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[Column] Vanguard: Saga of Heroes: Three Things Developers Can Learn from Vanguard
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
A few columns ago, I offered an analysis of Vanguard after its sunsetting by Sony Online Entertainment. I presented my case that the game could be considered a success in its presentation of an amazing open world, three “spheres” of gameplay, and a plethora of races and classes. I also touched upon how Vanguard’s bug-ridden launch, lack of features to justify its long-standing subscription, and inconsistent leadership led to its inevitable demise.
Read more of Som Pourfarzaneh's Three Things Developers Can Learn from Vanguard.
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Comments
In my opinion the only thing that wasn't wrong with this game was the class design.
The huge world came at the cost of chunks, which just weren't worth it. Glitching out every time you touch a chunk is worse then zoning. A few dungeons were well done but were horribly buggy and none of them really compared to EQ classic dungeons.
What developers can really take from Vanguard is that the old school feel still has a massive audience but they aren't going to throw their standards out the window for it. And no game depicts low gaming standards better then VG.
Honestly, the biggest thing would have been to have a bloody working client. The game launched in essentially an alpha state, with absolutely horrid performance, constant crashing, and so much that flat out did not work.
If they had managed to have a reasonably polished game at launch, it would have been far, far better. But its launch and 6ish years of stagnation really didn't put it in a good position for the F2P revamp, especially given its already niche target audience.
Here are my 3.
1. Don't release a game that's a broken buggy mess.
2. Don't release an MMO that can barely be played on top end PC's. I can't believe how poorly optimized it was, even up to the day it was shuttered it still played like poop on my PC that absolutely dwarfs the recommended specs.
3. Never over-promise and under-deliver - it sets expectations too high and then the fall is quite painful.
I remember hearing that the original development studio went bankrupt and then SoE took over and just rushed to release. This game really wasn't even in a closed beta state at release.
This game had massive potential but no one ever capitalized on it. I played this game early on and it was a massive game but lacked polish. I went out and purchased a new computer right before playing Vanguard and on a new machine with a high end graphics card I was averaging 15 fps.
The other major mistake was that they released the game right after The Burning Crusade came out which they should have never done. If they waited like a year to a year and a half, polished up the game and released around spring of 2008 they may have had a shot. I know a lot of people left WoW for warhammer and AoC only to return because they weren't satisfied.
Not exactly. The story is a bit more complex.
Supposedly, after years of faking milestones at Microsoft and not creating proper development tools to allow folks to create content efficiently, Microsoft got fed up with how long it was taking and kicked them to the curb. SOE was generous enough to pick them up and continue funding development, lending some of their own staff to support.
Well, eventually Microsoft came calling for the money they'd given Sigil and SOE wasn't about to front that kind of money, so they had to rush the game out the door to generate revenue to cover costs. The money at Sigil was totally gone, so McQuaid fired everyone in the parking lot (IIRC the day the game launched). What players got was not what was promised, it was a barely functional mess due to how far behind schedule they were.
With regards to who was in charge, who should communicate with the fan base, who knew when updates were coming etc, the buck stops with Smed. He's the man in charge and if he did his job then someone would have been put in charge of all of that stuff.
You can point fingers, speculate and debate all of those things but at the end of the day, if the guy running the show doesn't know what's going on he ain't doing his job.
I loved this game for it's vision, ambition, and scope. I loved it's world, it's dungeons, it's over arching philosophy of play. A perfect working optimised version of what this game was would be my ideal thing to play.
I hated it for the way it was mishandled from start to end. It was stillborn and left to rot, even as the midwife said she was there to save it.
The death of VG put the industry back in terms of design at least a decade. For that we all should mourn it's loss.
I liked Vanguard a lot. I started playing long after it released, so my impression was it had few bugs. Put on an SSD drive, chunking was an eyeblink. Changing from one chunk to another literally was less than 1/2 second in most cases.
So what I liked was:
- huge open world with no instances. Even housing was not instanced, it was in the real world.
