we were taken aback by the scale of the world and the reversal of gameplay mechanics that made exploration and travel more important aspects than quick action.
Artistically the style is supposed to resemble an oil painting. This influence is most noticeable in the distant landscapes like mountain ranges. The way some of the textures and colors blend does have some resemblance to more classic art mediums.
The issue isn't the wanting to go there but the actual getting there. The world is large. Very, very large. The time saving travel techniques found in games like WoW aren't going to be a part of the Vanguard experience by design.
A lot of effort is being put into making sure players will be able to distinguish their characters, and their character possessions, from others.
One of the interesting things about Vanguard, one that's pretty controversial and one we're still not too sure about, is the lack of instances. They didn't want to break people out of the MMO experience at any point so players might end up sitting in some of the dreaded spawn camping lines that have been much maligned over the years.
This is something that Sigil has taken into consideration as well and they've come up with a system they're hoping might solve some of the bottleneck. In certain areas, spawns will be tied to quests. This means a group with a chain quest might enter into an area and have a group of enemies pop up to kill them. More importantly, the same thing will happen for the larger named boss characters that usually have the best item drops. These enemies will be tied to the group so other players in the area won't be able to steal the kills. Others will be able to help out by healing, but won't actually be able to damage whatever main enemy it is. This should help with the bottleneck as once the creature is dead, the group that killed him won't get the spawn anymore so they'll have to move on leaving the next group in line to have a shot at the boss.
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/vanguard-saga-of-heroes/738526p1.html
There's no instancing, teleportation is very rare, and travel between areas is rather difficult and slow. The majority of player travel will be done on a variety of land-based or flying mounts or by ship.
The game will also bring back something most people thought was dead -- spawn camping. Players who entered the MMO scene post-World of Warcraft may not be familiar with the concept, but the term refers to rare monsters that only spawn at certain times that may be necessary for a variety of quests. As a result, groups of players cluster around such creatures' spawn points, often waiting for hours for the creature to appear, each hoping to be the first to tag the creature and get whatever it is that drops. The team's rationale behind it is that they don't want to lose the social interactions that come from groups attempting to work out access to rare resources. They also believe that the problem with rare spawns isn't their existence, but that parties often have nothing else to do while they're waiting. Vanguard's three-track experience system is supposed to give players something fun to work on while playing solo or waiting for a spawn to arrive.
"Diplomacy is one of our youngest systems," Williams said. I worked my way through Nalzen's first tutorial and while it was a bit confusing, what I eventually figured out is that diplomacy is a way of affecting the world and completing quests by basically playing a collectable card game. Every diplomat has a series of "cards" that represent a variety of conversational gambits. "Snippet of Wisdom," for example, is a "Reason" card, while "Aggressive Statement" generates "Demand" when players enter into a conversation (called a "parley"), a table appears on screen consisting of a player's point totals, four meters representing various conversational "power levels" and a "conversational flow meter" set at zero. The basic game consists of using various cards to fill up these power meters and pull the flow meter toward the player's side of the table. Each round that the meter is on their side, that player loses a point and sees another line of conversational dialogue. First one to get to zero wins the conversation and finishes another chapter in a story that can range from simple quests to bring a woman's husband home from a bar, to a continent-wide tale of betrayal and murder.
"Once upon a time, cities were just the places you sold loot, bought new armor and left as quickly as possible," Williams said. "For the diplomat, though, our cities are dungeons." Player characters will have three separate experience and skill point totals, so a hardcore diplomat with 350 out of 500 total skill points might only be a fifth-level sorcerer and a third-level crafter. Characters will also have three separate paper-doll systems for clothing and items that they'll automatically don when using various skills. That means that diplomats don't have to waste time in the wilderness changing into battle gear. There's a completely separate itemization tree for each gameplay track and a whole series of adjustments that need to be made when dealing with city denizens.
Without presence of a specific level, certain characters will not talk to the player, therefore one of the diplomat's major gameplay dynamics will be the acquisition of new and better diplomatic clothing along with more powerful conversational gambits (the cards) to use in those high-level power meetings.
If, for example, a player wants to parley with a local kobold chieftain for an "embassy mission," he may demand that the player wear the signet ring of a rival Orc warlord before he'll talk to you. The Orc warlord probably won't want to give that up, so it'll require the diplomat to call in friends with sharp swords.
Diplomats will also get involved with something called "city politics." City politics are a series of invisible levers that diplomats can push via conversations with influential characters around the city. Depending on how they choose to interact with them, these levers can shift the balance of power for various political parties and cities, causing enormous ripples that have significant effects on the real world. At the simplest level, diplomats can push levers that give citywide bonuses to any adventurers or crafters within city limits.
