Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

Denaut_sl said:

This is why developers don't or shouldn't talk about mechanics they aren't sure about, because they get spun up in people's imaginations and when something that doesn't work is taken out you don't hear the end of it.

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Vanguard's caravan system anyone?

Chesire_sl said:

Games started failing for me when my time got a lot more valuable . LFG for long time periods , corpse runs , xp loss and other things that were tolerated in earlier mmo's simply do not and will not work for my available play times.

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I have very limited with Time but would still rather play an EQ game.. I know this because I just spent 10 years playing a bunch of casual mmos that bored me to pieces after 3 months. To me it's all relevant. I might not complete 7 quest and gain a level in a hour play time in Brad's new game but I'll still progress my character in a positive way.

Merlin_sl said:

Aside from hitching in the major cities it ran fine on my system. Granted, I built a new system just to play Vanguard but it wasn't a super machine or nothing. It was just a good, not great system. I would guess I had around half a dozen CTD total. The only real crapper was the hitching and that wasn't a factor once you got out into the world.

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Well, shit, if it ran fine on your system then the game must have been fine for everyone!

It also failed because there were some really ignorant and rabid fanboys denying any and every technical problem and saying stupid shit like 'it runs fine for me' and dismissing or attacking people having issues instead of trying to help them. Which, at times, seemed to translate into devs also thinking the game ran just fine.

I was also a lucky one who built a new system around that time and found with enough patience and tweaking I could get the game playable. Playable also involved a lot of stuttering, lag, crashes, bugs, and issues. And I wasn't so fucking ignorant as to think my isolated experience was the norm.

Chesire_sl said:

Games started failing for me when my time got a lot more valuable . LFG for long time periods , corpse runs , xp loss and other things that were tolerated in earlier mmo's simply do not and will not work for my available play times.

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This doesn't make sense to me. No modern games have the features that you indicate as causing games to start failing for you. Shouldn't your statement be like "only the many available games that offer convenient features and low time-related consequences work for me. Thank god that's all of them!"

I don't mean to pass blame in anyway but Brad didn't force SoE to release VG in the state it was in. Actually even Brad wanted more time to finish the game.

Not sure how relevant this is tho ha.

Soygen_sl said:

I agree that I can't do it any more either, but I also resign myself to the fact that a certain game "may not be fore me" and would still like to see those games get made.

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No shit. Saying something this basic sometimes seems like an intellectual revolution compared to some of the shit coming out of the mouths of gamers.

People say dumb shit like how there's not a market for timesinks in games these days when a) WoW's timesink mechanics are as addictive as ever and people often complain there isn't enough they can put time into and b) just because someone is no longer a dumb kid not doing homework so they can raid all night doesn't mean there isn't an entire generation of people no different than we were at those ages. Trust me, I spend most of my energy at work trying to get dumbfuck kids to focus on being semi productive and to stop daydreaming about music, gaming, or pussy. Just because we've grown up and don't resemble our younger selves doesn't mean the youngest generation isn't pretty much exactly like we were (just with skinnier jeans and shittier music amirite doods?).

Chesire_sl said:

Games started failing for me when my time got a lot more valuable . LFG for long time periods , corpse runs , xp loss and other things that were tolerated in earlier mmo's simply do not and will not work for my available play times.

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Games started failing for me when they started making games for you

Brad tweeted some exclusive concept art for theVah Shir equivalent racein the game. Impressive imho.

would bang.

Soygen_sl said:

Vanguard failed because it ran like dogshit. It could have the best ideas and gameplay in the world, but if you can't get it to run even halfway decent on powerful machines at launch, people are not even going to stick around to experience those features.

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More specifically - Vanguard did not load textures properly and did not implement any type of object occlusion/culling/wtf. When you chunked in you had to slowly turn your guy 360 degrees to pick up textures and objects all around. If you didn't it would hang as you walked.

It wasn't bad after you did that but you had to be willing to do that. If you were, it was a pretty enjoyable game up to level 40: good mix of classes, decent to very good dungeons (though too many boss mobs were lacking), enjoyable combat with the OT/DT system (still hasn't been copied). As always, the post-40 content was non-existent so even if you were willing to put up with the 360 degree turn on chunking you had nothing to do past 40.

Anyway, VG was killed by SOE back in 2009. As for Brad, we'll see. Very dubious.

Big Flex_sl said:

would bang.

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What can I say? The ass was fat.

Convo_sl said:

I don't mean to pass blame in anyway but Brad didn't force SoE to release VG in the state it was in. Actually even Brad wanted more time to finish the game.

Not sure how relevant this is tho ha.