- complex crafting including boat and house building
- vast amount of content. For example, there were multiple dungeons at every level. Several, usually, so you could play an alt to max and not repeat any content. Literally dozens and dozens of dungeons, some very large, and all non-instanced. Large cities on multiple continents. Lots of smaller towns with crafting tables, etc.
- diplomacy game, where you leveled diplomacy, and diplomacy clothing and items, independently of crafting or fighting.
- good mounts, including flying mounts.
- lots of classes and races. And this was when classes had separate skill lines. For example, one of the 4 healer types, the Shaman, could specialize in three different skill lines, which gave three different pets.
- the best pet class ever: the Necromancer. After you kill the enemy, you rip out his innards and give to the necro pet to wear as armor. How cool is that? And just the pet command bar alone was way more than 5 buttons.
Since I build my own computers, and put VG on a fast SSD drive, it ran extremely well, with almost no hitching at all. It had very few bugs, I leveled to max and almost never crashed or suffered a bug. It was vast. As a Shaman, I could buff, debuff, heal, and fight pretty well. Many long long boss fights .... one of my favorite games.
Moral of the story: don't jump on a new MMO right away, it will be half-baked. Give it 6 months or a year to settle first. Your experience will be vastly different.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
I'm sorry, but you are dead wrong on this. Yes, there is a niche group of players who would love this type of mmo. If the developer made an mmo with humble expectations (100k-150k subs maybe). I think it could work. That being said, it would never have a massive population. To think otherwise is naive or blinded by rose colored glasses.
I have to agree on this point. I played Vanguard a year ago and whatever bugs it had when it launched had been mostly worked out. It was a functioning MMO - I thought the combat was a little bland, but otherwise it had all the requisite parts.
But the server was dead. There was hardly anyone around outside a few people in the starting zone. if there was a huge market for this type of game, at least some of the fans would have come back. And the bad thing about an EQ1-type game is without people, you might as well play WOW or an RPG who do the solo experience much better.
When SOE acquired VG, they already had EQ2 aimed at that market ....
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
I played VG at launch , hung in there while they cleaned it out, left after maxing 4 toons and fully raid geared. Came back when they added new content and did those raids.
Seamless world would be a very liberal term for the chunking process as I would describe travel the world. It could be extremely harsh.
Also falling through the world was and intermittent problem. Nevertheless the game was extremely enjoyable and rich in content scenery and graphics. remember the awe of some of the scenery of this game when graphics cards caught up to the load this game could put on them. It may have been too heavy a game for the majority of rigs out there at launch. As graphics cards improved so did game play.
The raids were tough and required thought, planning attention and skill. In the last 6 years I've yet to experience a game as challenging, sadly.
For all it's warts at the beginning it morphed into a good game. No game to date compares in crafting or diplomacy or the mini games that could be found. There's a lot that can be taken form the game, such as: who not to put in charge of development. Use development time properly. Plan properly.
This is purely subjective. Obviously, if it was so popular and superior you would see newer mmos trying to take the ideas for their own.
Not really. Publishers are just people in suits with no knowledge about games at all. That is something that has been proven over the last decade.
MMORPG's got popular when WoW came out. People can love or hate that game, but its a pure cold hard fact that WoW made the genre popular. Suddenly everyone wanted to get a slice of the cake when they saw how much money could be earned on the genre. Left and right MMORPG's popped out of the ground. All pretty much the same with not so much difference between them. Not because people wanted it that way, but because the biggest earning title in the genre does it that way.
People also tend to forget that 10 years ago gaming wasn't as booming as it is today. Even when WoW came out it was still a smaller group of gamers then you have today. 10 years ago you had to be ashamed to be a gamer, oh how it was a geek/nerd thing to do...the same people who bullied gamers are now the same people calling other noobs in Call of Duty and pretending to know stuff about games but they don't.