At higher levels city politics get even more elaborate. A dwarven city under threat of kobold attack, for example, can have its morale raised or lowered by diplomats. Raise it high enough and the city begins to feel hope again and work on repairing its defenses, generating a bonus for crafters and triggering crafting quests that are only available when morale is high. Conversely, they may elect to push city morale down. When it gets low enough, it'll trigger an attack by nearby kobolds. That's not so good for the dwarves but should be a bonanza for adventurers who will have access to quests and loot that's otherwise unavailable. There's even a PvP element to city politics as teams of diplomats compete with each other to pus
"Social players always had an opportunity to be social, but they never had any sort of ownership or influence," Williams concludes. "The people chatting with each other were never as important as adventurers or crafters. We aim to change that."
http://www.vanguardsoh.com/index.php
Misconception Numero Uno, and possibly the single biggest communications nightmare facing Sigil, is the entirely understandable belief that Vanguard is a hardcore MMORPG, designed for ultra-hardcore MMORPG players - the kind of people who turn up their noses at World of Warcraft for being "too casual", and who are colloquially known as "bottle-pissers" due to an often committed, yet rarely confessed, act of desperation during extremely long MMOG raiding sessions. Hey, it's a lifestyle choice, and if you're happy with that, then good luck to you - at least you're not doing anything genuinely odious, like buying Jimmy Carr DVDs. However tolerant we may pretend to be of the bottle-pissing masses, however, the fact is that if Vanguard was really designed to appeal to that market, the game would crash and burn instantly - there simply aren't enough truly hardcore MMOG fans out there to support an ambitious project like this, after all.
Each of the races looks very distinct, so you should see far fewer "clones" in Vanguard than you see in other games - but more importantly, Sigil has opted to provide an astonishingly powerful set of tools to players for character creation. Every element of your character's features can be modified, ranging from height and body mass to tiny details like how close-set the eyes are and how large the hands are in proportion to the rest of the body. The final results can, admittedly, look very bizarre - but with a little tweaking you can make a huge range of attractive, or at least interesting, characters, and the chances of running into a doppelganger are incredibly slim.
Each of the 17 playable races can choose from a number of character classes - there are 15 in total in the game at present (more will be added after launch, we're assured), but no one race can access all 15 classes, so choosing the right race and class combination is vital (thankfully, the screen where you roll your character is extremely simple and intuitive when it comes to these options - click on a character class, and the races which can play that class are highlighted; click on a race, and the classes it can play are highlighted). These classes range from straightforward "ugh me hit things" guys like the Warrior, through to much more interesting and (somewhat) original classes like the Psionist and the Blood Mage.
Now, at this point you're probably thinking the same thing we were - that having 17 races and 15 classes sounds bloody complicated, and immediately off-putting for the average player. However, Sigil has cunningly decided to actually break down all its character classes into four broad categories - Defensive Fighters, Offensive Fighters, Arcane Casters and Healers. This makes finding the type of character you want to play much easier, and to the developers' credit, each class within the "class grouping" plays very differently. Although I play a Paladin of some description in almost everything (get your booing, hissing and calls for nerfing in now, WoW types!), it's hard not to be attracted by the Blood Mage, who basically forms blood pacts with both those he is healing and those he is dealing damage to, and the Necromancer, who can animate corpses to fight for him. Best of all, each of these classes plays uniquely from the outset - Sigil recognises that all too many games start out casting classes that should be interesting, in theory, by making them stab things with daggers for five to ten levels, so they've ensured that a core skill that demonstrates the unique nature of the class is available to players from the outset.
there are dozens of animals that can be used as mounts in the game, another ambitious move on the part of the developers, and mounted combat is on the roadmap post-release, we're assured
Vanguard's list of "headline" features doesn't stop there. You can buy property in the game, build a house on it and furnish it - and as a result, crafting is an enormous part of the game, with the team boasting that there will be 40,000 items to craft, ranging from the usual armour and weapons to things like furniture for houses. However, the crafting system seems to be in a state of flux at present; an earlier system which was very involved and quite unlike anything in any previous MMOG has been toned down seriously, which has some of the long-term beta testers in open revolt. Whether this toning down is a step that makes things more accessible to the average player, or a genuine dumbing down of a previously interesting system, is something that won't really be clear until the dust settles on the whole issue - for now, though, the prospect of a more dynamic and player-driven economy where crafting is a genuine core talent and a fun aspect of the game, rather than just being a sideshow attraction as it is in WoW and most other MMOGs, is a promising one.
