TLC would keep me away. It"s fun to go back and farm stuff, redo old encounters you enjoyed. If you don"t get anything for it loot wise thats a real bummer.
Why all the nerd rage against Vanguard
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Hey dickhead, I don"t care about the game NOW. I did once until I eventually saw what a suckass game it was turning into. And where the hell were you when Brad was making thread after thread of redundant screenshots on this forum touting his dinosaur of a game. He came here for one reason, which he admitted, because the threads would take 10,000 hits. That is alot of free advertisement. The only problem tho was that it turned out mostly negative after awhile.Camerous said:
Now next time you spew crap, which is often, read the dam thread title first.
Brad, I appreciate your response.Aradune Mithara said:
I suggest you stop looking at the "data" and start logging in, much like some GMs would back in EQ1, and ask people that are in the trenches. Not feedback systems, as we know only the people that are absolutely in love or absolutely appalled with things typically respond there.
Honestly, the crafting system could be much better. The randomness is what kills it. A good sword smith in real life doesn"t sometimes make a good sword, sometimes make an ok sword, and sometimes make a crappy sword. This isn"t Honda, Ford, or GM, we"re not putting out hundreds of items. We"re putting out special, select few, custom made items. These things should take time to make, something that isn"t in the game currently. However, when they are made, they should be fantastic. The length of time to create a nice sword should be determined in the actual crafting, not in the gathering of materials (as it is now).
I"m no developer, but I could come up with some ways to make crafting require actual skill. Show the weapon forming on the screen instead of some generic every MMO Crafting Window. Show the hammer. Go to a first person view...the sword is forming in front of you, a minor bump here, a dull edge there. Actually incorporate folding into it. The more you fold the metal, the better the item will become. Actually incorporate the mixing of carbon and iron to create steel. No need for Black Iron and Star Iron and other falseties. Just make the best weapons take hours upon hours of real time invested into them. Make the crafting work to maintain a constant temperature. Allow him to hire 1 or 2 weapon smiths 1 or 2 tiers lower to come and manage the bellows, and in return for their work they gain XP and learn how to make the items themselves.
Something better could be done easily, and it would make more sense, and be 1000x more immersive. I would sign back up immediately and play any game that could do something similar with their crafting system. REAL crafting is the key to immersion within an MMO, something no game has come even close to.
If you want to craft it is.Kraks said:
I personally want to be involved in epic struggles built around combat. A game"s crafting system, while important mechanically to the economy, and to some player"s gameplay has absolutely no bearing on my sense of immersion whatsoever.
As it has been said, this is exactly the type of post and attitude that kept me away from the game. Why would I want to try a game that has issues, work past the problems, try to find the fun. So I can play with Camerous? Fuck no sir.Camerous said:
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 honest, but Blizzard put $80M into development. No one else is willing or able to do that. Not Microsoft, not Sony. EA perhaps, and they"re now back in the MMOG business with the Mythic acquisition (but at the time we started Sigil, they were still in a lot of pain over Sims Online, which is rumored to have been around $25-30M -- so at the time they were not interested in a game like Vanguard. And certainly not smaller publishers -- they definitely don"t have that kind of money.Maxxius said:
The reality is that Blizzard has been a fantastic company for many years, known for it"s quality RTS games. They"ve been very profitable and pride themselves in taking whatever time they need. This allowed them to take the time and spend like I said more than double what Vanguard cost, EQ 2 cost, etc. They also, because of how popular the Warcraft and Starcraft RTS games were and are in Asia, have a great name there, a great sales force that understands and thrives in a very different market (where you sell to PC Bangs as much as you do individuals). They are even making great in-roads into China. The result? The money they put into the game was well worth it and the game is doing incredibly well.
But in a sense, I can"t really complain. That Sigil, a start-up company, was given the money we were is probably unheard and totally unprecedented. If it wasn"t for our EQ heritage it never would have happened. We also set out to make a very ambitious game. In 20/20 hindsight, we could have scaled things back, but we didn"t know that we"d need to launch a couple of months early. Also, WoW has exposed people to MMOGs who likely wouldn"t have tried them -- back when we were pitching Vanguard the general belief was that the MMOG market was saturated and only about a million or so people were interested in MMOGs. WoW blew open the gamespace, destroying the theory that the gamespace was saturated. This is good for all MMOG developers, especially those who began development after WoW.
