind, but simply that there were many ways to fail, even a low level. And failures make at least as good a story as successes.

WoW is missing that. Unless you try very very hard, its almost impossible to fail. Sure, you can do the story on rails, and always succeed. But creating your own story, with highs and lows, requires designing a very gimpy character indeed.

I don't think Brad has a clue about about roleplay, at least in the story creation sense. Someone did, way back in the early days, but they were long gone by the time the Fionna Vie server was created. I've not seen anything about Vanguard that even remotely suggests they are aiming at a roleplay, roll your own story, crowd.

[Mesozoic]

<--  Had to be done.