Sony Online Entertainment Purchases Vanguard 77
The rumours have been around for months now, but Tuesday Sony Online Entertainment confirmed that they had purchased Vanguard and Sigil Games Online from its investors. Nearly everyone on the Sigil team was laid off with around 50% of the outfit slated to be hired back, so that work can continue on the Massively Multiplayer Online Game. The game will continue running under the auspices of SOE, as announced by company CEO John Smedley in a forum post on Tuesday. Rumours that Brad McQuaid (keeper of the Vision behind Vanguard) has not seen been in Sigil's offices since last year has only exacerbated fan reaction to this announcement. It remains to be seen if SOE can undo the damage that the last five months have done to the Saga of Heroes community, and the game itself.
Rootkit anybody? (Score:2, Funny)
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Bad Game (Score:4, Informative)
Without going into "the vision" or any of that stuff, the game as it stands right now simply isn't any good. Performance is its biggest problem, most people's machines simply can't play it effectively. Sorry folks, the market of people who buy new gaming rigs every six months isn't big enough to support a MMO.
Blizzard figured that out, and now they have a license to print money. Vanguard's makers didn't figure it out, and now they get a one way ticket to being dumped on Station Pass with a bunch of other games.
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I agree about the performance though; I logged on for the last time at the weekend before unsubscribing and my PC would chug and thrash the hard disk for a
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The sad thing is... People have been telling Brad this for years. It was the big reason a lot of people got fed up with Everquest, and is a huge reason Blizzard claims millions of subscribers. Back when EQ was king, there really wasn't another choice. People that liked MMORPGs continued to play it because it was all there was.
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It's a two part equation. First, a whole lot of players are not into the whole grind thing. They weren't that into it in EQ1, but it really was the only good game out at the time.
But, Brad set out to create a game for the hard-core player initially. A large majority of his early beta testers were people wanting a harder EQ1, with greater penalties and more enforced raiding. Those testers were VERY vocal, and Brad was happy to listen to them. By the time he pulled his head
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Class remakes at the last minute are caused by a lack of leadership and focus, not listening to the community.
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Which is odd, because I've hardly seen a solo quest since level 12. Sure, I could grind, grind, grind killing the same damn mobs over and over and over, but I got bored of that crap years ago.
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Re:Bad Game (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree. It was overly ambitious of them to design a game that accomplished horizontal AND vertical scrolling on hardware as primitive as the Atari 2600; as a result they had to cut corners on enemy AI, leaving it nothing more than "stop, wiggle, proceed".
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Sony is way ahead of you (Score:2)
Re:Bad Game (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, you want vision, how about a world where the monster population would grow over time, and where the lives of the NPCs go on, with a script for changes in the lives of the NPCs that will happen if the players don't interfere? That's the sort of vision that would make for a better game. Oblivion has the problem where nothing changes or happens unless the player is there. I am more of a fan that life in any game, single player or MMO, TIME should update what is going on in the game world. NPCs who are in love will eventually get engaged, they may break up or they will get married. Children may or may not happen, but all of these things should go on without the need for the player to be there to get involved.
Now, there will obviously be changes caused by the player(players) in "My vision" of a good game world. The players can get involved in the events, and if they do, the outcome might change. So you have these little RP quests going on, where you can either help or hurt the people involved(depending on alignment). If you kill an NPC, that NPC stays gone, and the people that NPC knows will mourn their loss, and either hate you or look more favorably on you. The NPC reactions and day to day might also change as a result. What's more, by having scripts for "if this then that" and having many options for the NPCs, they really can have full lives. The key to this is that every game day at 3:30am or so, there is a "loading screen", which will update the AI for the towns based on the events. Mobs would also fall into this category where mobs would have a life cycle, and that life cycle would include being born, growing up, finding a mate, food, etc.
