Age of Conan

There’s a video of siege gameplay. It looks like something that potentially could be fun if Funcom manage to reduce lag and turn it into less of a chaotic brawl. Then we have PvE dungeon footage that very much fails to impress.

And finally, there are some very mixed first impressions by gamers:

• Altair didn’t like what he saw:
  

  Just came back from GC and I must say I pretty much expected something else. [...] Honestly I’m trying not to be too negative, but what I’ve seen is not a game needing a polish, but a game which really needs way more time.

• Shem Asar really hates the combat controls:

  Imagine playing “Tekken” and having to select a combo through a drop-down menu each and every time before you can even attempt to pull it off through the proper movement and button combinations…

• Obosi thinks AoC rocks:
  

  AoC rocks!

Oh, and boobs!! Nice, yes, but I suspect that 90% of AoC’s population will be “female” and that’s kind of gay.

Warhammer: Age of Reckoning

EA Mythic revealed some leet infoz on Elves. I’m not horribly interested in playing an Elf because I’m too insecure in my sexuality. The always entertaining Brit Paul Barnett recycles some jokes we’ve heard before (Elves are like British posh people, Dark Elves are like British posh people on drugs yadda yadda yadda).

He added a new twist to his Darf Elves characterization, implying that they were also like Americans, by noting that ”they move around in enormous war machines carrying thousands of soldiers with enormous weapons of destruction, all across the world, wherever they want, and they invade places” and “they do whatever they want, no one can stop them, they’re rich“.

Another relevant piece of information bestowed upon us by Paul Barnett is that the game designer who created the female-only Witch Elf class is a “sad individual, who lives with his mother, and has no girlfriend. As a result, every skill he gave the Witch Elf is, in his mind, the evil powers of women“.

You can download a video of the presentation here. It’s only 500mb, too.

• Guild Halls
• The Brotherhood System
• Bind on Equip
• LFG Improvements
• Rest Experience
• Item Level Requirements
• Crash Fixes & Optimizations

Guild Halls?! Who cares? Most guilds have either imploded of left the game a long time ago. Only few people ever cared about housing in Vanguard to begin with. Who needs a pointless house in some god-forsaken corner of the world, much less a guild hall? They have been wasting development ressources on THIS? Is this a joke?

The Brotherhood system allows players to share EXP as long as they’re within 5 levels from each other. A feature like this has been promised since beta but it comes at a time when it should have been very, very low on the priority list and that makes it another major head scratcher. A pointless feature and a waste of time. It’s not even as cool as EQ2’s mentoring system which allows higher level players to scale themselves down to a lower level.

Part of Vanguard’s initial “Vision” was that Bind on Equip / Bind on Pick-up mechanics  would be used in moderation. It was a bad idea. EverQuest could get away with this because the rate at which items entered the world was extremely low. With the rate at which items enter the world in VG, BOE/BOP is a neccessity but it is yet another change that makes the game even more similar to its competitors. From what I’ve heard, they made most “rare” items not just BoE but BoP, which is extremely harsh. No self-respecting 40+ character would use anything but rares, so item trade has been effectively eliminated at the high-end. Wow.

Vanguard finally gets a useful LFG system with LFM functionality and the ability to specify which content you want to do. Players have been begging for a better LFG tool since beta 2 and I find it inexcusable that it took them until 8 months after release to implement something that is a basic neccessity for a grouping-centered game.

Rest Experience… oh, man. The last thing Vanguard needs is players reaching level 50 even faster. There is virtually nothing to do at 50 except some badly designed and frustrating grind/collect shit from the generic content assemby line. I’m not sure what to make of this. Not only does it sound like yet another “me too” feature but I never saw the leveling curve in VG as much of a problem. Yes, it was slower than in EQ2 and certainly WoW but that’s not why about 4/5 subscribers have quit the game. This new feature doesn’t help anything.

The second major change to items is the introduction of item level requirements. The Equipment Expertise system was canned and items now have a fixed minumum level like in WoW, supposedly because EE was too confusing for new players. Yeah, right. Like Vanguard has “new players”. It’s a fucking shame. EE was novel and it worked. Replacing it with static level requirements simply snuffs another element of choice and uniqueness out of the game. With Vanguard’s item system being in such a pathetic shape, one wonders if they don’t have anything better to do than changing item mechanics that work perfectly well.

