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I"ve posted now several times that I wish we could have launch a bit later, but that it was out our hands. Fiancial realties, being what they were, made that decison for us.

It has to do with the quality of the medium used to create the immersion. A brilliant writer can do it with words. A movie director with how he shoots, uses sounds, and even what he does"t show. It can be done using realism, or be heavily stylized. It can be surreal, or over the top in your...

Thanks for addressing the Bog 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...

I should have said was mainstream, my bad. When EQ 1 was released most people didn"t have a Voodoo 1 because a. not many games took advantage of it and 2. price point. Both issues, however, resolved themselves. And many good cards for Vanguard have been available since late 2005/early 2006...

I don"t think either the EQ 1 or EQ 2 launch suffered significantly from their hardware specs and the tech level they used. Many people want a more immersive and technically advanced engine, especially when it comes to virtural worlds. Does this mean these games won"t achieve WoW numbers as...

To be clear, we don"t expect everyone to upgrade because a lot of people don"t need/require running on the highest settings, or at 30fps, or at 1920x1200 resolutions. The specs I listed, which while not inexpensive, they are also not crazy expensive either, are for systems that will run the...

1. What we have done with the Unreal 2.x engine is astounding -- major props to the programming team, etc. It *is* a fast engine and it was also relatively easily modified to add bump mapping, specular, per pixel lighting. And we were also able to make it seamless, although I wouldn"t say that...

What"s missing are environment shadows -- character shadows are there, although they need some tweaks. We are waiting on a hardware solution for environment shadows which should happen in the next couple of generation of cards. So right now you have character soft shadows unless there are too...

With all due respect, I absolutely remember issues. Until the Voodoo 2 came out, there was a lot of complaining. Until the Voodoo 2 SLI and Voodoo 3 came out there was some complaining. Different people like to run at different resolutions and also have different thresholds in terms of how much...

Yeah, if you go p4 I would do a minimum of a 2.8ghz,and preferably a 3.0 aor 3.2. And make sure the motherboard is pci-express.

I have to respectfully disagree. It used to be that to buy a top of the line computer you were looking at 3-4k. It"s dropped considerably, and I"m only talking about a top of the line computer if you want to run at high resolutions and at high graphical settings. Many, many Vanguard players run...

1. 6 months isn"t enough lead time to make major fundamental changes to the architecture of the game (even had we wanted to). In a 4.5 year project, you simply can"t do something like that and make you ship date even if, like I said, you wanted to. 2. I still think, especially longer term...

Plus I still truly believe that casual, core, and hardcore can co-exist and even be interdependent in an MMOG. I think VG made a good stab at it and will get even better at it, and future MMOGs will do even better.

I think it would be great to have a RL economist on staff -- it"s just a matter of budget. MMOG economies mirror RL economies in many ways, although not all, and having that insight would be very nice.

The plan, as I understand it, is to use lower poly/texture LOD models of player and NPC characters (especially PCs) when too many players and mobs are in your view. The visual quality will go down, but at least you will have framerate.

No, I"m saying when we had an earlier release date with MSFT we therefore started beta earlier.

I put together a lower end machine that would run VG fine at like 1600x1200 or below and also took out gamepc.com assembly and burn in. I don"t think you can get under $2k for a Vanguard machine without, like I had mentioned, using egghead or some such and buying all the components yourself. You...

Definitely not trying to be flippant at all -- apologies if I came across that way. I was just trying to make a point that you don"t need a $3k or $4k machine to run Vanguard at high setting and high resolution.

Yeah, you probably don"t need such a powerful power supply -- I just tend to get powerful ones so I don"t ever run into power problems. And yes you can probably get the ram cheaper elsewhere and no you don"t need such a pimp case

I believe I said it needed 200k-300k to be successful, and that I hoped to see 500k after the game was out 1 year, which would make it very profitable. So far we are in the mid 150s which is less than I would have hoped, but still good and still growing. I have said we released 2-3 months...

AES is in and used a bit, but not nearly enough. Turned out to take a LOT more time than expected to implement it, and with the rush to get the game out, there isn"t much. All I can do is apologize. I do believe it will be tweaked and optimized and used more in the future with higher level...

What you are seeing is static meshes (the rocks) penetrating height field terrain. Making a world as big as we did using a height field terrain (like EQ 2 did) would have made the install like 50gb not 17gb. In the future though as hardware becomes cheaper and more powerful, I think you will see...

It was somewhat the same. Planning for the future to make sure the game would look good years from now, architecting it so we could easily integrate new graphics tech, the fact that we like games that use the latest tech personally, and we made a large world so we could have plenty of room to...

A machine as follows: 3.2ghz dual core or one of the core duos 2 gigs of ram xfi card (gets you 5fps) fast HD (raptor, etc) ati x1950xt 512meg dd2-800 RAM / fast FSB isn"t that expensive and does quite well. You could run 1920x1200 in balanced or better mode and get 30 fps in most...

Would be awesome to see more player made fraps videos out there. You need a beefy machine because fraps takes away about 10fps, but you can make some pretty cool videos with it.

Nice screens! What level are you?

I don"t have a solid date, but I know it"s already being worked on. Basically, as fast as we can, but we also need to make sure the low and mid levels are a bit more solid too. The majority of the design team is cleaning things up and balancing and making the game even more fun, with the...

How massive and detailed they are -- I"ve personally never seen dungeons with such potential in terms of gameplay coupled with their sheer size and the awesome artwork. They are some of the last dungeons we made and the artists really had the tools down pat. And with the designers tools also...

We had to agree to a launch date, or there would be no money to continue. This was unfortunate, but we will and are recovering. This game was expensive -- probably second only to WoW, although WoW cost more than double. I don"t want to sound jealous, although I probably am to some degree to be...

It"s being worked on, but I don"t have a solid date. We are working upwards, focussing on new and updated mid level content, and some devs are already working on raid content. Also some raid specific code support may be necessary. In any case, we want to do it right and not rush it. I do...

No plans for in-game advertising. I think in-game advertising can work in a game that is set in current times or the future -- kind of like the huge Coke ad in Blade Runner. But I don"t think it makes sense for a high fantasy game like Vanguard.

We certainly did not forget that casual, core, and hard core players can and should co-exist in Vanguard. Originally we planned for 20% casual content, 60% core, and 20% raid. Turns out based on beta that we needed more casual and actually, especially at lower levels, there is a LOT more casual...

A lot of people really like it, including my guild who is really into it. I"m not saying everyone likes it, or that it"s perfect (e.g. will continue to enhance systems trying to make them even more compelling and fun), but it"s a good system overall. It doesn"t appeal to everyone and I"m sorry...

Totally agreed -- this is in the works.

Well said and a great question and certainly one we think about. I think there are misconceptions out there about the game and our intent. Our heritage making EQ 1 makes it so a lot of people automatically assume the game is only for the hardcore. I posted here and elsewhere (on other boards and...