Publishers are now used to gather to the mainstream gamer. WoW is a mainstream friendly game (vanilla would even scare them off). Meaning the core fans of the genre have to see how they are being called a minority and things that used to be normal in MMORPG's are kept out cause its not something that pleases the mainstream gamer or is to hard for those poor souls who don't wanna infest some time and effort in learning games (hey i got a 40 hour work week, my time is limited as well but no F'ing way that i want my games to be superduper easy just so i can get the awesome stuff in a short time).
Many things are left out these day's even though a large group of people does request them.
Just because its not made anymore, doesn't mean it wasn't a good and popular thing. Player houses used to be normal but today when you read the forums you see some mainstream raid kids shouting they rather see developers spend time on making even more dungeons then player houses. People have totally forgot that a MMORPG used to provide you with a world to live in. Having a RP scene, PvP and PvE. All three were important. Providing a player house meant people felt like they had their own little place in that world. Something many of today's MMORPG players don't understand cause they never got onboard the train before WoW and the games after.
I played vg beta although it was not really playable crashing every 2 minutes. Then again on launch day and it was still largely unplayble on lowest setting, quit for a month and came back and some things were workable.. Planning to not turn while in combat, knowing that crossing most chunk-lines and zoning would crash the game, and most things just didnt work yet, even the infamous gm reply that "your character is in an unknown save state cannot be fixed" made me and some friends delete and reroll characters a few times.
Still the content that did work were good, especially dungeon areas that really brought the good feel from eq that none to this day has manged to.. But those that worked could be counted on one hand. Combat and class system was well designed and with the horrible eq2 class/combat fresh in memory, vg on that part delivered on its hype as "the real eq2" - Still today I see vg combat system as the most innovative and best in any mmorpg I have tried.. And I am pleased to see eqnext take up some of the ideas.
Still vg was in no state to be played, and hardly worth beeing in alpha and this was a month after release, so I quit. 3 years later I returned to see the game again, and although there were improvements, many of the same bugs were right in my face and annoying the hell out of me. Rubberbnanding, zoneline crashing, unfinished quests and areas, not to mention the lack of content, so after about a month I gave up and never returned.
I guess the lessons would be that mmorpgs thrive of momentum, so you must hit the ground running, financially and game wise. You cannot release a game that is not working, because that alone will take almost all momentum and goodwill away, first impressions unfortunately last. I know that vg didn't have a choice, the release was forced by the investors and depleted funds. Could vg been a success if more investments were put into it, after it became obvious the original plan was flawed? It is possible, because vg had the thing eq players were looking for, the thing that eq2 had not delivered and later became obvious that no other game did.. The potential was there, and it was not a direct contender with wow, but it was with eq2, which means... Getting sold to SoE was the final death stroke to vg, any other and there would still have been a chance.
Lesson, keep the game on schedule, be honest with the investors and youself, adjust dreams with reality. It is better to have less working features than many unfinished. If you not good at management hire someone who is. When planning a project, make sure to multiply all estimates by PI.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
Played and loved Vanguard when it first came out (up to L30 when zones were empty of mobs).
Two things I believe would have helped them:
1. Made a minimum viable product, put it in the hands of testers, and receive feedback, before spending years building levels no one would see.
2. Less complex ui gameplay and instead rely on animations. Too many icon alerts when a simple unique animation would have been better. Why pop up a huge combo graphic over the gameplay and instead make the mob take a knee...
-WL
Werewolf Online(R) - Lead Developer
The most important lesson devs can learn from VANGUARD is to stop listening to loud mouth minority who are against any change. Learn to change with time, don't be stuck in old school mentality and modernize your game according to the needs of current time players.
Vanguard community was its own worst enemy. They were stuck in 'old school' mindset and were against even the simplest ideas such as portals and taxis for quick travel. This game stood no chance since no new player would want to play such an outdated game.
"The problem is that the hardcore folks always want the same thing: 'We want exactly what you gave us before, but it has to be completely different.'
-Jesse Schell
"Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid."
-Luke McKinney
So painfully wrong. The old school feel was the only thing VG had going for it. People didn't play it because it was poorly designed, had zero standards, no testers or QA and a CEO that fled before it even launched.