Crash fixes and optimizations…  a reoccuring item in many Vanguard patch notes but these supposed fixes never seemed to work. From what I’ve heard, hitching is still bad and crashes are still frequent.

There’s more stuff in the full patch notes, some minor features and tons of bug fixes and small changes but that’s it, basically. Not what I expected. Where’s the new and fixed 40+ content? Where is the raid content? Where are the neccessary changes to the frustrating crafting system and its punitive and unfun mechanics? Is there yet a point to Diplomacy? Why didn’t they adress the most glaring character balancing issues? This “game update” certainly isn’t the step forward that Vanguard needs. Questionable changes, worthless features, a few fixes and maybe one or two genuine improvements? Screw it.

At least they finally fixed some of the issues with the rogue class that have been around since beta. Rogues still can’t sneak past mobs even one level higher than them but at least AoE damage, racial abilities and damage shields don’t break Stalk anymore. A very slight damage increase of rogue abilities across the board and some tinkering with cooldown timers. A new ability and a stun that actually is worth using now. Blackjack is now a lull instead of a short mez.

That’s all nice and good but it doesn’t address the problem of rogues being one of the three or so classes that can’t solo worth a damn, having to run screaming like little girls from mobs that virtually all other classes can chain-solo without risk. And fixing the rogue’s broken Vital Strike duration from 12 seconds to 4 seconds is a huge nerf to the class’s group DPS and it’s not like rogues had much to write home about when it comes to usefulness in groups.

If I hadn’t cancelled my subscription weeks ago, I would have done it now. I don’t see the devs addressing any of the issues that made people quit in droves.

The experience was rather anti-climactic - my Drake battlecruiser didn’t even stand a fighting chance. So lesson one here is that EVE isn’t about fairness, it’s about might makes right. Lesson two is that if you’re acting like a retard, you die. From hindsight, I have been acting pretty retarded. I did check the map for recent combat activity but I disregarded clear warning signs, like that lonely red-blinking guy at the jump gate acting as a lookout. Or the containers labeled with clear warnings that there is pirate activity in the region. I guess I was just overly confident because I had entered that particular system several times without any trouble. Lesson three is: don’t be too confident, retard.

Losing 100 million ISK (after insurance pay-out) was a pretty big deal for me. Level 3 missions aren’t all that lucrative and the ship I lost represented a significant time investment. Yet, I found the experience less infuriating than being steamrolled by an Albion zerg every time I poked my nose out of the castle gates in DAoC. There is something inherently attractive about a game in which getting killed has consequences, unlike PvP in DAoC or WoW. This might not come as much of a surprise to seasoned PvPers but I’ve been trodding the Path of the Carebear for most of my MMO life. This is all new to me and  I like it.

I’ve also been seeing a few visually more impressive missions than the usual assortment of ship and generic objects in deadspace pockets. Huge wrecks, enormous space stations, dust clouds… I wish there was more content like this. Running missions is dreafully boring. There are too few of them and that makes it every bit as repetitive as grinding always the same mobs in conventional MMORPGs. This isn’t helped by the fact that the missions aren’t particularly challenging.

Nothing I’ve encountered in level 3 missions so far can crack my Drake’s shield tank, and I usually aggro the whole stage and trigger als many waves as early as possible, just to have all the ship wrecks bunched up nicely for easier looting. It’s like playing in god mode, much better than running missions in an actively armor-tanked Gallente drone boat.

The Drake is also one of the most visually appealing ships in the game. It’s shiny, metallic and sleek and not as assymetrical as most other Caldari ships. I find it a bit curious that most spaceships in EVE, a game that is all about spaceships, look like crap. The Gallente Dominix looks literally like a sack of shit. Most Caldari ships look horribly deformed and Minimatar ships are essentially flying trash heaps that, admittedly, have a nice hobo charm to them. I hope that the upcoming graphics engine upgrade improves things but CCP will probably retain the basic design of all ships and some of these are simply beyond redemption.

As I’ve mentioned in my previous entry, Funcom haven’t shown jack shit so far. No content, no advanced mechanics - it is astounding how little has been revealed about a game that is so far into developement. Instead, we get treated to retarded little details like the blood being modeled to look like in the movie 300, Zack Snyder’s homo-erotic orgy of violence.

