New Content Coming To Vanguard 45
Allakhazam spoke with Salim Grant, lead designer for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, about a variety of new content coming to the fantasy MMO. Grant says that the update will be free, and it will include two new dungeons, a revamp of the buff system, and balance changes.
"Both of these dungeons are going to have a group component and a raid component that you unlock. As we get closer to releasing these dungeons we will be releasing new features like AA, item enhancement, and increasing our level cap. ... We will also be merging as many buffs as we can into a single buff with one icon to help make going through your buffs a little easier. These buffs will be upgrades to their previous buffs as well. Some classes like Dread Knight will be getting something kind of different that plays off of their DC ability and we have a cool ability planned for rogues. Necros and druids will see upgrades to their pets as well. We are also using this chance to hopefully fix some of the power issues we have with our game. The way some of our formulas work is not very expansive and we are looking to fix some of these things while making some of our stat mods a little more valuable."
Whoa! (Score:2)
And this is relevant because...? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't mean to offend those who are genuinely interested in this game, but is this story really worthy of being on the front page? Sorry for trolling, but I just don't understand it. Slow news day perhaps.
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Well, to support your view, I must say I got to the commentaries to see if there actually was someone interested.
Maybe I'm getting old and can't follow current major events in the gaming world.
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Re:And this is relevant because...? (Score:4, Insightful)
If there is room on the front page for eighty thousand articles about World of Warcraft, or Apple or Google, then there's room for the occasional article about something else.
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Yes, they could have at least covered Vanguard for Atari. I mean, hey, there are probably at least 30 people that remember and/or care about that one. I mean this is slashdot.
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Personally, I'm really impressed they're still cranking out new content for an Atari 2600 [atariguide.com] game.
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Yes. Vanguard is a MMORPG, and playing MMOs is a typical nerd pasttime, and with Slashdot being "news for nerds"...
Yeah, you could argue that only the most popular one deserves to hit the news, but if so, then Slashdot shouldn't post stories about things other than WoW, Windows, Java, and politics in China.
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I don't know what nerds YOU know, but MMOs are about as main-stream as you can get.
Nerd.
(I kid!)
Sure it's newsworthy (Score:2)
It's newsworthy because the game crashed and burned on release. It's still going and now it's being updated. Not completely unusual (Anarchy Online being the other example), but odd enough that it's a story of some sort of interest.
There's certainly been enough other fluff on Slashdot, like every little possible rumour that Apple is developing new iPocketLint. *rolls eyes*
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There's certainly been enough other fluff on Slashdot
What you got against fluff?
"We have a cool ability planned for Rogues" (Score:4, Funny)
Still nothing for crafters? Or diplomats? (Score:5, Informative)
Allow me to illustrate why this is a question worth asking, for those that never played Vanguard or dropped it after the first 10 minutes, like so many did:
Vanguard features three kinds of "leveling systems". One fighting, one crafting, one diplomacy. All three are supposedly allowing you to independently reach their respective maximum levels, i.e. you were supposedly able to become a master diplomat without having to resort to violence. You were supposedly able to become a master crafter without the need to go on raids for receipe drops.
So far the theory.
The reality is more like whatever you can craft will be outmatched by a drop. This is by itself not yet a complete backbreaker, but they made it so that the rarest item you could craft from the rarest resource can't hold a candle against an uncommon drop (read: One that you get in about three hours of slaughtering).
You may imagine for yourself how much demand there is for crafted goods. Essentially, the only thing that's in any kind of demand are bags and horseshoes because, you guessed it, they don't drop like candy.
