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."
Aw man (Score:3, Interesting)
Aw man, I thought this was going to be about the Atari 2600 Vanguard. I was wondering whatever happened to those guys.
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Me too, man. That game rocked =).
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Except EQ1 peaked at 500,000 players. And if you want to aim at the hardcore segment, you get even less. It's probably barely enough to pay the development costs.
"Only" 500,000 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"Only" 500,000 (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong. Final Fantasy XI peaked at over 600,000 and probably still has more than 400,000. FFXI was the #3 subscription MMOG (behind Lineage and Lineage II) when WoW came out, having overtaken EQ over a year earlier.
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But 300k of those playing FFXI were gold farmers.
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Wrong, wrong and wrong.
Everquest: Online Adventures came out for the PS2 less than a year after FFXI's JP release (and before the NA release). FFXI is perfectly well supported on the PS3. And as far as supported only by Japanese--not hardly. The past several Vana'diel Censuses have shown that the big peak for log-ins is during NA prime time. At JP prime time, there is a distinct spike, but a much smaller one. This has been true for years.
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Unless the fees are $1.50 a month you should probably add a zero to your revenue figures.
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Here's a neato graph of Eve Online subs [mmogchart.com]
quoted from CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson on 17 Aug 07
"We began full-force in 2000," he continued, "by raising $3 million, which is about one-tenth of the current MMORPG." Its flagship product, EVE Online has been in development for three years, "the last year of which we had no money, but everyone turned up to work anyway despite us not being able to pay them," he admitted.
"This created a core of people who have gone through hell with us, and helps with the community espe
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Except there was a significantly less overall MMO players at the time.
EQ1 probably had comparable market share in the MMO market when it was out then WoW does now.
And this is coming from someone who didn't like EQ at all (UO 4 lyfe yo)
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Vanguard aims at the old hardcore Everquest crowd.
As an old EQ player... they missed when they started being more guild centric, mass teleport, EQ2-mechanic lifting, and generally nothing like the GOOD days of EQ. The problem is that they started listening to the guilds and started putting in things that broke the original design. The game was meant to have regional economies, vast distances, and group centric content. Now, since SOE has them, they are plugging in all the code from EQ2.
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I remember EQ in its heyday, but I really can't wax nostalgic about making sure I only wore gear that I wouldn't mind losing if my guild chose to raid Fear or another plane.
Fear should have had a small staging area. The early EQ1 zones definitely had design flaws.
EQ pre Kunark wasn't designed to make you wait forever to get a kill. It was simply that the game at launch didn't have enough high end content.
Of course, one death would set you back hours
It gave you motivation not to die. And/or gave you motivati
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Thank you for writing all that so I didn't have to! Spot on. Especially with the mapping! I remember more of EQ than I do any other MMO because I had to learn the land.
Previous EQ DE Enchanter, breaker of (lower level) trains.
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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 wit
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?
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We are not talking about a 'game' at least in the traditional sense. WoW is some
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It's obvious that those items and groups do provide a lot of the pull to
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Because content isn't infinite (Score:2)
Mostly because nobody has ever made a game with truly infinite content. (Even random generated maps eventually start to look like more of the same, once you figure out their rules and mob placement.)
So eventually people have done all the quests, seen all the zones, did their share of grinding the same "endgame content" a hundred times, etc. They eventually get bored and move on.
Since you mention X-COM: ok, they were
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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),
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Part of the problem is that no other company has both the financial capital and intestinal fortitude to have the patience to deliver the kind of overall quality and polish Blizzard does. In fact, the majority of MMO developers *never* had those qualities, even before WoW.
Remember when WoW came out, and all the problems it had associated with having a player base 50x larger than the expected player base, including lag, server crashes, and queues, and it was *still* considered the most successful MMO launch u
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Sony and EA would have the money, but they're simply too greedy and shortsighted: they want money NOW and don't understand that with MMORPG you make money on the long time, but only if you don't botch the launch.
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Sony and EA would have the money, but they're simply too greedy and shortsighted: they want money NOW and don't understand that with MMORPG you make money on the long time, but only if you don't botch the launch.