A March 25th release date means that AoC will have to go up against Warhammer. That’s not as bad as Vanguard’s release a mere days away from WoW’s first expansion but it certainly won’t help sales. Unless, of course, I’ve been reading the tea leaves entirely wrong and WAR, not AoC, will turn out to be the unpolished, half-finished turd.

On a related note: check out this AoC screenshot. It’s hideous. Kind of looks like Vanguard, doesn’t it? That reminds me… I’ve been planning to write a blurb on why Vanguard’s graphics suck but I have lost all my screenshots when I temporarily turned into a moron and decided to install Windows Vista. I can probably make due without screenshots but it’s a bummer nevertheless.

Lately, I’ve been getting progressively more worried, though. AoC is supposed to be released in October, a mere 2-3 months from now. And so far, they haven’t shown anything of relevance. A couple of cinematic trailers, some UI footage and a number of short flicks showing some guys whacking a bunch of mobs. That’s basic functionality. Who cares? Let’s see what we have not been shown yet:

• Dungeons and quests
• Mounted combat and real-time archery
• Player-built cities, including sieges and defense
• mass PvP and formation combat with AI controlled soldiers
• the innovative, multi-tiered class-system

FunCom make quite large claims for AoC, don’t they? Every day we’re getting closer to the October 30th release date, with no substantial information released on the very features that are supposed to set AoC apart from the competition, I’m getting more and more convinced that AoC is, in fact, exhibiting the horrible trio of high expectations, overambitious goals and a looming deadline. If that stuff was ready for release in October, they would have shown at least something by now.

FunCom can’t afford to push back the release date too far. Going up against Warhammer in Q1 2008 would be a bad idea, WAR would slaughter this game. On the other hand, FunCom can’t afford to release a half-fnished shell of a game, either. Not after they did it in the past with Anarchy Online and certainly not since Vanguard proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that gamers won’t tolerate it anymore.

Games Convention in Leipzig (Agust 23rd to 26th) will probably be the last opportunity for FunCom to convince the public that AoC will not end up as yet another MMO debacle.

In retrospect, I think there are a bunch of things Vanguard does better than or at least as well as other MMORPGs. It’s not enough to gloss over the fact that the game is essentially an unfinished, bug-ridden and conceptually failed abomination but there are some things I wouldn’t mind seeing in future MMORPGs. That’s not to say that there isn’t anything else that’s worth a damn in Vanguard, this list of far from exhaustive.

Character Classes

Vanguard features 15 character classes: 3 heavy fighters, 4 light fighters, 4 healers and 4 casters. It’s an archetype system, not unlike EQ2’s. All classes are designed to fulfill a core functionality. Vanguard does it rather well. The classes aren’t equal in power or usefulness, far from it, and there are plenty of class-defining abilities, but all classes can get the job done.

While there is a certain degree of overlap in mechanics and functionality (it’s hard to come up with radically different implementations of tanking), it is camouflaged well. The classes feel sufficiently different from each other. Certainly not all of them and maybe not to the extend that WoW’s classes do but it works for me.

Vanguard successfully pulls off what EQ2 never could: a functional archetype system that allows all classes to fulfill their core roles without becoming virtually indistinguishable from each other. Even after EQ2’s radical class system revamp, their classes stink. Vanguard has interesting classes that aren’t revolutionary but well implemented, bugs notwithstanding.

Targeting

In Vanguard players can have two targets, an offensive target (mobs and NPCs, usually) and a defensive target (group members, pets). What sounds like a small evolutionary step actually makes a world of a difference. It reduces a lot of UI usage tedium, especially for healers who can now keep their party alive without having to detarget  the mob and stop doing damage.

Besides being convenient, Vanguard’s dual-target system is also the enabler of classes like Disciple (heals by performing melee attacks) and Blood Mage (a life-tap based healer) and interesting combat mechanics like Rescues and Intercepts.

Equipment Expertise

EE is an interesting little game mechanic for restricting twinking. An item’s EE is expressed as a percentage value that depends on character level, item level, item type and rarity. The Übersword of Assrape +4 may have an EE of 34% for a level 20 character and 15% for a level 30 character. The combined EE of all items on a character cannot exceed 100% and there is also a cap of 20% maximum per item that can be equipped.