Now, all of this really wouldn't be THAT hard with modular NPC AI(where old "what if" scripting is pruned, and the devs put in new life events into the people. A default set for babies/children could also be auto-generated without being too complicated. But, I havn't heard of any developer looking at how to make an MMO that isn't based entirely on fighting/magic/crafting as a way to have fun. How about just going from small town to town as a bard, meeting people and having fun. No combat, but just "living the life"? Roleplaying, and how to add roleplaying to an MMO should be seen as the next true "next generation" MMO. The AI doesn't even need to be THAT advanced to make it fun, look at Baldur's Gate 2 and how you CAN have long-term interactions with party members. Now, expand that to an MMO setting and give the player more choices. It may be multiple choice roleplaying, but Planescape: Torment showed you can have a lot of different ways to play.
Eye candy is only one part of having "a vision", but if that vision doesn't include making the world feel alive, it will never be a true "next generation", because there will always be a "grind" just to have fun.
Re:Bad Game (Score:4, Insightful)
That's one of the reasons why MMOGs have to be limited compared to single-player games. In a single-player game you're one adventurer (or a small party) in a world full of monsters and normal people, in a MMOG you're one of a bazillion adventurers in a world where almost everyone is an adventurer.
Just imagine, for example, a LOTR MMO where only one person could ever do the 'Ring Quest', or a Star Wars MMO where only one person could ever blow up the Death Star. Don't you think most players would be pissed?
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However, I would also make a cut off point. Give players 30 or 60 days then drop that content and then rearrange the game world to reflect those changes. You could also have a larger open to all event at that point.
Anyway you slice it though, one thing MMO studios need to realize is the "grind, grind, grind" simpl
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MMOs already do this and call them 'story quests', 'story arcs', and whatnot.
That takes the MMO out of MMO, and leaves you with a single player or cooperative game that is not an MMO. When you do that, yo
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Now what?
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You'd inevitably have some group go through an entire town and kill every single NPC "just for fun"... then what? That town is just a ghost town now? That might be kind of cool, but what h
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Pics or it didn't happen.
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I was so hyped on VG that I put that out of my mind. But months later, I felt cheated. I wanted Sigil to, well, frankly, die. I wanted Brad's Vison (TM) to fail. Why? Because I was cheated. You, me, and everyone else who played this game was cheated!
We stuck around in the promise o
Star Wars Galaxies (Score:5, Insightful)
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Now it's a role playing action game, where you'd be much more happy. You'd jump in the game and already have skills, hell you could be a jedi if you want. I think it kills the game if you don't have to earn your skills.
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Maybe... but who's going to stick around that long in a game that isn't fun?
When I think of 'Star Wars' I think of flying around in spaceships, fighting in big battles, and shagging Natalie Portman. But all I could find to do in SWG was spend thirty minutes running from one city to another doing Fedex deliveries to NPCs who often weren't even there (or wait around for ten minutes for a shuttle which ate up most o
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SWG sucked out of the box. I never understood people that thought it was the greatest MMO.
And EQ2 has gotten incredible changes, changes so good it is no wonder that SOE took a flier on fixing SWG.
Ask anyone who ever played EQ2 when it first came out, quit the game, and then gave it another try after getting baked on WoW for a year or so. Just about every one of them will tell you they were amazed at how cool the game became. Heck, most of the ones that did that wouldn't
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2 more games down the drain (Score:2)
they have managed to take a franchise like star wars and screw up its game SO bad that, swg have broken fastest account cancellation rate among mmos in history once, or maybe twice from what i remember.
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As for Vanguard SOE has been purchasing failed MMORPG, such as Matrix online, and combining them into thier all access pass. If you are to plan SOE and not Brad. SOE saw an MMORG with a large fan base that was being dumpped by Microsoft, purchased the rights to support gave Brad money(aggreements on this was before SOE signed on) and expected him to know what he was talking about. As some others have put i
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SOE... (Score:5, Funny)
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Almost had a chance (Score:2)
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Sony = Brokers? (Score:2)
The bugs aside (Score:3, Interesting)
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My HOPE is that they actually have some story direction and movement through the War of the Ring events (especially since it would be cool to play in "the rest of the world" that you never saw directly in the trilogy, but still had lots going on), but that puts them on a path to an "ending," so... I'm
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City of Heroes had a pretty smooth launch. It wasn't perfect, but nobody will every achieve that. But I had the least amount of problems with the CoH launch than any other MMO I played/beta tested.