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Nah. I'm pretty sure that Sigil was out of money and they had two choices: release the game in late Jan 2007 or go hat-in-hand to Smed again and give SOE a bigger slice of Sigil. Brad made the wrong choice.

Yea Microsoft pulled the plug on the funds. Just saying nobody thought VG was ready at that point but things seemed to be falling apart around the project so not sure any amount of money would saved it. I think that's where Brad lost a lot of folks here and UT correctly called him on it. What he was posting wasn't exactly matching the current state of the project. Just hoping for a better outcome this time around. As you know I think Brad is capable.

Maybe someone is pulling the most epic troll ever. if you think about it, all we know comes from a handful of twitter posts.

tad10_sl said:

Nah. I'm pretty sure that Sigil was out of money and they had two choices: release the game in late Jan 2007 or go hat-in-hand to Smed again and give SOE a bigger slice of Sigil. Brad made the wrong choice.

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Sigil would have crashed and burned just like 38 studios did if SoE hadn't stepped in and gave them time to semi finish Vanguard.

I don't think you can blame SoE for Sigils failures in this case.

Tmac47_sl said:

Are you trying to say Vanguard failed because it was a WoW clone? It's a stretch to even claim it failed based on any game design decisions.

It failed because it was unplayable... Lol.

It felt old as a brand new game. That's a feat!

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Sort of. I played it with real life friends who were big WoW players, right around the time of release. We were constantly fighting against bugs and performance problems. We would make a group and the UI wouldn't show everyone. So everyone disbands, and re-invite. Eventually that worked. Then we could kill stuff and the need/greed/pass thing would pop up but people wouldn't get their item and the item would remain locked on the corpse forever, so nobody could actually loot it, even if you just abandoned the group, the item was lost forever. And then someone would crash, which was a 30 minute regular thing. With 6 people in a group regularly crashing, it's hard to get in to any kind of groove. Basically my friends thought it was a huge pile of shit and quit before level 15 and never went back.

That said, I think they did become a WoW clone along the way, and it suffered because of that, especially because WoW is so slick. I think if it was a natty hardcore old style MMO, the type of players it catered to might have been more forgiving about the bugs and stuff. I know I was, because I stuck around and I still play even now, but it was the gameplay which ultimately made me un-love it. The boring quest grind with a group of noobs who can't play their classes, and the boring, uneventful dungeon runs, that's what killed it for me.

Denaut_sl said:

It sounds cool but it was a miserable failure, which is why it was mostly cut. There was no dumbing down or WoWing up of the combat system to please "noobs", it was removing something that wasn't even remotely fun, a good internal decision. This is why developers don't or shouldn't talk about mechanics they aren't sure about, because they get spun up in people's imaginations and when something that doesn't work is taken out you don't hear the end of it.

I just wish you'd stop talking about it like it was more than an experiment that didn't work out.

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I disagree with everything you say, and I wish you would stop talking like your opinion is the only one that's valid.

The original combat design was a huge part of the game. It was presented to the fans right from the start and it's the main thing that got a lot of us interested in the game in 2004/2005 or so. There wasn't much competition then, everyone was just talking about EQ, WoW, and EQ2. So the idea of a whole new style of combat that was MTG inspired, was really exciting to a lot of people - especially MTG players. So the fact that it was dropped is not some minor insignificance to some of us. It was a massive let down and it's something I have wished would show up again sometime but maybe never will. The nearest I've seen was MTG Tactics by SOE, but that was too expensive to play.

But your version of history seems different to the one that I saw and read about. What I read is that the game was originally designed like a new EQ, players would go out in groups to hunt mobs, and crafters would tag along to try to harvest around them. But they kept running in to stuff that was too hard and didn't know where to go, and they bitched constantly on the beta forum. And this was a big reason why they decided to add all the quests, so that they would guide people through the game area by area. In fact I think I remember reading one of the devs on here say that they were all thrown together in literally the last year or so before release. All of these things matter. I even saw Brad post on the official forum saying that he hopes to attract former WoW players who had outgrown it wanted something a bit deeper. It seemed obvious to me that they became more obsessed with going for the WoW audience and forgetting about the old EQ1 players they seemed to originally target. To me that's a big part of Vanguard's failure, and something they need to right this time around.

Vanguard was almost unplayable at the end of the Open Beta.
Post release it was playable and I can't remember crashing. I leveled up a Dark Elf and grouped several times but at certain points the world felt empty and incomplete so I stopped playing.