The degree of flexibility offered by the EE system is certainly nice, compared to the hard caps in games like WoW. Equipping one or two items that are of significantly higher level is possible, but it comes with a trade-off, as they use up a good amount of EE. The system could use a few tweaks but I like the fact that I am given a choice - within certain boundaries, of course.

Music

Todd Masten’s music is one of the high points in Vanguard. While the main theme isn’t all that great, pretty much everything else is. Vanguard’s in-game music isn’t big on instantly recognizable themes but the few themes that exist are outstanding. The ambient music is also good. It’s unobtrusive, diverse and it usually fits the mood of the zones very well. Some samples from the official website:

Aghram Theme,  Shensho Ni Theme,  Cobalt Deep.

User Interface Icon Art

Vanguard’s user interfact is bog-standard, similar to WoW’s UI. It could be a bit more customizable like EQ2’s UI, it could use better mod support and a better quest log but it’s functional as it is. What stands out are the beautifully drawn UI icons. I don’t think I’ve seen better icon artwork in any other MMORPG so far. It looks much better than the amateurish icons in EQ2 and LotRO, that look like they were ripped from an early 1990s shareware game.

Some Aspects of the Graphics

I’ll discuss Vanguard’s graphics in-depth in the near future. Visually, Vanguard is a very mixed bag, there is a stark contrast between stuff that looks stunningly beautiful and things that don’t work at all. The Human and Wood Elf areas of Kojan, for example, look amazing. Large parts of Thestra, on the other hand, look dreadfully boring. Qalia can impress with incredible long-distance views but most of the landscape looks like an acne-scarred mess due to the bad use of bump-mapping. Individual objects are often modeled in detail (compared to the low-poly models of other MMOs) but more detailed objects also mean less objects on the screen. The water looks nice but the line where water meets land looks pretty horrid. The dagger and martial arts combat animations look great, the combat animations for spears and two-handed hammers look retarded. And so on.

Mob, weapon and armor models are among the best in any MMORPG, though there could be more diversity. There are so many great pieces of artwork, it’s a shame that all is glued together by a horrendous fractal landscape that makes everything look disjointed because nothing really blends into it.

What’s definately well done are the proportions of characters, buildings and objects in relation to each other. A castle actually looks like a viable castle when it comes to size, unlike these tiny little castles in EQ2’s Antonica zone that look like they couldn’t even withstand an assault by a bunch of geriatric Orcs. The city of New Targonor is a towering bulwark of walls and fortifications. The strange geologic formations in Thestra’s southern swamp lands make players feel tiny and the Infineum Sanctuary, perched atop a mountain surrounded by steep cliffs, can be seen from miles away.

EVE Online is still the same game that I didn’t like 15 months ago. It’s still the same unimmersive spreadsheet game that is just one spaceship model away from being a text MUD. It’s a game that’s not about space combat but about activating icons to shoot at little red crosses. It’s not a game about spaceflight or genuine exploration, it’s about selecting items from a list and clicking icons. The game is missing an element of interactivitiy that is present by default in games in which one has to actually navigate his avatar through a synthetic world. In EVE, it’s all about bookmarks and items on a list. The graphical representation of the universe is mere window dressing. It is utterly irrelevant. The UI is the game, which makes it even more infuriating that the UI is so horrible.

The UI is a clunky bastard that has been amended and expanded to the the point of being almost comically bad. The amount of information you regularly want to be displayed does barely fit on a 1280×1024 screen. Commands to drones have to be issued through right-click context menus. The map interface is horrible and bloated. The interface of the recently added Loyality Point store is almost unusable. If you want detail information on equipment in the Market or the Fitting menu, you have to open an additional multi-tab info window that is filled with often irrelevant stats. The general problem is that too much information is burried too deeply within EVE’s complex UI structure.

For example, let’s say we want to find a higher quality mission agent who hands out missions of a certain level and is located in high sec space. In order to do this, you have to open the info screen of the NPC corporation (right click, pick "show info"). There you have to switch to the agents tab. In the agents tab, you are presented with an expanding list menu for the various corporation divisions. Expanding a division list menu entry produces a list of agents. 

