Why all the nerd rage against Vanguard

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xregg_foh

shitlord
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Hey Aradune.

Im almost lvl 21(I know its low for playing everyday since launch, I died a lot in the early stages heh). You should stop in on Flamehammer. We have a pretty nice sized guild made up of a lot of people who post here. Log in and Ill give ya some tips on how to take eye catching in game screenshots on todays hardware for your website


Blacken {Talisman}
Flamehammer Server
 
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Xitix_foh

shitlord
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What concerns me most about VG currently is the customer support and fixing problems cycle. EQ was total shit in this regard, bugs straight out weren"t really fixed and instead customer service was penny pinched to reduce costs. A much better approach is to fix all problems/bugs at least twice. First to fix the problem now and a second time to fix underlying problems that allowed it to happen in the first place. Takes more time and money at first but statistics show it saves a ton of cash over time. Instead of 100 plus support incidents per month at $5 each it"s $2000 to fix it fully. That means it starts paying off in 4 months and since these games are live for years it"s a huge win. Preventing similar errors from ever going live also saves huge amounts of cash.

An example: Quest X says to take item A to NPC Y. The error is it doesn"t hand you the item so the quest can"t be completed. First fix: edit the specific quest/npc data to have the NPC hand out the item. Second fix: Search and flag all quests that might have the same problem and ensure they are correct. Third fix (!): add warnings/flags to quest/npc/item edit/check tools to show when this problem reappears when creating new quests or making changes to old ones. Re-run checks to flag problems and fix them in the last days before pushing a patch out to the servers.

An actual example from Everquest: ground spawns. For whatever reason with allmost every single expansion for years some ground spawns were bugged and only spawned when the zone was reset. Players, GMs, support people and developers were constantly dealing with the same problem after every expansion was released. Huge waste of time and money for everybody.
 
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ham

Lord Nagafen Raider
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Mithrull said:
The dungeons really are where VG shines. Its the first game with dungeons worthy of the EQ legacy.
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What dungeons are you talking about? And really I never thought there was anything wrong with WoW"s dungeons, the style of gameplay wasn"t for me but they always had pretty well designed places with cool mobs to fight. Even the earliest Horde dungeon has a cool flaming dude to fight at the end
 
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Alarion_foh

shitlord
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Kraks said:
Brad, I appreciate your response.

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.
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You know, I would love a game that became a real simulation of blacksmithing, or carpentry, etc.

The thing is, while you and I might like this idea - the idea that we can spend 30 minutes making one item - but when it"s done, the thing is beautiful and can sell for a hefty premium; the rest of the player base wouldn"t. They might say "yeah, that"s a cool idea" but really, they want to login for an hour and be able to actually get some stuff done.

Maybe it"s because I am a creative person, so I would enjoy actually creating something; using a crafting skill that you really had to learn and not just buy some new recipes from a vendor. Right now, while I do enjoy the crafting system on some level, it is definitely a little wonky. I mean, really the only thing that determines how good you are at crafting is 1. juggling your skills to find a balance between the number of complications and how efficient your progress/quality abilities are and 2. how much +highnumber crafting clothes you can afford.

I personally like systems where you have to figure stuff out. VG has this to an extent, moreso than say World of Warcraft does, but it still is not to the level that some of us would like to see.

That said, while I would enjoy a more involved system where you actually craft something; I can also see myself (and others) getting bored of it and not really wanting to do much as it would take so damn long.
 
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stevemcqueen_foh

shitlord
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Throag 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.
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Yes, unfortunately we are not dealing with a painting competition but with games.
Plus EQ2 still has a plastic feel to me, so the graphic departement is pretty much subjective as you mentioned (at least the artistic aspect, because obviously EQ2 is technically superior to WoW).
Anyway EQ2 is still on 250K subs, and that was before Vanguard came out...
Therefore high polygon graphic doesn"t always equal succesful game, on the contrary on MMORPGs that"s an handycap.

I got your point, BUT there is a big difference between Very Low hardware demand (WoW) and Very Hard (Vanguard), can we do something in the middle?
Look at the market of normal games.
The most demanding games are NWN2 and Oblivion which run smoothly on highest setting on my crappy computer.
With Vanguard I have to play balanced settings and tune down to zero all speculars, shadows, atmospheric distortion and tune down to 20% shader LOD , reflective distance and tree rendering distance.
I believe that is too extreme.