DING DING DING DING. This all the way.
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People who cheat and exploit will be in a game regardless of target audience, do not kid yourself.
Pre-Trammel UO was wondrous, I enjoyed in immensely even as a person who was often on the receiving end of such pounding. Even losing everything you could bounce back quickly, because the game was not populated by ultra-rare must-have uber weapons or armor.
The freedom that "kill everyone and cut up their body and stomp on it" environment has fosters greater player interactions. Actions of other players ju
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Unless you owned one of the original "Vengeance" weapons, the ones that did +45 dmg. Did they every completly remove them?
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Seeing as how EVE online (pvp with consequences), Everquest II (graphic heavy) and City of Heroes (niche market) aren't anywhere near failing, not a whole lot. Unless you define failure by the ridiculous standard of "not a WOW-killer".
Well, Darkfall still might well and truly fail, since its "pvp consequences" look pretty obnoxious. But that would be an indictment of Darkfall
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During EQ1's prime, a lot of games came within 50% or better of its market share. No game has even come CLOSE to touching 50% of WoW's market share, no matter how much you massage the numbers to make it look bad. We're talking about significant digits worth of difference here.
I'm not saying WoW will be #1 forever, but there's just no historical precedent for its popularity. You cannot compare it to the EQ1 age or any other similar game type in history.
And there's no way WoW has a million player churn of lea
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Actually, I have no intention whatsoever to either make it look bad, nor to massage any numbers. I'm just saying that sooner or later someone will figure out how to make an even better game. I don't know who or when. Maybe it'll be one of the games due to be released this year, or maybe in the next decade, or maybe in a thousand years. But given practically infinite time, even ve
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And here is your problem. You are an "MMO player", not a "WoW player". Your circle of friends are mostly MMO players. Your demographic probably represent less than 20% of WoW's total subscriber base. You're framing everything on your perspective, which is not repr
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1. I'll go by your numbers, since I see no point in arguing wild guesses. Ok, fine, let's say only 20% of ex-WoW players ever try another MMO again. At 1-2 millions recycled a month, that's 200,000 to 400,000 per month that are ripe for picking by another game. It's more than other games have as their total population.
It still seems to me like it can't be that horrible an idea to aim for at least some of that potential market.
2. Well, this isn't just about WoW, but rather more generally about game design an
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Better in whose eyes? Many if not all other MMORPGs try to be more hardcore, focussing more on competition and teamwork and such. WoW got into its position precisely by realizing that the people who are decked out in top tier equipment at max level and discuss the relative balances of the classes in PvP are only a tiny fraction of the total number of people and that while they probably enjoy facing harsh penalties on death and danger everywhere the rest doesn't. WoW was better for those who don't want to tu
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Amen.
1. But additionally the thing is: nowadays even people who are hard-core nearly-full-time gamers prefer a more relaxed game. E.g., I'd think Tycho and Gabe from Penny Arcade are anything but casual 1-hour-a-week gamers, and they probably qualify as "gaming press" more than some magazines out there... but the thing that stuck to my mind is that they praised COH back then for lacking the disproportionate penalties for death of EQ. (And that was before it got reduced even further.)
Or off the top of my hea
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WOW will be dethroned only when someone programs to lower-end machines. All these MMOs act like mass pixels is the height of design. WoW undercut them and achieved a wider audience with no competition.
-Jeff
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Other than the market expanding even further, I can't see how.
If a game is made that differs from WoW in any way, the WoW players won't play it, as it doesn't have the exact same set of features and gameplay mechanics they demand. If the game is exactly like WoW, they still won't play it, as they already have WoW and don't need another game that's exactly the same.
Seriously, there are players who won't touch another MMO if the quest-givers don't have question marks ove
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The funny thing is what WoW is becoming so standard, it gets used as a communications medium. A lot of people have friends that the best (perhaps only way) to get in touch with them is through the game.