Now, let’s say there is an agent of the desired mission and quality level (if not, you have to collapse the division menu and check a different division) and you want to find out if the agent is located in high-sec space. So you right-click on the agent name and pick "show info" from the context menu. In the agent’s info screen, you change to the "Agent Info" tab. There you open the info window for the "Location" entry by clicking on the small "i" symbol (right-click doesn’t work here). This opens the Station Information window. Change to the Location tab and click the "i" icon next to the solar system entry. That takes you to the solar system info window, which finally display the security level of the system the agent is located in.

Alternatively, you could open the "People and Places" window, change the search type to Solar System and type in name of the solar system the agent is located in. This opens search result window, where you right-click on the solar system’s name to open the info window. That saves of few clicks but is every bit as annoying.

Now, if you want to make sure that the agent is located at least two jumps away from the nearest low-sec system (since some missions send you to systems two jumps away), you click the "Show on Map" button in the solar system’s info window, which takes you to the horrible ingame map. There you have to change the options so that the solar systems are coloured according to their security level. Then you have to hover the mouse over the solar system and figure out if the system is connected to any low-sec security solar systems.

A task that should be trivially easy – finding the best mission agent in high-sec space for your standing level – becomes retardedly complicated. In terms of usability, EVE’s UI is an unmitigated mess. The same applies to general readability and the presentation of important stats and information.

The newbie experience is still pretty damn horrible. There is that boring, long-winded tutorial that leaves the newbie with more questions than it answers. There are hilariously idiotic things, like the tutorial instructing newbies to activate the option to avoid systems with recent pod killings in the autopilot setting, which leaves newbies wondering why they can’t warp anywhere once the tutorial has ended. There is no proper explanation of deadspace acceleratoion gates, which confuses newbies to no end. Star Gates don’t appear in the overview list’s default filter setting, which is plain stupid. The map interface is utterly incomprehensible to new players, and needlessly so.

Tutorial woes aside, the newbie experience would also be much less retarded if CCP did away with the concept of "Learning" skills. Learning skills are skills that lower the time it takes to train skills that actually do something. Instead of giving new players a strong sense of immediate progression (something which EVE’s skills system would be quite capable of doing), EVE essentially tells new players to train skills for a week or two that do absolutely nothing to enhance their gaming experience.

Much of the learning curve’s initial steepness doesn’t result from the game’s complexity but from CCP’s bungling incompetence at designing a newbie experience that turns free trial accounts into paid subscriptions. Once newbies have braved the initial irritations, they are confronted with a game of immense complexity that completely leaves them out in the cold. There are bits and pieces of information available, there is a New Player Guide on the EVE Online website, there are a number of short, optional tutorials but all that these things do is provide tidbits of information that still leave the newbie without a sense of the bigger picture.

If the newbie turns to the web, he is immediately swamped with information, often riddled with utterly cryptic acronyms. It’s overkill. There are plenty of tutorials and articles that tell you what to do and how to do it, but what often seems to be missing is an answer to the question of why you are supposed to do it. Again, the bigger picture. By now, I have figured out most of the basics of fitting a ship but, for example, the inner workings of the player-driven market and things like research, production, probing and exploration are still little more than obscure concepts to me.

Uniqueness is what is keeping this game alive. There is no other MMO like it. The terrible UI, the lag, the general clunkiness, the bugs, the lack of immersion, the paucity and repetitiveness of EVE’s PvE gameplay… all these things are bearable only because EVE provides something no other game can: a sense of almost total freedom. It’s the ultimate sandbox. EVE also does an exceptionally good job at giving players things to look forward to, like bigger ships, being able to fit better equipment and, ultimately, a chance to become part of an epic struggle between warring player empires. Somehow EVE sucessfully subdues this creeping "why bother?" feeling that I usually get when confronted with sandbox MMOs. 

On the surface, EVE looks like a success story. A game that started out with a tiny subscriber base and grew to more than 150k subscribers, still growing even years after its launch. I believe, though, that EVE as a business is much more fragile than it looks. The game very much encourages multiple accounts. There is so much stuff to be done. Multiboxing is the way to go and it seems that all but the most casual players run two accounts at the very least. Three accounts is extremely common and there are people running up to 6 accounts, with 4 or 5 not being uncommon at all. I’d be surprised if EVE has more than 50k individual players, which means the game does a horrible job at attracting new players. Should the game ever fall into disfavour with a large chunk of its player base, it will suffer proportionally worse than other MMOs would.