The Nvidia 8800 series , which is the card that allows to play Vanguard almost at highest details, will be an average affordable card in 2 years and that is not acceptable IMO.
This is not good for Vanguard, like it was no good for EQ2.
 
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woqqqa_foh

shitlord
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Yeah, you"re right Steve...the more I look at this sort of problem, the more I think console MMOs are potentially viable, since it would be far easier to design for a standardized platform. After all, if the choice is between shelling out 2000 bucks for a new rig to play the latest PC MMO or the several hundred for an Xbox, PS3 or even a Wii (I"d love to see an MMO controlled with a Wii-mote), it"s no competition. A keyboard and mouse (or headset) can easily work with any of today"s systems. And since the new generation all has online connectivity, the updates would be no trouble.
 
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Twobit_sl

shitlord
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woqqqa said:
Yeah, you"re right Steve...the more I look at this sort of problem, the more I think console MMOs are potentially viable, since it would be far easier to design for a standardized platform.
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It"s going to be the wave of the future. In 10 years I bet most MMO"s are console only, or have minimal PC support.. opposite of what we have now. Being able to design for one platform, knowing your limits and eliminating 95% of the technical support issues is a huge boon to developers.
 
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woqqqa_foh

shitlord
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Twobit Whore said:
It"s going to be the wave of the future. In 10 years I bet most MMO"s are console only, or have minimal PC support.. opposite of what we have now. Being able to design for one platform, knowing your limits and eliminating 95% of the technical support issues is a huge boon to developers.
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Players too. Not having to upgrade because the newest MMO needs a ton of RAM and a faster processor is a boon to pretty much everyone but hardware vendors. And since they won"t be trying to trump each other with tech (my MMO requires FOUR video cards just to run), they"ll likely end up focusing more on style and content, which imho is just what the industry needs right now.
 
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Throag_foh

shitlord
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I agree about the fact that there is indeed some middle ground. But the single player vs MMO argument is IMO irrelevant and has already been beaten to death. In a single player game programmers have ways to predict mostly anything that is going to hit the screen whereas in MMOs they cannot, I"m oversimplifying but this is the core of the problem, you cannot optimize MMOs the way you do single players games. That said I don"t excuse Vanguard since I believe myself that the game should run a bit better given the level of detail (I"m holding back on buying it until I get a better computer).
I also have a friend who worked on the Unreal Engine 2 and he told me that the engine was as unoptimized as it can get. He worked on the PSP version of Splinter Cell and multiplied the performances by roughly ten. I guess that"s what you get for using a cross platform engine. (It was on PSP, not PC and I don"t have first hand experience so don"t quote me on this )
 
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Maxxius_foh

shitlord
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So in the end Utnayan was right. The game by admission wasn"t ready for release, it was released mainly so the subscribers could pay for the development. Although I can understand the agony of meeting weekly payroll, had SOE supported you for 2 more months, I honestly believe an April release date would have generated twice as many box sales since people wouldn"t have been sidetracked with TBC. Recovering from a slow launch date, tho doable, will be extremely hard now. No wonder SONY keeps losing money.
 
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woqqqa_foh

shitlord
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Maxxius said:
So in the end Utnayan was right.The game by admission wasn"t ready for release, it was released mainly so the subscribers could pay for the development. Although I can understand the agony of meeting weekly payroll, had SOE supported you for 2 more months, I honestly believe an April release date would have generated twice as many box sales since people wouldn"t have been sidetracked with TBC. Recovering from a slow launch date, tho doable, will be extremely hard now. No wonder SONY keeps losing money.
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Yeah, pretty much. Still, I think that the engine they"re using (trying to future-proof the game) is actually a bigger problem, because of the barriers to entry it provides. Someone asks a friend about Vanguard, hears "well they"ve cleaned up the bugs and it"s fun to play, but you"ll have to buy a new PC to play it", and you"ve got yet another lost customer. There"s no need to go with a WoW-style engine that works on every PC out there, but going with a high-end engine that has optimization problems as well is just shooting yourself in the foot.
 