The amount of people interested in old EQ emulators, Pantheon, EQ live progression servers and ArcheAge(lol) launch are proof people long for an immersive, old school MMO.
And it's hilarious people actually claim SoE "saved" Vanguard. Saved it from what, not launching? Because last time I checked it was a failed game that never recovered from a bad launch, which SoE inevitably canned themselves. Doesn't sound anywhere near saving to me. If I was drowning I sure wouldn't want SoE to find me first =P
I am sorry but death of Vanguard and lack luster performance of recent so called old school MMOS says otherwise. I am not saying there aren't 'old school' players ofcourse there are. But harsh reality is they are not enough to keep a MMO profitable. Unless ofcourse you are satisfied with a MMO made on shoe string budget just to appease 20 to 30 thousand players. Then you won't have a problem but Vanguard wasn't one of those MMOS.
"The problem is that the hardcore folks always want the same thing: 'We want exactly what you gave us before, but it has to be completely different.'
-Jesse Schell
"Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid."
-Luke McKinney
Such as? Please don't say Wildstar. That's about as far away from Vanguard as you can get. I mean I agree Vanguard had no chance of ever being the next WoW but it could have been the semi-themepark EVE. There's a sizable niche for this type of game. The lessons are that shoving your game out the door before it's ready is an incredibly stupid idea. A bad launch will probably kill you even if you can eventually fix up most of the worst issues in your game and it has some genuinely interesting and innovative ideas. Also continuous marketing is important "build it and they will come." does not work for MMOs.
I never gave this game a shot because at one time is was bugged to hell and the other it was empty. Always a shame to see an mmo go under though, especially one that has a lot of what I'm looking for in today's market.
Here's hoping there's more sandboxes and less themeparks to come.
21 year MMO veteran
PvP Raid Leader
Lover of The Witcher & CD Projekt Red
Well yes and no, it needs elaboration. The players who became the vg core and kept it up with subs, had to be catered to in order to keep the game alive. I know some and their opinions of which I find too religious.. I understand the background for the opinions, but I don't see every ease of playmechanic as bad, for me it is more about the volume and which are breaking immersion. So, yes those people who are against anything that can make the playing experience smoother, definately made vanguard not innovative after launch - and there I agree with the stuckin old school mindset label.. And that group is not big enough to drive a big mmorpg.
However there is another and much larger group of people who wants a game that is not old, but embrace the spirit the oldschool games were based on, but as a modern game. Many of these players don'teven know that iswhat they want because they did not play those oldschool games, all they know is that the games they play can't keep their attention. I beleive that a meaningful game experience is what many mmorpg players are yerning for, and the first mmorpg to deliver this will be a success. Such a game would be oldschool in the sense that it can give players a meaninful game that is not just a themepark questgrinder but involves players to make their own stories. The mechanics however can be totally new and innovative, the only rule is really they must not break immersion too much.
I am rambling, but the point was that vg tried to be this new innovative game with oldschool virtues, but it was because vg died and became stagnant that it did not evolve, which again made players leave which again made it more stagnant, until only the against anything crowd basically controlled the game.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
SOE did Vanguard no favors by leaving it on life support (and bug fixing) but SOE didnt doom the game
here's Brad's announcement of SOE publisher support, after Microsoft dumped Sigil
http://www.silkyvenom.com/pages/devtracker/index.php?go=posts&get=thread&fromsite=1&id=51141&p=1
we own Vanguard and are co-publishing the game with SOE. We are not 'just a developer' like we were when we were under Microsoft -- we now have more control over our game than probably 90%+ of all developers out there (because we already owned the Vanguard IP, and now we are buying the publishing rights to Vanguard from Microsoft).
SOE did not buyout Vanguard until 4 months AFTER launch (Vanguard launched Jan 2007)
http://www.silkyvenom.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19739
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/104908/Sony_Online_Acquires_Vanguard_Developer_Sigil.php
EQ2 fan sites
I completely agree. A lot of bitter vets around here. The behavior is similar to the way older people respond to new music or "current" music. I mean no disrespect AARP members. Just stating the obvious