The associated quest line revolves around gaining rank with the Lucent Circle, a faction located at a harbor to the south. Ascending through the ranks takes little more than tedious faction grinding via repeatable kill quests. At every rank you get a quest that upgrades a necklace that is given to you at the very begining of the quest line, which is nice.

The real purpose behind doing the retarded faction grind is to acquire special coins that can be traded in for some pretty nifty rings, ear rings and cloaks. Once you have reached a certain rank with the Lucent Circle you gain the ability to trigger events inside the temple pyramids.

That’s when the fun starts.

The pyramids are populated with tough level 49-50 mobs that run away when low on health while regenerating quickly. Fighting your way to the main chamber isn’t a cakewalk. Once in the main chamber you can trigger an orb that despawns all mobs and teleports in a platoon of Lucent Circle troops. The problem is that the mobs in the main chamber all attack and try to destroy the orb once it was triggered. The only way to do it is to clear most of the mobs there, which is really hard because respawn is rapid.

Once the pyramid is occupied by Lucent Circle soldiers, the undead attack in several waves of two trash mobs and one boss mob. There isn’t enough time to kill one wave of mobs before the next wave starts, so you end up fighting a desperate retreating battle of attrition all the way back to the main chamber, using the Lucent Circle soldiers as cannon fodder. If you die, it’s game over because the quest is removed from the quest log when you respawn at the altar. To successfully complete the quest you have to kill the final boss mob in the last wave while making sure that all the Lucent Circle leaders survive. That means you have to kill just about fucking everything.

It’s insanely hard to beat the event. There almost no margin for error and the fact that the Lucent Circle soldiers become attackable once they go aggro on the mobs doesn’t help at all. If you happen to hit one of them by accident, they attack you and make it virtually impossible to successfully complete the event. Also, there are traps inside the pyramids, like collapsing floor segments, that make it hard to move around.

We tried to do it with two groups the other night (only one group will get the 7 coin reward) and it was still extremely difficult. It’s supposed to be single group content and you have to do these events dozens of times to get all the coins you need for the good shit. Considering that it takes the better part of a play session to complete one event, and the likelihood of failure is so high, it seems barely worth the effort. The difficulty needs to be toned down slightly, the Lucent Circle soldiers have to be made unattackable by players and the faction grind should be reduced to a bearable level. Other than that, it’s actually pretty fun.

Some screenshots:

Recently, Fallout fan-site Now Mutants Allowed managed to get their hands on an early tech demo of Black Isle’s cancelled Fallout 3 (project name “Van Buren”). It’s a glimpse at what could have been. NMA produced a short video of it:

An isometric 3D Fallout made by the guys who gave us Fallout 1 & 2. That’s what I wanted. Instead we’ll get a Fallout 3 done by Bethesda, the company that brought us Oblivion and Morrowind, two dumbed-down turds posing as CRPGs.

I don’t think Bethesda has what it takes to make a good Fallout game that is true to the spirit of its predecessors. Bethesda are the Jerry Bruckheimers of RPG game developement: all flash but little substance. Bethesda couldn’t even produce a good RPG if someone put guns to their heads. Their track record speaks for itself.

Fallout has always been about meaningful choices and consequences, an element that is almost completely absent from Morrowind and especially Oblivion. It doesn’t matter what you do and how you do it. Nothing has an impact on anything. There simply is no choice in these games. There is exactly one way to solve a quest and that’s it.

Fallout has branching conversation trees that produce different outcomes. In Oblivion, dialogue serves no other purpose than triggering lines that provide quest information. In Fallout, the choices you make during character creation and how you develop you character has an impact on how you approach the game and solve problems. In Oblivion there are no meaningful character choices, all that changes is the way you kill.

Your actions and the sides you take affect not only the enviroment but also the ending you get in Fallout. In Oblivion, nothing matters. You can close three Oblivion Gates, no one will ever take notice. You can become the Arena Champion, no one will give a fuck. You cannot choose to betray anyone, you cannot sell out the Thieves Guild to the guards, you cannot do anything that could possibly produce different outcomes. Bethesda’s games are sandboxes with bad game mechanics and a bunch of linear quests thrown in.