Properties can also be turned into businesses, and it's possible to create a shop, set opening hours and so on, and essentially become a trader in the game - another different way to play which Vanguard hopes to offer to players for whom the quest 'n grind approach has grown weary. Like houses, boats, too, can be crafted and purchased - ranging from little one-man skiffs up to enormous Guild-owned vessels. The immediate question on everyone's lips when they see those ships is whether they'll get to play at being pirates; yes, Sigil assures us, naval combat and boarding of other ships will happen, but not until after the launch of the game.
Sigil seems to be down on the idea of allowing extensive user modding of Vanguard, but the team is keen to offer a solid UI that doesn't need modding instead - so, for example, you get an extremely useful panel by default which shows exactly which monsters are currently attacking your team, how powerful they are and which player they're currently targeting, all at a glance. Anyone who has ever played through a tough dungeon or a raid will immediately appreciate how useful that is.
Or the appearance of a number of dots beneath each monster you see, which provides another layer of information on top of the traditional "con" colour of the monster's name (for the uninitiated, monsters in MMOGs have different coloured names depending on what level they are relative to you - in general grey means they're way below your level, green and yellow are around your level or slightly above, red is significantly above and purple means RUN RUN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD RUN). The dots indicate how powerful a monster is for its level - anything above three dots is designed to be taken on by a group, and six dots means you shouldn't try it without a raid party.
Other ideas also stand out as feeling as though they come from really great mods, rather than being the kind of feature an MMOG development team would add from scratch. In combat, for example, there are certain chain attacks which you can execute by following up another team member's attack with one of your own; conversely, there are some attacks and spells which directly nullify attacks or spells used by your enemies. In both cases, timing is crucial - and rather than forcing you to work out what to do by trial and error, Vanguard's user interface actually pops up a button when a chain attack is available to you, which you can use to execute the correct attack automatically. Naturally, there's a balance to be struck - click this button every time it appears and you'll end up screwing up because you're not paying attention to other aspects of combat, or are using up all your mana points, or whatever - but it's certainly more fun than the closest equivalent system I can think of in an MMOG, Final Fantasy XI's incredibly arcane and labyrinthine combat skill chaining system.
Take the "corpse run", a staple of EverQuest gameplay which saw freshly resurrected players being forced to run across hostile areas "naked" to recover their equipment from their now-deceased body; while Vanguard initially incorporated this aspect, it now offers players the option, when they die, of paying some gold, taking an XP penalty or, in some cases, doing a short corpse run. The choice of how to pay for your death is the most user-friendly we've seen in any game yet - certainly not the motif of a game designed only for bottle-pissers.
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/vanguard-saga-of-heroes/609555p1.html
"We wanted to go with a '1001 Arabian Nights' theme." Karlsson said about building Qalia. "It's pan-Persian, pseudo-Arab, a mix of Babylonian, Phoenician, and Egyptian influences in an attempt to pay homage to the history and mythos of that fantasy world while still providing a solid enough anchor that people could identify with it. We've taken great care to not have any particular features which stand out substantially as one culture or another, but rather this hodge-podge blend with a layer of fantasy over the top."
If, for example, players have outgrown their starting village and the surrounding countryside, they may start out on a quest to reach the capital city of the Empire of Aghram, and not get there for some time. That's because the journey itself is the content, not the eventual destination. Things will come up, players will get distracted by world events, and bits of ancient lore may be discovered that will lead the players on a hunt for the Nusibe Necropolis. Indeed, by the time they reach the city, they may find that they no longer wish to stop there because their character progression has changed their goals.
While traditional crafting will be viable ways to play the game, Vanguardmay be the first MMO to have "explorer" as a realistic job title.
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/vanguard-saga-of-heroes/515974p1.html
Here the designers felt that "dumbing down" massively multiplayer games wasn't the solution. Creating instanced dungeons may give the games more of a single-player feel, but in the process games lose the magic and spontaneity that makes multiplayer special. Similarly, allowing players to teleport all over the map is convenient for adventuring with friends, but in the process gamers lose the whole feel of a "quest," or of adventuring into the unknown. The Vanguard team doesn't want to lose the special experiences that only massively multiplayer games can offer, but they're still aware of the problems from those original games.
Getting there is a game in and of itself. Woodworkers and shipwrights can help build a massive ship, provided that they can get ropes and cloth and tools and all the other materials from an army of fellow players. Once the ship is built, a whole guild can travel together on the high seas - discovering new islands and fighting off sea creatures all along the way. The voyage won't be a hassle: it'll be part of the game.
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