And if so…is it getting any better yet?
I LOL’d.
Awesome.
Damn those are the best looking clouds I’ve seen in a game
Had I time and computer enough to handle it, I think I might give Vanguard a spin. I still like the idea of that kind of huge fantasy world out there waiting to be wandered in. But, I am also unburdened by memories of EQ and Brad and the Vision ™.
Anyway, it’ll probably never happen. If I have a better PC some day, and the game is on a budgie rack, and its servers are still up, I might check it out…
What was the Vision ™? (or dare I ask?)
Aspects of EQ’s design that disgruntled the players, I gather. Others could describe it in much more detail as I never played EQ.
“The beatings will continue till morale improves.”
The Vision was all of the grand ideals Brad had about how EQ gameplay ought to work, and all of the attendant nerfing and restrictions that came about when those pesky players wouldn’t stop Playing The Game Wrong or requested non-Vision features.
The usual examples of it were things like forced downtime after battles, meditation for mana regen consisting of being forced to stare at a spellbook, very narrow roles for classes and the Holy Triumvirate of tank/cleric/enc, the anti-soloing and forced grouping stance, etc…
Sounds like a real blast, I can’t fathom why it isn’t doing better.
they wanted leveling to be slow, which never was going to fly. They should have done away with leveling if they wanted protracted development and come up with something else.
Guild Wars tried that somewhat and every game gets to that dreaded point eventually. It’s called end game content. It’s pretty telling that Guild Wars 2 may have an infinite number of levels. That doesn’t mean that levels will be slow just that people like gaining levels.
I remember reading something about Asheron’s Call to that effect. Even if the outcome in total bonuses is exactly the same, people generally prefer having more levels rather than less levels. At some point though, I think really high max levels can be intimidating to new players. That’s why you create sub-leveling systems.
Planetside was pretty much level-less from the beginning, and it did ok. If only its engagements were more entertaining …
I guess the lesson learned (well, from my viewq) from that is that XP or no, levels or no, if you don’t have compelling long-term (can’t really call it end-game in Planetside) content, you won’t keep the subscriptions. Seems like hardly the revelation.
Wasn’t most of the staff laid off? Where Brad McQuaid didn’t have the peppers to show up on the “firing you all in the parking lot” day?
Yes but the game went under the “wings” of SOE (EQ2 guys) and was supposed to be revamped to cater for more people.
I haven’t heard anything about it since though (never played it).
If it wasn’t for bugs, slow servers and a 17 gigabyte client installation,
the game wouldn’t be so bad. Many nice ideas. But Sony fail at making
games accessible. WoW’s dinky graphics, which I hate, at least play nicely
on any sort of hardware. You shouldn’t require hardware upgrades when you
make a niche game.
The entire staff was let go and the company was dissolved, I believe, and then SOE hired some of them to keep working on the game over at SOE.
Theoretically, their niche was the hardcore gamer who is most likely to have a constantly updated gaming system, so for all of the bad decisions that went into Vanguard, I don’t think that was one of them. But it was so poorly implemented that it ran like shit even on the highest end of systems, and THAT is a problem.
Presumably it has gotten better since then, but I’ll never know for sure.
Funniest part is that Vanguard current and former subscribers were offered EQ2 with all expansions for free and free play till September.
