Vanguard Producer Wants Second Chance for First Impression

Allakhazam is featuring an interview with Vanguard producer Thom Terrazas where he addresses some of the early issues that made Vanguard so slow out of the gates. "Performance; Optimization; High System Requirements. Everyone may have a different name for it but at the end of the day, optimization challenges were the biggest hurdle faced at launch. We lost too many customers at launch due to the inability to run the game smoothly and we have been making huge improvements in this area in every update since. I can speak to this first hand actually: When I started playing at launch, I experienced some horrible "hitching" while moving from one area to another on what I consider an average gamers' computer. When I began to play more extensively a couple months later, I noticed some considerable improvements to my frame rate. Today, it is night and day superior than it was at launch. Optimizing the game has been one of our top priorities and in the last six months, we have made some considerable strides in improving the player's experience. If you haven't logged in recently or if you gave us a look in the beginning and haven't been back since, check it out now - I'll even flag your account for free for a period of time if you want to go in and prove me wrong."

Open Week

[everphilski]

Run an open week. I don't want to have to go out and purchase the game to "prove you wrong." I played the beta and was active in several forums, I was really hoping this was the game that could put my EverQuest addiction to rest. But sadly it was not. I still play EverQuest a few nights a week, and I'd like to move on but I haven't found a MMO that satisfies.

Vanguard made lots of promises but never really fulfilled them, and it's sad because on paper it really looked like a great game. Maybe they do now, but if you really want to prove it, have an open week where people can download the client and play for free, like an open beta. Yeah, there's a few logistical issues to work out but I'm sure Sony can take the load if prepared (I'm not being sarcastic...). If you want to bring us in, give us something to chew on. Everquest still gives out free month trials... the Trial of the Isle, which is essentially a month playing with the first three expansions on designated servers. The whole game, uncrippled. Something like that might help you prove your point.

Re:Lesson learned

[subsoniq]

I think game companies are finally starting to figure this out (where MMO's are concerned). I was in the AoC open beta and had a lot of problems with the beta client (debugging code was compiled in and turned on), but I've heard from the early access people that the RTM client was smooth as silk, a huge improvement over the different beta clients and actually playable on machines 1-2 years old. And of course Mythic pushed back the release of Warhammer Online, which hopefully means they'll get it straight for a smooth launch.

what specs

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what his so-called "average gamer's" PC actually is. I highly doubt it really is. Maybe "average HARDCORE gamer's PC".

Re:Open Week

[lewp]

I think any game that wants to be a competitive MMO nowadays needs to have some kind of free trial that doesn't involve shelling out for the game box first. The whole "first month free" is nice, but not if I have to actually buy the game to get it.

With other games you can check reviews and get a fairly clear picture of what's going on. MMOs aren't so easy because a) they take a lot more time to fully get into than a reviewer is likely to spend with the game and b) they're constantly changing. You need to let people get their feet wet with the game before expecting them to pay up.

Re:Open Week

[MrBandersnatch]

Sadly, Vanguard is dead and has been running on life support since a few weeks after launch. Due to the low subscriber base I strongly doubt it will EVER see an expansion, which would be the only way it can ever hope to GROW its subscriber base! But maybe it would have been worth going back except......

Age of Conan! Its actually GOOD and has delivered on many of the promises Vanguard was making. I'm not saying there aren't problems (only a few of which are major) but I've not had this much fun in an MMO since EQ.

Re:Open Week

[GeekDork]

The issue with segregated trials is that you will experience a vastly different community than on real live servers. For example, when I was still playing DAoC, a magazine for the mentally less endowed (no other way to say it more politely) had a trial offer. You could pretty much see the average intelligence drop to negative in the starting areas in the weeks after that. If I had started during that time, I'd have paid to make it stop.

Giving trial players too much influence on the live environment without paying for it on the other hand will make a lot of Chinese extremely happy.

All in all, it's a no-win situation. My idea would be something like a 2 or 3-week trial for a small amount of money, say, 5-7$, which is pretty affordable. People throw away a lot more money on trash food and bad movies on a daily basis. SOE also seems to be working on a new/alternative starting area, which could also be (ab)used as a trial area.

From the view of a returned player who played shortly after release, and then stopped for 10 months, I can say that the game has really improved a lot performance-wise, and has a rather mature and friendly community. Apart from that it's a perfectly normal MMO, with long-standing bugs that still need to be fixed since beta, class rebalancing with each update, surprise features, etc.

Re:Open Week

[Anonymous Coward]

There is something about EQ1 that gets me to keep my sub going, even though when I log on, the servers are almost dead. A level 80 in EQ1 is truly a badge of honor, because of all the grinding it took to earn that, even not factoring all the AAs it takes along the way.

EQ2 is an interesting MMO. If you do the strategy like in WoW and just grind levels to level cap, your character will be a lot weaker (although at level cap, you can get AAs by killing stuff, but it will be quite slow) than someone who quests, kills named mobs at the right level ranges, due to EQ2's AA system (which is similar to WoW's talents, except you earn points by exploration, killing nameds, finishing up quests, and finding rare items.) It can be argued that EQ2's "endgame" starts at level 1.

EQ2 is my mainstay these days, because it has good gameplay, decent graphics, and plenty to do. WoW is OK, although the endgame is pretty much losing BGs and trying to hold up a so-so score in arenas for gear, as most of the playerbase is too amateurish to raid or even run instances with. Even the poorest players in EQ2 are able to do basic group functions (fighter classes hold agro, healer classes heal and not try DPS, scout and mage classes DPS, but watch agro.) I can say confidently that the bottom 10-15% of the playerbase in EQ1, EQ2, or Vanguard, if moved to WoW will be above average instance runners or raiders, just due to the differing population dynamics.

Its not that WoW doesn't have good gameplay. It shows a lot of dedication on Blizzard's part to get a game with WoW's graphics and gameplay to work on such low end hardware that it works on. However, PvP class balance is pretty pathetic (you either are one of two classes, or are HK for those classes), and the chatter in various chat channels makes one wonder who is feeding so many people the lead paint chips.
I've not tried Vanguard, but I really wish SOE had given Sigil enough capital to allow them to complete a release 1-2 years later, so all three continents would be fleshed out, tradeskilling (which is difficult) ironed out, and perhaps some raid content put in.

Re:Lesson learned

[SatanicPuppy]

Well it's also finally come around that there are companies who have done it before...Both Mythic(DAoC) and Funcom(AO) have prior experience with long-running MMOs.