So I thought, let's drop that idea and turn to diplomacy. That was at least a clever new idea. It's a bit like playing a trading card game in an MMO, but hey, it's something different. It also starts off quite nice, some neat tutorial quests, a main town quest line, then you're sent off to some other part and then... you hit the wall. You cannot do your quests because your gear does not provide enough influence (that dictates whether you can at all engage in a diplomacy contest with an NPC) to do any of your quests. Yet you only get new gear from quests, as rather rare drops or crafted from even rarer resources (and again, the crafted gear can't hold a candle to the drops). The drops in turn drop from the mob you cannot engage in diplomacy with. How this hen-and-egg problem is solved? Well, certain combination of race/class do have a different quest line that supplies them with gear with a hint more influence in the relevant area, so they can actually tackle this quest... in other words, it works kinda-sorta for certain races/classes, it's impossible for others. Personally, I'd consider this broken.
So the two features Van touted as "new and excitingly different" are broken and/or ridiculously pointless. What's left is a standard plain vanilla fantasy MMO with a balance I don't even want to start about. And the big news is new content for some classes for their fighting power? Wake me when something happens that gives me a reason to come back to Vanguard, i.e. something I can't have already, and better, in other fantasy MMOs.
Can't agree 100%, but... (Score:3, Informative)
In general, the poster has many valid points, but:
Crafting is not completely borked. Sure, it's fallen into niches or into status items (like having a galleon now), but there remain areas for which a crafter is essential. A few examples (and sadly, there are only a few) are guild halls and houses, particularly GHs for the guild buffs. Specialized gear, such as spell countering gear for casters, can pretty much only be crafted and is essential for critical raid battles ... try killing Kotasoth without being
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These two definitely need attention, like making more raid gear drops targeted at these professions and making the items Bind On Equip, not Soulbound, but more importantly attention needs to be paid to the main ideas behind the classes.
So you want to make crafters ultimately dependent on fighters. Swell idea, if you plan to keep me out of the game forever, that is.
I entered the game with the promise that crafters would be seen as a viable choice, as much a part of the game as fighters or diplomats. Yet so f
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Tell me, are you crafting?
Yes, I have a lvl 50 Tailor and apprentices in all the other professions. And you got what I said completely backwards.
As it is now, crafter loot drops where lvl 50 adventurers can go, but the stuff is soulbound. That means they cannot share it with pure crafters or sell it on the exchange. In my experience, the gear goes to high level adventurers who are low-level crafters and they may never grind their crafters high enough to use the gear. It's a waste to make these things soulbound.
And btw, my lvl 50 Tai
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Then appearantly I know mor eabout playing a Cleric than I do about crafting in cloth, wood, gems or metal. Did you ever sell anything but bags? I mean, before you hit the 50s.
What you describe is even worse than having sellable crafting gear drop in adventuring locations. I wouldn't even mind that so much if it wasn't so completely inside out compared to the other way around. Yes, crafters can craft items adventurers could use. So crafting drops from fighting isn't so outside the order, because it works bo
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Civic diplomacy was the pure-diplomacy mechanism to ge
If a tree falls in the forest... (Score:2)
...and there is no one to hear it, does it make a noise?
this is interesting (Score:2)
I thought that Vanguard had gone the way of Tabula Rasa, but I guess I was mistaken. Is there anyone in the player base on slashdot? And if so, maybe you could explain how the game has progressed since the (reportedly) abysmal start it had.
One of the playerbase (Score:2)
Nice that someone is interested.
I took about 9 months off the game because of all the bugs at launch and the lack of end-game content, but was pretty surprised and impressed when I came back about 4 months ago.
The game is still visually stunning -- one of the best looking MMOs I've played. It's also is one of the largest, in terms of game landmass. The multiple paths you can take -- anyone can be an adventurer, crafter, diplomat and harvester -- can offer a variety of different challenges depending on your
Vanguard is still running? (Score:1)
Ha! Didn't even know the game was still up and running. Good for them. But yeah I was certainly one who jumped in and attempted to play. I got fed up with the ridiculous lag as well as the system requirements to play it at the time. Since then I've got a better rig. Unfortunately Blizzard just keeps my addicted arse coming back to WoW.
Think there are plenty of us out there that would love for someone to come out with an MMO that makes us feel what we felt with WoW 4 years ago. Since then nothing has
If only this were about the *real* Vanguard (Score:1, Offtopic)