The biggest problem for LotR:O is that it was fairly boring. Other than it being based on LotR, there wasn't anything that made me go "whoa, this game is cool!" It's one of the few (real) games I got so bored with while beta testing, that I had to force myse
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Launching a game smoothly shouldn't be rocket science. It should be the norm instead of the exception. Unfortunately...
-- Gary F.
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Chris Mattern
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AC is still alive and trying to do well and I'd say it was much superior to the EQ that seemed to oclude it during it's early lifetime.
AC2 was pretty ambitious but for some reason - and I'm not 100% sure why - it failed. Very pretty game.
DDO - it is still alive and has an appeal to a very specific kind of player, trying to be faithful to the pnp DD crowd. I'm
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AC2 was pretty ambitious but for some reason - and I'm not 100% sure why - it failed. Very pretty game.
I'm going to have to assume based on this comment that you didn't acutally play the game? The first 5 months of it's retail release it was an Alpha quality product. There were huge bugs in every aspect of the game. Chat didn't work most of the time. Mobs (and players) constantly got stuck on terrain. There were practically no quests. There was practically no content of any kind really. The crafting system was a joke. Leveling a character was about repeating the two or three quests available at your level r
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I played the Beta. I really wanted to be an engineer in that game. But I got tied back into AC as no one I was with in AC were inclined to go to AC2. I wound up doing the monarch thing instead on AC.
Maybe you should let your friend get LOTRO and consider AC2 a learning moment for Turbine. I don't know if you aren't buying Turbine anymore to PUNISH them or because you don't believe they can make a good product. Both are invalid. You need to REWARD them for good products (buy LOTRO) and PUNISH them for b
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But yes the launch has been very solid.
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Why don't you first define what you mean by "balance" ??
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Witness the BC ideas. Separate PvP and PvE progression? Sounds good, except that the way they chose to do it doesn't apply equally to all classes; if they went further, though, and put PvP-only or PvE-only bonuses on items, you start to have two divergent systems of gameplay, which means you might as well make two games and stop confusing people.
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The only reason WoW had lag issues in the beginning was because even Blizzard didn't anticipate such a quick adoption by so many people. That was in part because so many people could play it (it barely required a decent PC when it came out, let alone now). They quickly fixed the lag issues, and even offered credit to players for server d
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Blizzard gave me a five day credit on my account and I continued playing on other servers during that time period.
Still... I remember the bad times when walking around Ironforge or Orgrimmar near the Auction Houses would lag my computer... not just because of the number of people, but also because it only had 512MB of RAM. Doubling that reduced the problem considerably.
Sony's taking over Vanguard? (Score:2)
Really? (Score:3, Funny)
Track record is mixed (Score:4, Insightful)
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SOE learned from SWG:NGE, yes. But they didn't create that mess. If you look at the deal between SOE and LucasArts that resulted in SWG, you find that SOE has no control over the game itself. LucasArts controls game mechanics, artwork creation, content creation, customer-service policies, in-game rules and just about every other aspect of the game. NGE was Lucas' idea, SOE was violently against it but they've no say over that aspect of the game. Essentially they're contractors, providing coders, CS bodies a
That's a scary healine. (Score:2, Funny)
Sony...Fix?... (Score:2)
At least Brad got his priorities straight... (Score:2)
Dammit... (Score:2)
God almighty (Score:1)
I was wondering why I saw a charge on my credit card for Vanguard a few days ago, when I had cancelled it before the free month had even expired.
Maybe it will be as hard as Horizons to cancel.
On the positive side, my "WoW Burning Cruscade Please Come Back" free 10 days just expired yesterday. I had gotten my new Blood Elf up to level 18, on top of half a dozen other new characters, and that's with a family and life. A flunking college student could have probably gotten up to leve
LOTRO vs Vanguard (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now the race seems to be between Lord of the Rings Online, a WoW clone with a well-known license and an amazingly done hobit starter area, and Vanguard: Sage of Heroes, a sorta sequal to Everquest that is claimed to try to innovate the MMORPG.