Another thing that doesn’t bode well for Fallout 3 is the fact that the game is going to be cross-platform, which means that gameplay will be tailored to consoles. Don’t get me wrong, I think consoles are great – for sports games, car racing games and shitty emo Japs RPGs with tons of teen angst conveyed by hour-long cutscenes. For more sophisticated games they suck.

For PC users that means that Fallout 3 will have a crappy UI and bad controls. Plus, the huge font sizes needed to make things readable on TV screens pretty much rule out complex branching conversation trees, but I guess such an “old school” feature isn’t “next-gen” enough for Bethesda anyway.

But there’s more evidence that Bethesda will rape Fallout. Listen to the FO3 game music sample on their teaser site. Yes, it’s another version of Jeremy Soule’s usual pompous and overwrought fantasy dreck. This epic-as-fuck orchestra shit just isn’t Fallout. Hey, Jeremy, it’s F-A-L-L-O-U-T, not Guild Wars, not Harry Potter, not TES V: Noobsauce. Did Bethesda think at all before contracting Jeremy Soule to churn out Generic Fantasy Soundtrack #63?

Fallout’s minimalistic soundtrack set the game’s mood. Seperated from the games, the soundtracks of Fallout 1 & 2 are pretty much unlistenable. There isn’t a lot that qualifies as “music”. There are some tunes but most of it is really just strange noises. It cannot be overstated how much of an impact the soundtrack has on the general mood and feel of the two original Fallout games. Clearly, Bethesda doesn’t understand this.

And then there is Bethesda’s big announcement that Liam Neeson will be featured as the voice of the player’s father who “will appear prominently throughout the game” in a role that “was written with Liam in mind, and provides the dramatic tone for the entire game”. Ok, so the protagonist’s father will “apear prominently throughout the game”. Gone are the day of being a loner who picks his allies and appears out of nowhere to leave his mark on the world. We now have to deal with a father figure. Woohoo.

There’s nothing wrong with Liam Neeson but does anyone actually give a shit? The role was “written with Liam in mind”? What does that even mean? His voice? His personality? A stereotype of who Bethesda’s writers think Liam Neeson is, based on his movies? It makes no fucking sense.

Wouldn’t the money be better spent on a larger number of professional voice actors? I guess it’s all about the hype that celebrity voice actors generate on game websites, not about making good games. Oblivion proves that you can produce shit and sell three million units if you have the right combination of graphical bling and Captain Picard spouting a bunch of lines.

I know that Bethesda’s Fallout 3 going to be a fucked-up travesty. A travesty that will rake in 90% ratings from retard reviewers who wouldn’t know a good CRPG if it crawled up their ass and died. It will be hailed as a “next-gen” reimagination of an “old school classic”, i.e. a game that is so streamlined and devoid of choice, meaningful dialogue and good storytelling that even Xbox Tards and Playstation Kiddies can enjoy it. It’s gonna be the greatest act of game design faggotry ever since Shadowrun bastardized the Cyberpunk genre by introducing Orcs, Dwarves, Dragons, Fireballs and fucking Elves.

That leaves the Fallout MMORPG, the game on which the dreams of Herve Caen, CEO of Interplay, rest. Caen plans on somehow convincing investors to pour $75 million into his defunct company so he can build up a design team from the scratch to produce a Fallout MMMORPG by mid-2010 that will gain 1 million subscribers. I’m not kidding. Needles to say that I have very little confidence in whatever this guys does. I don’t think the Fallout MMO will ever see the light of day, and if it does, it will suck.

All there’s left is hoping that Fallout 3 fails so badly that Bethesda will sell off the Fallout IP to Obsidian or some other company that has the talent to produce a good Fallout game. Slim chance for that, though. If Oblivion sold 3 million copies, Oblivion With Guns probably won’t sell much less.

Anyway, I must have missed the follow-up question the first time I read the interview. Several employees alleged that Brad McQuaid distributed religious propaganda at the workplace and that there was a religious factor in promotions. Brad McQuaid sounds quite sincere in his strong denial:

F13.net: That cuts directly to the core of something I’ve heard from at least a couple employees who are upset. Someone is alleging – and I’m sure I’ll get a straight no comment, but please just deal with the question… Did you distribute religious materials and offer promotions based on people who took you up on it?

