Well it makes sense to try to retain the subscribers, and if shifting them to EQ2 is the way to do it, good move by SOE. Makes you wonder if they bought Vanguard just to get at the subscriber base, though. I don’t think it’s a game you want to build up by taking the subscribers and shifting them to other games.
EDIT: RepoMan won this thread. Awesome screenshot. ;)
Since nobody else has mentioned this, thought I’d throw in the fact that recently (or soon, not exactly sure on the timing) Vanguard is going to merge their servers. After the merge they’ll have 2 PvE and 1 PvP US servers, and 1 PvE Euro server. That speaks volumes about where the game is going.
In addition, one of the big parts of Brad’s “vision” was an aversion to instancing. Remember the days when you sat around waiting with 10 other people for a boss mob to spawn so you could be the one to tag him first? Vanguard is all about that.
Not to mention that when the game launched they had horrible bugs relating to grouping - you’d join a group and not be able to see or talk to your groupmates, crossing into a different chunk (subzone, I think each chunk could be on a different server) caused you to drop your group without being able to rejoin, joining groups caused people to crash, etc. I never played past the beta, but the launch was, shall we say, messy.
My most memorable experience with Vanguard was at level 3, when I had to sit around in the newbie area waiting for a certain type of spider to spawn, so I could kill 10 of them. Of course, only perhaps 12 of them spawned, all at once, and there were 5 or 6 people each trying to kill them (and nobody would group, natch!). It was then I realized this was not the game for me.
Well I played to level 30ish and never once did I feel the need to camp a spawn. It’s a non issue if there are plenty of other quests in the area for you to complete when that target mob isn’t up. Now if you’re really anal about completing every quest, I suppose it could be a problem.
One of the cool things about VG was that the dungeons were enormous. The scope of it is hard to describe because you haven’t seen anything this large that appears to be a continuous zone in any other MMOG. Some of the dungeons were so big that they even had safe points in the middle for a group to camp out and continue the session later. 99% of the groups I observed in VG were always moving and not camping a spawn which is very different from EQ1.
Also the game wasn’t any more grindy than WoW. So I don’t think VG failed because of Brads “Vision” from EQ1. Bugs and an inefficient 3D engine were probably the biggest contributers to it’s failure. Also content was hit and miss. Some of the starting zones had lots while others had barely any at launch. The starting cities while architecturally impressive also felt lifeless. The NPCs populating them needed a lot of work.
I dunno, among my WoW and old EQ friends, it was largely the perception of Vanguard as a hardcore, old-school-EQ game that killed a lot of their interest in it before things like bugs and system requirements were even known. Having tasted WoW, they just didn’t want to go back to that style of game.
I agree that SOE has a lot of clunkers in its lineup, and that SWG stands out as a monumental disaster, but I think they did a good job whipping EQ2 into shape post-launch. Yes, we probably have WoW to thank for putting the competitive spurs to SOE’s behind, but give Sony credit, they put in the effort with EQ2.
Yes, Vanguard had a perception problem, and that was due to the early PR on the game, most notably from interviews with McQuaid and Butler. It was clear that they did want a slow-leveling game, corpse runs, XP loss for deaths, long travel times, etc. They may have compromised that “vision” due to pressure from Microsoft and then Sony to make the game into a breezier experience, but the perception had already been shaped that Vanguard was old-school EQ.
Then you had the old-school EQ fanboys who comprised the core market for the game and shouted down other interested gamers on the message boards who asked for that breezier experience.
Nothing about the game seemed very inviting.
I played in the BETA for a bit and mostly screwed aroung with the crafting, which was sorta interesting. Outside of that, the things I found interesting were
I have two level 18 VG characters. I am a Station Access subscriber and I haven’t logged in for at least a month.
The game as I left it is not at all the “hardcore” diku that all the early hype suggested. It became quickly evident that a huge empty world sucks. There were very few interesting sights in that huge world. Solo exp was painfully slow and - as has been noted - the mechanics of grouping were broken. Then exp was boosted. Then quest exp was boosted again.
Vanguard had/has two things going for it: fun classes and really cool dungeons IF you can find a group and have 4-5 hours to dungeon crawl.
Fixed!
I really enjoyed Vanguard for the month or six weeks that I played. It had a lot going for it, but a lot going against it too. Kind of a shame to see it sink so quickly.
I much preferred SWG to EQ2. A billion times more. EQ2 was tired and worthless. At least SWG carved new ground, even if it made a canyon full of mistakes on the way.
Tired and worthless sells (see WoW). EQ2 in it’s current state would probably have 10 million subscriptions if it wasn’t for the hardware requirements and it’s image.
The SWG to which you are referring no longer exists. If it did, I might still be playing it. :(
Everyone I knew who played Star Wars Galaxies in its first iteration was a dancer or a fruit seller or something. Which just seemed wrong to me. I couldn’t see paying ongoing subscription money to be a moisture farmer (of course, going too far in the other direction is dumb too, what with the jedi recipie).