So I"m not upset in anyway with SOE or Microsoft -- again, what they did give us in terms of funding and support is unprecedented. The vast majority of developers would kill for such a budget as we received. It"s just a financial reality that is hurting us short term a bit, but something I know we can and are recovering from. Also, launching around the same time as Burning Crusade wasn"t optimal either, but again, nothing we can"t recover from.
What are we going to do about it? Well, the team is continuing to crunch and kick ass and are quickly making up for what happened. We"re killing bugs, tweaking content, adding polish, etc. And, at the same time, putting in new content as well. We"re patching often and the game is getting better every day. That, combined with the hooks and planning we did early on, makes me really excited. I"m loving the game now, and I"m just as excited about the future. We have 5+ years planned out in terms of expansions, live updates, new game mechanics, etc. We"ll be able to take advantage of new technology, implementing it relatively easily because of the way the game is architected.
So that"s it in a nutshell. A little frustrating short term, but the game is out, it continues to sell well, churn is very low, and the word continues to spread that the game is fun. Also, hardware is becoming cheaper and faster and as people upgrade their machines for Vanguard and other newer games either already out or on the horizon, the performance issues will go away. EQ 1 had a similar issue, but it paid off as well -- we were one of the first hardware only games (remember the Voodoo 1?). People needed to upgrade, but within 6 months or so after launch, Voodoo 2s were out, etc. and performance issues all but went away. In fact, performance past us up and we were able to create zones more detailed in our first expansion (Kunark) without any problems. This will happen with Vanguard as well.
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 that much more mature, what they will be able to do and are already starting to do in these dungeons is pretty mind blowing. I was talking with Tagad a while ago who is populating the City of Brass and it"s going to be crazy He did some really cool dungeons in Velious with the old EQ 1 tools -- I can"t wait to see what he and other designers will be doing in the raid dungeons in Vanguard.Neric said:
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 minority working on new content including raid content. This will change soon, however, and the majority will be working on high level and raid content.rinthea said:
Sorry mate but what you think, is your opinion only.Mkopec1 said:
I like the death penalty, although in fact I think is not harsh enough.
But many more people in this thread and other forum I browse, don"t feel the same way.
Just scroll up and read some of the posts more carefully.
No it"s not.Mkopec1 said:
This is not about the "Old Casual vs Hardcore" debates, because Vanguard is the subject.
You don"t see soo many debates around a game with so little subscribtion base.
Vanguard generates almost the same amount of threads as WoW, but Vanguard has around 2% of the subscribers of WoW.
That"s because either the casual and core player base feel betraied by Sigil promises that the game will be the way they like it.
That"s as simple as that
Brad this is what always limited your games.Aradune Mithara said:
Eq1, EQ2 (I guess you were still in charge when it was designed) and Vanguard.
Making a game technically 2 years premature compared to what is the actual average machine at the time of release is not a smart move.
The casual gamer which you insist in embracing, don"t invest too much money on PC hardware, hence they won"t have the latest state of the art machine, and neither can be bothered to upgrade it.
They like to play with Xbox and PS2 as much as they do with PC and they spread their money evenly.
WoW crowd has a very average machine, that could not run Vanguard decently, and that"s a huge limitation, I hope you thought this when decided that Vanguard required the most advanced machine of the entire game industry.
Another big issue that has nothing to do with the quality of the computers that run Vanguard is the memory leak.
Brad I don"t know if you play your games long enough, but I do.
The game crashes at least once in a hour, sometimes 4 times in 5 minutes.
It is not just me, I look around me when I play and at least other 3 people in my group go LD at least once every hour.
This is a make or break issue for me and I believe for all people who is playing this game.
I would focus on getting at the bottom of it and sort it, I can live with the bugs, but I am not ready to give more than a couple of month to this matter though, I am physically suffering.
Last thing is the server and chunk instability.
The server and the most crowded chunks crash way too often.
Just yesterday (double xp w/e) we had constant server crashes every hour.
In 1 hour alone my chunk (CiS) crashed 10 times in a hour.
People was incensed and very pissed off mate, this is not a one off, it happens every day since the game was launched.
If you really play your game properly, along with us "mortals", you will realise what the real make or break issues are.
Fixing bugs at the moment is not as important as fixing all the issues listed above.