What I did NOT like about Vanguard:
1. Game engine was clunky and unresponsive.
2. Itemization was horrible.
3. World was too empty; felt unfinished.
4. Fetch quests.
5. Races used the SAME character model but with a different head. Animal/Humanoid races felt like guys wearing masks.
6. Character models looked ugly and plastic-like for my taste (same problem with EQ2)


To be honest I'd rather Brad make a first-person view MMORPG which plays more like EQ than Vanguard (especially the itemization part and disregard all the fetch quest bullcrap). I wasn't a huge fan of Vanguard.

Question: How slow was HP/Mana regeneration on Vanguard? Because I REALLY want a game where HP/Energy/HP regeneration is so slow that you seek out buffs to compensation which makes interdependency a beautiful in my opinion. It also makes "efficiency" a skill you seek to maximize.

If mana/hp regenerates within seconds off-combat... what's the point?
Oh, and no Healing/Mana potions please....

I'm with you 100%. It's funny because I still play Vanguard but I still don't really like it. It just happens to be an MMO I dislike the least, and it's free, so on occasion if I feel like some MMO'ing or collecting some bear asses, and now that EQ Mac has gone, it's all I really have.

As for your question the HP and Mana is very fast. The main issue is that you don't always even use any hp or mana in a fight... Different classes work in different ways but just one example is as a Psi, you have various forms like stances. One of them increases your damage from damage spells, but makes them cost more mana, one stance is "all is equal" and one makes you kind of ethereal so harder to hit, good for running away or whatever. But anyway, one of them makes it so that all your damage spells do no damage but heal your mana bar for what they would have cost in mana. So in other words, I fight a mob, I nuke it 3 times and just before it dies, I switch stance, nuke it 3 more times to recover my mana back to 100%, then switch back and do one real nuke to finish it. Basically, I end every fight 100%. And many of the other classes work more or less the same way. With my Druid I pwn the shit out of anything with nukes and dots, kite with root and snare if I need, and I can heal myself if I do take any hits. And then if you do ever run out of mana, I just hit this thing called Taproot, which roots me in place but recovers 100% of my mana. You can 'only' use it once every 2 minutes or something, but basically it's often enough that you more or less never run out of hp or mana.

Even if you do use hp or mana, out of combat it regens very fast. It slows down as you level up, but it more or less recovers about 10% of your hp and mana every 2 or 3 seconds. So wait 20 seconds and you're back to full, even from empty. And if you ever need to hurry it up, you just have food you can click and it recovers the whole lot in about 5 seconds. And you have to buy but is more or less infinite because its so cheap and you get some from quests too.

Long story short, Vanguard really is not as hardcore as some people claim. I would say it's pretty much a compete WoW clone, only with virtually no polish, clunky unfinished engine, loads of bugs, content gaps, no battlegrounds, no arena fights, and various other negatives. It does have some good things going for it too though. But on the whole I would much prefer Brad look at the way EQ worked than Vanguard.

Laura_sl said:

You know what I hate about recent games?
Is too much symmetry.

I don't want EVERY class to have 10 skills.
I don't want classes to feel/look the same at all.

Another good thing about EverQuest is when casters have bazzilions of spells (Which they can only use 8 of them at the same time) melee classes have very few skills.
Bards uses their "spells" differently; twisting.

I don't want predictable game mechanics. I want things to feel odd and asymmetrical. Because perfectly refined systems and mechanics feels too gamy to me.

I want one class to solo better than others. I want a class to group better than others. I want a class to be able to travel better than others.
Variety, Variety is the key. Push variety and uncertainty to the limit.

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I agree, if the decision about my arsenal is done pre-combat (e.g. the 8 spells for EQ casters) I'm fine with having more. Simmetry is more or less present in GW2 (everyone has 10 slots), but it plays completely different for each class, with some similarities here and there. Then if you want to argue that in the end it's all spamming buttons, yeah, well... that's videogames in general.

Every game past WoW used pretty much the same system: many hotbars, talent trees, all classes solo decently well, some do it better because they are tanks/healers or have a pet and they are all carbon copy of each other except for the name of the spells and eventually the resources used to cast them.
The ridicolous part is that WoW doesn't have this crap: every class is much more unique than seen in other clones, still they have a bloated mass of skills on the hotbars.

GW2 did it differently, which by itself is a very good thing and praise-worthy, they did some things wrong too, but I'm not playing with 30-50 skills at once anymore and for that I'm grateful.
The fact remains that every class plays differently and that all of them have a unique feeling. Admittely they could have worked a bit more magic in terms of resources instead of slapping a generic "cooldown" on everything non-thief, but it's a step in the right direction: pre fight change your weapons and skills setup and go: 10+5 skills is all you have at disposal.
The game lacks in other departments for sure, but in terms of number of skills is just right in my opinion.