Vanguard Round 2 - Post Mortem

[Signe]

What's up with the windows, or lack there of.  Eventually that crampy little place will smell like feet and whatever that is that died on the table.  I do like building things though, and decorating.  I just don't like Vanguard.  Oh well.

[SnakeCharmer]

SWG was classic. I could search for groupmates according to the type of music they like, but not on whether they are flagged lfg, or whether they can shoot a rifle. wtf?

Don't forget blood type!

Seriously.  That was an option.

[shiznitz]

Indoor screenies of the second house:

[Jayce]

This thread makes me miss AC1 more than it makes me want to try Vanguard.

Especially since my machine is from around the same time as the AC1 graphics engine.

[Nebu]

I love housing in games.  After playing Vanguard for 3 weeks, the best housing ever created could not drag me back to the game.  What I'm hearing from those still enduring the game (yes, I said enduring) this housing is no better than housing implemented years ago in other games. 

 

[Xanthippe]

What is the crafting like in Vanguard?  Can someone please provide or point me to an overview?

[Nebu]

Here is the warcry review on crafting.  I consider it to be a rosy picture of what I encountered, but admitedly I didn't stay with it long.

[shiznitz]

Crafted items are a lot better than most drops. That can be a positive and a negative. It makes it hard for a pure adventurer to sell his excess loot for much but it gives crafters a raison d'etre.  The work order systme also gets good reviews from crafter-enthusiasts because you can advance without having to harvest. The work order provides you with most - if not all - of the components.

[Trippy]

Okay the no windows thing is really lame.

[Kageru]

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.

[Damn Dirty Ape]

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.

l33t brickmaker of WTFpwnage!



That just screams adventure, doesn't it?

[Hound]

The plot system and building a house one brick at a time is straight out of Horizons. In fact a lot things about Vanguard remind me of Horizons.

[eldaec]

hideously expensive limited resources to have e-peen competitions over.

I'm not aware of any mmorpg on the market with any other sort of pve endgame.

[Simond]

One of the Vanguard threads on the FoH boards has taken a nasty (nastier?) turn - Brad was defending the VG engine, system requirements, artistic designs, etc. (the usual 'Come back in three years and look at the graphics then!' crap SOE tried with EQ2)...and someone started posting (hi-res) LOTRO screenshots.

The current theme is therefore "Hey Brad - why does LOTRO have lower system requirements than Vanguard, run smoother, and look better?"

[Hound]

One of the Vanguard threads on the FoH boards has taken a nasty (nastier?) turn - Brad was defending the VG engine, system requirements, artistic designs, etc. (the usual 'Come back in three years and look at the graphics then!' crap SOE tried with EQ2)...and someone started posting (hi-res) LOTRO screenshots.

The current theme is therefore "Hey Brad - why does LOTRO have lower system requirements than Vanguard, run smoother, and look better?"

After reading various posts in that thread I picture Brad being honestly confused as to why there has not been a mad rush on E6700 machines with dual 8800GTXs just so people could play Vanguard at 30FPS. There is a huge difference between buying a $150.00 Voodoo card in 1999 so that you could play EQ1 and dumping a thousand or more into your box with all of the competition that is out there today. There is just not enough game there for the buck for me to justify even upgrading my present video card for. If Vanguard was bug free and complete I really do not think all that many players today are really into the forced group play style and long grinds. Some do enjoy that sort of thing however I can never see VSoH being more than a minor player in SOE's station lineup.

[Endie]

To save trawling through various threads on FoH, any chance of a link?  It's not imediately obvious fro teh thread titles I saw.  Ie there is no "Brad gets bewildred by the reaction to his game's meh graphics" thread.

[Trippy]

http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/27044-why-all-nerd-rage-against-vanguard.html

[ajax34i]

http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/27044-why-all-nerd-rage-against-vanguard.html

Heh, 100+ pages of "discussion"...  There's a Brad response on p. 43 and the screenshots from other games start on p. 85 and 89.

[Trippy]

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

[Jayce]

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

This quote is almost siggable. If it made any sense out of context I'd do it.

[Falconeer]

Brad says:

And I agree with you -- some of our biggest problems are LFG, performance, some PvP tweaks, and low server pop. We messed up, as I've said before, and were so worried that noob areas would be over crowded, that we should have launched with fewer anyway and people would have spread out naturally.

It's painful to read his delusion about the (not so) over crowded areas...

[Murgos]

Brad says:

And I agree with you -- some of our biggest problems are LFG, performance, some PvP tweaks, and low server pop. We messed up, as I've said before, and were so worried that noob areas would be over crowded, that we should have launched with fewer anyway and people would have spread out naturally.

It's painful to read his delusion about the (not so) over crowded areas...

Thats great.  Their biggest problems are that people can't make groups in a group centric game, that the game runs like crap, that PVP sucks and no one is playing.

So, in other words the whole thing is broken?

[Numtini]

I must have cataracts or something because I've yet to see anything in a Vanguard screenshot that I thought was better than SWG or EQ2. (I would say WOW looks better than Vanguard too, but it's not a fair comparison.) And SWG/EQ2 I can run with the bells and whistles turned on and Vanguard wouldn't run acceptably with everything turned down to nothing.

This has been one of the big things I have just never understood about the Vanguard discussions. It looks like butt.