I don"t mind not being able to finish a quest or not being able to make a particular recipe.
What people care is the chance to play continuosly without being kicked out of the game every hour or so.
It is not fun to die in an unaccessible area where you cannot recover your body or lose contact with your group (which took you 21 hour to find) just because either the server or your computer implode for a reason or another.
Work on retain the customer you have before tuning up the game to get more customers.
That"s my suggestion.
As a very loyal and paying customer, who like Vanguard game design very much, I am willing to put up with all the technical shit for 2-3 months more.
So you can count of me and my money, as I believe you can count on other people who is giving you the benefit of a doubt for few more months.
But don"t count too much on it.
If the memory leaks and the server instability is not fixed, people will give up on this game, I am afraid.
That doesn"t happen to everyone though. The crashing. I know i have a guildy that crashes alot, and he has a pretty bad ass computer. It sucks for him. I have a crappy computer, and i have crashed 2 times since a few days before it went "technically" live. It does need tweaking, but he already said, the money was gone, and he really had no choice but to release. What could he do? not release at all, and take a 30 million dollar hit? yeah right.
Read the bottom of my post mate.
I just don"t criticise for the sake of it, like other people does in this forum.
I play this game and I want to keep playining it.
I put my money where my mouth is.
I am saying that I am giving Sigil my money for 2-3 more months although at the moment I am forcing myself to keep playing it, because I understand the financial pressure Sigil is on at the moment.
But the stability issue is more widespread that people might think.
I play this game and I see how many people go LD while I play in a group. It ain"t pretty.
Plus the server/chunck crashes are problem for everyone, and they are getting worse not better.
What I was saying is that taken into consideration all the financial problem of Sigil, I along with other loyal customers are giving Sigil few more months to fix the worst issues.
And in my view the game stability is number 1 matter, before bugs and everything else.
I just don"t want it to be overlooked, because for me it is a very big issue.
I don"t care if all the bugs will be sorted.
If I can"t play for at least a couple of hours without crashing once, I won"t keep playing this game (and I am sure is not just me, you just need to read the chat window in game to understand the mood of the players on this matter, I am not over exagerating it).
That"s all.
I just don"t criticise for the sake of it, like other people does in this forum.
I play this game and I want to keep playining it.
I put my money where my mouth is.
I am saying that I am giving Sigil my money for 2-3 more months although at the moment I am forcing myself to keep playing it, because I understand the financial pressure Sigil is on at the moment.
But the stability issue is more widespread that people might think.
I play this game and I see how many people go LD while I play in a group. It ain"t pretty.
Plus the server/chunck crashes are problem for everyone, and they are getting worse not better.
What I was saying is that taken into consideration all the financial problem of Sigil, I along with other loyal customers are giving Sigil few more months to fix the worst issues.
And in my view the game stability is number 1 matter, before bugs and everything else.
I just don"t want it to be overlooked, because for me it is a very big issue.
I don"t care if all the bugs will be sorted.
If I can"t play for at least a couple of hours without crashing once, I won"t keep playing this game (and I am sure is not just me, you just need to read the chat window in game to understand the mood of the players on this matter, I am not over exagerating it).
That"s all.
I disagree here. It"s always good to keep in mind the future evolutions of the hardware. WoW ran great one year ago, it still runs great today but IMO we are already reaching the limits of the engine. I just have to look at armored characters and can"t help but think that armors look just like body tight pyjamas with enormous shoulders to make up for the lack of detail / volume on the rest of the armor (hey guys, maybe if we oversize the shoulders they will not pay attention to the fact that the rest of the models have nearly no details eh? Oh and let"s add some trees on those, I"m 100% positive they will only look at that!). You can also notice that on the environement, most textures look just like crap when close to them. Sure they can add more polygons etc over the years but they won"t be able to go beyond the bounds of such a limited engine. What will it look like in another year?stevemcqueen said:
Everyone was saying the same thing about EQ2 when it was released and look at now, a lot of people consider the game to be gorgeous, and I"m not talking about art here, since it"s highly subject to taste.
IMO it would be silly to design an engine around the idea that you will get substantially more subs thanks to that taking example on WoW. No one will get 9+m subscribers, it just won"t happen. Sure you will get some more, but what made WoW reach so many customers is not that. It helped of course but that"s far from being the main factor.