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Dashal_foh

shitlord
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Maxxius said:
So in the end Utnayan was right. The game by admission wasn"t ready for release, it was released mainly so the subscribers could pay for the development.
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Again though, while I"m sure nobody likes that fact, it"s like predicting the sun rise. No MMO I"ve ever played was "complete", and some less so than others. Probably the most complete by far was WoW, and they had a much larger budget, lower tech, less game world and features and even still had some end game stuff missing.
 
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Mkopec1_foh

shitlord
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Dashal said:
Again though, while I"m sure nobody likes that fact, it"s like predicting the sun rise. No MMO I"ve ever played was "complete", and some less so than others. Probably the most complete by far was WoW, and they had a much larger budget, lower tech, less game world and features and even still had some end game stuff missing.
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I can predict the next 2 or 3 launching incomplete in some way.

This is not rocket science. And stop making this UT fag some kind of hero martyr.
 
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woqqqa_foh

shitlord
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Mkopec1 said:
I can predict the next 2 or 3 launching incomplete in some way.

This is not rocket science. And stop making this UT fag some kind of hero martyr.
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He"s nothing of the sort, he was a foul-mouthed rude bastard who despite those qualities, had a great insight into the state of this game, the devs" approach to things like features (core and "fluff"), and it"s potential market. Go look up his posts, he wasn"t just generalizing, he actually predicted a lot of the game"s current problems...related to the graphics engine, world design, Sigil/SOE and customer relations, etc.
 
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Druixx_foh

shitlord
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Twobit Whore said:
It"s going to be the wave of the future. In 10 years I bet most MMO"s are console only, or have minimal PC support.. opposite of what we have now. Being able to design for one platform, knowing your limits and eliminating 95% of the technical support issues is a huge boon to developers.
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I agree with you that consoles would be an ideal platform for MMO"s. Especially allowing for a keyboard and mouse, in addition to the normal console controller. The developers win because they can take the nightmare of multiple platform support out of the equation and optimize it for one set of hardware. The customers win because they get a bug-free game (at least as far as hardware bugs) with more time put in to testing the game play as opposed to hardware.

However, the problem with this theory that MMO"s will all move to consoles is the limited lifespan of the consoles. Typically, we see consoles being released every 3-5 years. The development cycle for MMO"s is nearly that long. Which would mean the window of opportunity to get started developing a new game for a particular console is limited to only a few months to a year after that console is released. Otherwise, by the time you can release your game, there is a new, better, latest-and-greatest console out that makes your game obsolete.

My theory is that this is why Starcraft Ghost was cancelled because the development took too long and by the time they were projected to release after all the hurdles, there were going to be new consoles out.
 
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Twobit_sl

shitlord
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Consoles are backwards compatible. They are still making PS2 games even though the PS3 is out, etc.

A backwards compatible console with an updated version of the game with shinier graphics available to the new console, but the original version working for the older console would work pretty well. If the main difference is only in graphics, then they should be compatible. Just like someone using Luclin models and someone using original models in EQ.

It"s no different now, really. Someone can play VG on a 9800pro, AMD 2500 with 1GB of ram, but they coexist in the same gamespace as someone on a 8800GTX, core2 duo with 4 GB of ram.
 
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Lyenae_foh

shitlord
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Druixx said:
Typically, we see consoles being released every 3-5 years. The development cycle for MMO"s is nearly that long. Which would mean the window of opportunity to get started developing a new game for a particular console is limited to only a few months to a year after that console is released.
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No, before a console is publicly released developers get access to "developer kits." This usually starts about 1-2 years before release. As release gets closer, they get their kits upgraded to better resemble the final release version of the console.

An MMO developed on a console would have to start before console release, and then it could be released ~3 years into a console"s life... which is often prime time. Hell some of the best PS2 games came out 5 years after original release (and now 6 years with God of War 2)

Though, I highly doubt being on a console would change much. I"ve heard just about every excuse for why MMO"s are buggy and/or run like shit and I honestly don"t buy any of them. I"m fairly certain that the first few MMO"s would run like shit on a console and the programmers/design teams wouldneverhave the responsibility to say "we fucked up," or "we mismanaged", or "we didn"t have a budget for Q&A." You"d see fingers pointed at console limitations and/or shitty dev kits before you"d get the real reason.
 
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