[Simond]

Thats great.  Their biggest problems are that people can't make groups in a group centric game, that the game runs like crap, that PVP sucks and no one is playing.

You forgot: the game looks like liquid monkey ass, the PvE content pas L40 is sparse (at best), there's pretty much no endgame raiding, and that Sigil seem to be 'fixing' the wrong problems.

So, in other words the whole thing is broken?

No, it's worse than that - it's working as intended.

[Signe]

I must have cataracts or something because I've yet to see anything in a Vanguard screenshot that I thought was better than SWG or EQ2. (I would say WOW looks better than Vanguard too, but it's not a fair comparison.) And SWG/EQ2 I can run with the bells and whistles turned on and Vanguard wouldn't run acceptably with everything turned down to nothing.

This has been one of the big things I have just never understood about the Vanguard discussions. It looks like butt.

I have to agree.  Vanguard uses kind of a dull landscape palette which was something SWG also did, but I liked SWG's landscape art more.  EQ2 and WoW are brighter and more interesting to look at, overall.  LOTRO looks better than all of them, in my opinion.  Nearly everything runs better than Vanguard on high settings but even running it on the highest, I didn't find it particularly special looking.  I think Vanguard's character models and animations stink.  Not that it matters.  I don't really want to play any of the above named games any more.  I'm waiting for something else.  Holodecks, maybe.

[Venkman]

It's the usual mismatch of tech and style. The power of the engine is irrelevant if the players are disinterested in the aesthetics.

Poking at DDO is about all he can do. No other high-profile MMO is below 150k (there's a few sub-<150k ones, but they're all niche. And he can't even poke at Eve because as a niche title it's growth pattern indicates even it will outpace VG).

The housing is cool, mostly because it's the first game since SWG that allows for house placement in the persistent world. Every other game (afaik) before and since only allow instantiated apartments (AO, EQ2 noob, CoH, etc), the buying of pre-placed houses (EQ2), or placing houses on pre-placed hooks or in dedicated zones (AC1, DAoC I think). So really, VG is still fairly unique in this regard, I think only the fourth game ever to allow houses to be placed anywhere in the persistent enviroment, among the ranks of UO, SB and SWG. I could be wrong though.

The no windows thing is a shame but I'm sure a nod to resource overhead on screen. Rendering all the internal customizations with everything outside could maybe require too much server work? Or maybe the architecture doesn't allow for it?

[eldaec]

The housing is cool, mostly because it's the first game since SWG that allows for house placement in the persistent world. Every other game (afaik) before and since only allow instantiated apartments (AO, EQ2 noob, CoH, etc), the buying of pre-placed houses (EQ2), or placing houses on pre-placed hooks or in dedicated zones (AC1, DAoC I think). So really, VG is still fairly unique in this regard, I think only the fourth game ever to allow houses to be placed anywhere in the persistent enviroment, among the ranks of UO, SB and SWG. I could be wrong though.

The previous page of this thread says VG housing can only be built on specific developer-defined plots, a la DAoC.

The previous page could be wrong ofc. I'm not crazy enough to buy this shit.

[Nebu]

The previous page of this thread says VG housing can only be built on specific developer-defined plots, a la DAoC.

The housing is like DAoC in that it can only be built on predetermined housing plots.  The only difference being that in VG the plots exist in adventure zones.  It creates the illusion of being able to live wherever you wish, but doesn't actually allow for that.  Since housing plots are limited and have costs varying with exclusivity, it also creates yet another heirarchy that most achievers love. 

[Glazius]

Indoor screenies of the second house:

Wow, they reanimated Van Gogh so he could do interior design!

Bold move.

--GF

[Glazius]

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

[shiznitz]

Each of the three continents have their own styles for everything craftable (weapons, armor, boats, houses, etc.) If you start on Thestra and want to make Qalian items, you have to go to Qalia and grind crafter faction through workorders before the Qalian recipes become available to you. This faction grind is completely unrelated to any racial faction grinding (i.e. killing mobs) that might be necessary. I haven't heard of any crafter having to do that though.

It. Is. Fucking. Retarded.

Yet, people are doing it and defending it. If Sigil wants to cockblock players from cross-continental recipes, I would have just made it a moneysink, e.g. pay 20g to join the Qalian crafter guild or something.

[Merusk]

Yet, people are doing it and defending it. If Sigil wants to cockblock players from cross-continental recipes, I would have just made it a moneysink, e.g. pay 20g to join the Qalian crafter guild or something.

But that doesn't provide the cockblock to 'lessor players' that  hardcore tradeskillers (Yes they do exsist.) get their own e-peen all stiff about.   The same people defending it are the ones you would have found exploiting the SWG factory bug the first week or two, then applauding that it got patched-out when they were one of the only Grand Master Tailors on their server.

[Miasma]

l33t brickmaker of WTFpwnage!

The combination of a shiznitz thread and this post made me remember that when he had 1337 posts a little while ago it got filtered into "leet" under his name, I assume this happens for everyone.  I just want to say that I think that is awesome.

[Venkman]

While there's historical relevance for the cross-nation faction grind, it's really just more proof of the type of player VG was designed for.

And thank's for clarifying how houses are placed. So then the only difference is it can be placed in adventure zones.

[shiznitz]

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.