WoW is an Everquest light with added evercamp and evergrind added but coated in a delicous cholate covering that have most of us not noticing how goddamn boring the game actually is at times.
LOTRO in some ways tries to remedy this, it for instance has reduced to almost zero the number of times you will have to kill for a rare lootdrop. If you are asked to collect bear pelts then the bears will drop them pelts, if not it is a bug. So far I seen only two quests were did this not happen, this was mentioned in the quest description and it was then about half that dropped them.
It also has reduced the evercamp, rare or named mobs just respawn at a reasonable time, nothing close to everquests 2, once in a blue moon. Yet you still have quests were you have to kill boss X and have to stand in line to do it. One of the worse variations of this is a quest were you have to rescue a lynx kitten (don't ask) and it is a afraid to come out so you have to kill six budgies that are pestering it. Problem? They ain't assinged to you, so far this invariably results in someone else attacking one of yours. Since you have to kill six of them, this means you then have to wait around for someone else to trigger a respawn of six of them and kills some of theirs. At times you wish they set the respawn more frequent or made such quests into instances.
In the end LOTRO seems to be a WoW with a nice license done slightly better. Yes the Shire is absolutly amazing but the dwarf hall has nothing on the one in WoW.
Vanguard on the other hand is.... Well what is it? Once upon a time SWG was a game that was radically different from Everquest. You just could not compare the two. Vanguard has a lot of lofty claims but ends up being WoW with lots of complexity and even more bugs added but deep down a WoW clone (not that this need amaze you, WoW is an everquest clone and Vanguard is by the everquest guy).
LOTRO and Vanguard even share an oddity. For crafting you need special tools. Sensible enough I suppose, vanguard for some reason turns it into an entire outfit. Yet they both add an amazingly stupid bit of micro management. In LOTRO you have to equip the right tool for the job yourselve. WHY?
Vanguard goes even further, during the crafting process you use a lot of different tools, you can have them in bags (3 tools in a bag) but only one bag active at once, if you need a different tool you need to make a different bag active. WHY?
It really adds nothing to the gameplay but annoyance.
While in theory the combat in Vanguard should be deeper in reality it just isn't. It looks better (LoTRO animation is not even close to Vanguard) but it is just as shallow. If you played WoW or EQ1/2 you will know the drill.
But where LOTRO beats vanguard is in presentation. If you look on at the shire then LOTRO vs Vanguard is like WoW vs Everquest2 times 100. The shire is like one of those adventure themeparks. Something is always happening, it is a beautifully animated populated world. Its quests are fun and exciting and bug free (so far, I do see others having troubles) and it is just an amazingly well done world.
Compared to that Vanguard just seems, lacking.
It is not simply that they are bad, they are not, but they lack the spark. It just ain't the shire and that is it.
The odd thing here that it is not SWG vs EQ or WoW. This is a WoW with license vs WoW with lots of complexity bolted on comparison.
For all that vanguard claims to do, it is just WoW made complex and confusing.
Not that it is all bad, short of Guild Wars Vanguard wins for having females have their own animation. (GW has boobie animation and so beats almost any game) Its combat animations also seem to connect more.
But offcourse, last but not leas
It's okay (Score:3, Funny)
Ladies and gentleman pretending to be ladies, I give you The John Romero MMOG! [gamasutra.com]
You think Brad McQuaid knows how to burn $30 million? Just wait till you see this guy in action. He'll make McQuaid look like Steve Jobs.
Come to think of it, now that McQuaid's on the market again perhaps he'll find his way into Romero's Team. Damn, can you imagine that? A joint Romero-McQuaid MMOG vision? They'll have the combined power to take down any billion dollar development operation, and cause dozens of other local businesses to file for chapter 11 just from proximity fallout alone!
The Past (Score:1)
Well SOE/Sony's track record points to no. No they can't and won't. Let's not forget SWG.