Vanguard Dev Talks About the Game's Future 86
Massively sat down with Thom Terrazas, producer for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes about what the future holds now that the game has had time to stabilize after a rocky start. Terrazas talks about some of the upcoming content, and explains why they chose to develop in the direction they did. "A lot of the requests are a mix of high-end content requests. You know, keep delivering higher end content so that progress doesn't stop for our players. In addition there are many requests to fix current content. Those are the two things that the players have requested the most." He also provides some general information on their ideas for alternate advancement. "... the idea is you can build your character out so it's a bit more specialized in things like damage, or mitigation, or spell damage. So you can specialize any way you want. We're working on that now, and it's something we're looking to launch in the raiding portion of Pantheon. So if you really love your character and want to specialize in something more, be a little different then the rest of your class, then AAs will be coming with the second part of Pantheon so you can customize your character further in the higher level."
Re:Heh (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Heh (Score:3, Insightful)
So your suggestion is that they instead copy WoW as closely as possible and hope that players spontaneously jump ship because...?
WoW is the Windows of the MMORPG world, and by that I simply mean it is the one that everyone, even those with no interest in the subject is aware of. WoW may even be fantastically good at what it does, but it seems like a lot of people pick it because they are already invested in it or it's the most widely known option.
If WoW is actually so fantastically good at what it does that most players are choosing it because it does what they want perfectly, then this gives other developers even less reason to chase the mass market. Much better to make a game that beats WoW's experience for 'hardcore' players, because at least that gives it an edge with a certain market segment.
You overestimate WoW (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, you seem to:
A) assume that owning the MMO market is a for ever. WoW started from zero once too, and people predicted it won't do that great competing with EQ1 which owned the market. With EQ2 right around the corner, nobody expected WoW to do that great. Even the publisher only allocated funds for a couple of servers... resulting in the hideous queues to get in, as 100x more people wanted to play it than anyone estimated.
WoW _will_ eventually be dethroned too.
B) assume that there isn't room to grow the market. Again, people said the same about WoW back then. It had been years since any MMO had done more than steal some players from another MMO, so the total number of players looked static. (Seriously, look at the MMOG charts.) But then it turns out that making it more accessible for casual gamers has enlarged the market by an order of magnitude.
I see no reason why another game can't do the same.
C) forget that people do get bored and leave any game after a while. Last I've heard a statistic, it was an average of 6 months per player. Sure, it's still a Gauss curve, so some people leave after the free month, some stay around for years, but the average was half a year.
WoW sheds a million or two of players per month, who look for another home. Then we try a bit of EQ2, a bit of COH, and end up right back on WoW. A game would just have to not suck much to make a good living out of such people who, yes, liked WoW but got bored after a while.
Even briefer: we're talking about a game, not about Windows. Windows is something that just runs your programs, so if you already have it, might as well keep it. A game is something you have to actively play, and people get bored eventually of doing the same thing. Same as in any other game.
D) Going in the opposite direction is hardly a way to achieve any of the previous possibilities. Even if you don't plan to dethrone WoW or enlarge the market, aiming to actively suck for the millions of ex-WoW-ers around, seems pretty stupid to me. That's a lot of people who have already decided they like MMOs and _are_ looking for a new MMO to play. Any reason to actively try to hold them off?
"Only" 500,000 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You overestimate WoW (Score:3, Insightful)
If WoW will be dethroned, it will be by another Blizzard MMORPG.
It seems that other producers cannot grasp the concepts of "deliver when ready", "appeal to the masses", "don't need a supercomputer to run" and so on...
Surely other factors concurs, but AoC was targeted to mature(?) audience, WAR to PvPers. They started with a market base already reduced by their choices, and killed themselves by being uncomplete and bug ridden.
How much will you bet that Darkfall (pvp with consequences), Aion (graphic heavy), Champions Online (niche market)... will fail? If they won't have the quality that WoW has *now*, people will play them for the standard free month and then leave them for the next game.
Re:Heh (Score:1, Insightful)
[quote]So, let me get this straight, at a time when WoW has got another couple of million players by going less specialized, so healers or tanks can still kill stuff when soloing and damage dealers don't get two-shot... Vanguard actually plans to make people _more_ specialized?[/quote]
Not everyone is happy with WoW's generalization so this will appeal to them. .. check.
Least loved healing class for a party.. check.
Fragile cloth class w/ laughable aoe.. check.
Itemization forces competition with 1/2 the dps
Thoughts of playing that crazy blood mage again... check
WoW is only the beginning of MMO growth. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think that WoW grew a userbase that wasn't already there. While it is true that a large number of players came to a genre that they wouldn't have 2 years before, I think that WoW caught a lucky break in a number of factors, the first that comes to mind is this:
Network/computing potential. Prior to WoW, broadband wasn't as widely available, and it is now doing nothing but expanding. Computers also struggled to play games unless they were specifically built for such a purpose. As WoW arrived, it was designed, and took advantage of the introduction of newer, cheaper game-capable machines. It no longer took $1500+ to build a machine that could play WoW.
In short, they capitalized on a market that existed but just didn't have anyone trying to sell to it.