/agree - I might be as well.
You’re utterly delusional. It’s lucky it’s not a Vanguard-like disaster. The developers deserve a lot of credit for rallying post-release to save it from that fate.
WoW is far from tired and worthless - it may be very derivative, but it does a lot of things better (arguably, the most important things) than any prior MMO. It’s not exponentially more successful than every prior western MMO by accident, or because the franchise had more value than those of other MMOs, like Star Wars, D&D, Tolkien, Ultima, etc.
Don’t want to devolve into yet another WoW vs EQ debate but have you played EQ2 recently? Feature for feature it is as good as WoW in almost every way. Leave aside matters of taste like artwork and you have two very competitive products.
WoW is like the Wii of PC Games. It’s tapped into a market who didn’t even know what a MMO or RPG stands for before WoW. Can you be specific about what it does better? It’s very accessible (like the Wii), I’ll give you that.
Personally I don’t think either game is worth subscribing but I have spent an equal amount of time playing (the latest expansion of) both and I just don’t find WoW to be superior.
Actually, all but one of those is not primarily a gaming franchise. In raw value, WoW might not have been worth more, but within the gaming market it’s arguable that WoW did have more value. This is especially true since Blizzard owned its IP. It didn’t have to go to a 3rd party to ok art and design decisions. WoW was also able to capitalize on the increased capacity of PC hardware that Ultima, the only other gaming franchise, couldn’t. Ultima had to be bleeding edge tech because what it was doing wasn’t necessarily possible on 5 yr old PCs at the time.
WoW did a lot of things right. First and foremost its presentation is unbelievably good. The consistent quality of its art direction is still pretty much unsurpassed by most MMOs. It capitalized on fantasy archetypes, but without making them bland. It made sure as the player progressed to each new area, the game felt fresh and new. It’s designed for small session play (both in time and group size), but with obvious long term goals. Even its pop culture references connect the player to the game more. You may not know Warcraft lore or care, but you get the Chasing Amy joke in Ungoro[sic?]. People already mentioned the non-idealized female models that appeal to women (dwarves,gnomes,undead,orcs,trolls). Even Blizzard’s history of making competitive multiplayer games played a role. I know people who only played Counterstike/Starcraft/Warcraft that took up WoW as their first MMO because of Blizzard’s track record there.
I didn’t mean “value” in that sense - I meant that people the World of WarCraft setting wasn’t some magical “lure” that could be highlighted to discount its phenomenal commercial success. Franchises like Star Wars, D&D and Tolkien, etc. were far more likely to lure non-gamers into to sample an MMO in those settings than World of WarCraft was. Hell, even among just gaming franchises, the Sims was a far bigger gaming franchise than WarCraft was prior to WoW, and yet that larger consumer base didn’t translate into a comparable success for Sims Online.
Agree with what you said about the appeal of WoW though. You can’t overstate it’s solo-friendliness, quest-based gameplay – that’s easily the biggest reason it was a much bigger success than EQ2 or any other prior MMO, because nobody had offered those features so well, which were crucial if you wanted to expand beyond the diehard. Similarly, looking great on even average PCs, and being runable on virtually every box out there, allowed it to appeal more broadly.
EverQuest 2, at least when initially released, was a tired retread that imposed grind-based leveling, camping, was incredibly solo-unfriendly (it actually had a mechanice that made it LESS likely you could find a group, since the entire group suffered penalties if they allowed a weak player into the group who died frequently), the areas looked artificial and uninteresting compared to WoW’s and the game ran like shit on even high-end computers. Accessible? Compare EQ2’s crafting system to WoW’s. Compare the rote “kill 20 beetle” quests dished out by multiple NPCs in EQ2 to WoW’s more engaging quests. Frankly, I think EQ2 was a step backwards from older games like Dark Age of Camelot, and certainly wasn’t anywhere near as polished as the then current breed, WoW and City of Heroes.
But I don’t want to turn this into a WoW vs EQ2 thread either – I’m sure you could dole out counterpoints indicating why you prefer EQ2 as well – but fortunately we don’t have to, because regardless of our personal opinions, the market has already conclusively determined that they are NOT very commercially competitive products, which is why I disagreed with your suggestion that EQ2 could have 10 million subscribers.
The reality is that these products were released at almost the exact same time - neither had an inherent competitive advantage (at least in North America), and yet WoW utterly blew EQ2 out of the water, commercially. Gamers loved WoW and stuck with it, and told their friends to buy it, because it was pretty damn special compared to the grindy, hardcore-only, old guard MMOs. And it still is - Blizzard hit the ball out of the park with WoW, and deserves all the success it has earned as a result.
Which is obviously not to say that a lot of people might find EQ2 more to their liking than WoW. Hell, I like Temple of Elemental Evil better than either of those games, but I’m not under any delusions that it would have sold 10 million copies if not for its image and hardware requirements. WoW clearly has far broader appeal than games we both personally prefer to it, heh.