This is the reason that I keep my WoW sub current. There are so many people I know that their E-mail address, IM handles, and Facebook messages are changed or never watched, but people do log into WoW to check on their auctions and WoW mail tends to work well almost all the time.
Add a Blizzard Authenticator
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Vanguard has always been aimed at a select "hardcore" group of people who feel that any MMO you can play without it being a full time job is for noobs. Those people seek to recreate a mythical golden age from Everquest, which is impossible since back then it was a new and shiny thing for most of them. It's not new anymore.
But, thats the audience they have. At this point in the wider market Vanguard is known only as the "WoW killer" to bomb most quickly. It was one of the buggiest, worst performing, and outr
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Actually, when I tried it real recently (when the new newbie island was in beta), I was shocked at how noob friendly the game really is. Soloing content was doable, maps were pretty straight forward. The things that got to me were the bugs (couldn't complete goblin starting quests without at least two GM petitions), and the sheer repetition. I remembered
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[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
Th
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Talking about the game's future... (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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This is all true, but I think the biggest win for WoW was that they had the world's most popular gaming franchise (Warcraft/Starcraft) and turned it into an accessible MMO. You already have millions of gamers familiar with your product, your quality, your characters. This is unlike Star Wars which has a larger fanbase but decidedly fewer fans who know it already as a computer game.
Basically, WoW moved all its Warcraft RTS gamers into its MMO. Star Wars and Lord of the Rings had to move all the movie-watch
Then explain TSO please (Score:2)
Now explain The Sims Online please. The Sims had sold more copies than all warcraft games combined. TSO flopped quickly anyway.
We
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Point taken. Rebuttal:
Sims Online: coming, like WoW, from The Sims, an all-computer gaming audience. Except TSO didn't translate well into an online game. It doesn't matter if your fan base is huge, if the next game you put out sucks, you get initial sales, followed by poor reviews, and nothing else.
Star Wars: Yes, there were a mishmash of Star Wars games of varying quality. Two things here: 1) Star Wars was a bigger movie than any of its games. 2) SWG was a mediocre game at best. You're taking the gr
Bingo (Score:2)
Well, I see you make basically my point: a license will only get you so far either way. In the end, if people like your game they'll play it and provide word of mouth advertisment to their friends. If not, not.
Everquest is probably the best illustration of it: it was based on no franchise whatsoever, and for a while it was king of the hill. It overtook both UO (which had the very strong Ultima name) and wasn't surpassed by SWG (which had a huge following in computer games, though as you correctly note an ev
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Really? I'd never heard of Warcraft before WoW. Was it an MMO or an RPG? I'd have thought the most popular gaming franchises would be Mario, the Sims, Halo etc.
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Everquest was just one of those 'sad MMORPG games' that people wasted their time on, drained their life and ruined marriages, whereas WoW was the next chapter in the Warc
May have to give it another shot (Score:2)
/.'er who plays Vanguard (Score:2)
Hmmmm (Score:1)
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Vanguard Dev Talks About the Game's Future (Score:2)
Or lack of there of... Can I end that with a preposition?
Looking at this thing [mmogchart.com] you can really tell when the game was launched, and when the free month ran out. And there is no reliable data since. Not a promising sight for a WoW-killer.
Have they made the game fun yet? (Score:1)
But they forgot to make the game fun.
They spent a ton of time focusing on features and graphics and
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Really? I played the demo the other week, I got maybe 3fps on default settings, and the graphics were abysmal. No detail whatsoever, the blandest game I've ever seen, and buildings popping up yards in front of me. What exactly was taking up so much processing power to make it so slow, when the game looked no better than Everquest 1?
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Really? I played the demo the other week, I got maybe 3fps on default settings, and the graphics were abysmal. No detail whatsoever, the blandest game I've ever seen, and buildings popping up yards in front of me. What exactly was taking up so much processing power to make it so slow, when the game looked no better than Everquest 1?
Well, out of fairness, I think I got a bit lucky with the graphics situation. They looked incredible on my machine whereas others were having problems.
Nothing can change the simple fact that... (Score:1)
WOW truel (Score:1)