Brad McQuaid: Absolutely not. No and no. Nor would I ever.

f13.net: Ok.

Brad McQuaid: I believe very much in spreading the gospel of Christianity through ones actions. I don’t think you’re going to force or debate anyone into believing something. It’s got to be based on your actions and morals. On top of that in a work environment – and on top of that, in a management position – it is completely unacceptable to do anything like that and I wouldn’t dream of it.

During the heyday of the official Sigil forums, Brad occasionally participated in forum debates of religious nature. While it became clear that he held some form of religious belief, his postings were very moderate, open-minded, balanced and thoughtful. I don’t recall any bible thumping, overt dogmatism or even the kind of incessant Jesus babble you’d expect from someone who’d promote employees based on religion. In fact, I enjoyed reading some of his postings on these subjects and I’m a baby-eating hardcore atheist.

While you can’t analyze someone’s personality based on a bunch of forum postings, I pretty much dismissed these allegations immediately, mainly because I concluded from his postings that he was precisely the kind of Christian who would not try impose his religiosity on others.

Then I remembered a private message I received in late 2005 on the official Sigil forums. There was a huge Evolution vs Intelligent Design debate going on and I argued quite ardently against the pseudo-scientific gobbledygook that is ID. A Sigil employee, who was an Associate Game Designer at that time, wrote me this PM:

I just wanted to let you know that you did a great job out there destroying the ID arguments. It is not prudent for me to get involved in such discussions as a developer as tempting as it might be, but the subject itself hits home. [...] Hearing people attack (especially through strawmen) something I hold so dearly (the scientific process) makes my blood boil, and it does somewhat annoy me that I can’t do anything about it on our boards. Luckily you said and did everything right.

Here are some of my favorite arguements against ID claims that work well for lay people. Feel free to use them as you like, I might send you more as I think of them.

1. New York City is irreducably complex. Take away any of the vital mechanisms that are needed to run the city; water system, sewage system, police, traffic lights, roads, electricity, etc. and the city ceases to function. Therefore, by ID logic, New York City must have been specially created.

2. If your parents hadn’t mated with eachother, or either of their parents, or any of their parents parents, or so on for thousands and thousands of generations then you would not exist. Since the probablility of all those people mating with all those other people is so high, you don’t exist.

3. ID disproves itself (and for this reason makes for horrible philosophy). The claim that something as complex as life can only come from something intelligent (and therefore at least equally complex) is an infinite regression. A creator will always have to have a creator. If the IDer claims that at some point complexity could have arisen from something less complex, or always existed (however ill-defined complexity is) then they just countered the basic tenet of ID, and their very own claim.

Just to let you know, I didn’t send this PM. I would likely get in trouble if this PM, its contents, my personal feelings, or the fact that I even sent you one regarding this subject were made public. So please, keep this between us.

And keep up the good fight, those that want to control others through ignorance will attack science at every turn, as it provides a mechanism for escape from ignorance (and therefore control).

I reproduced the whole message for context (except for some bits in the first paragraph containing personal background information). The relevant part is the paragraph before the last.

Note the exact wording. He wasn’t worried because it wasn’t prudent or against company policy to engage in such debates publicly (which he didn’t do), he was worried that he’d likely get into trouble if the content of the message or his personal feelings on the subject were made public.

While this certainly doesn’t constitute evidence for the accusation that Brad McQuaid tried to shove Jeebus down his employees throats, it does raise the question what kind of work enviroment existed at Sigil – and what caused it. A work enviroment in which employees were scared to openly admit that they prefer a naturalistic world view to a religious one?

Or maybe I’m just reading too much into this.

One reason I’m still playing is that there are no alternatives that appeal to me. I’m done with WoW, it was fun while it lasted, but raiding and retarded guild drama burned me out. I tried LotRO during open beta but the overwhelming feeling of sameness to WoW was an instant turn-off. People seem to like it but it isn’t what I’m looking for. Return to EQ and ruin the fond memories I have of this game? No way. EQ2? Three times is enough. EVE? Never managed to get into it and that’s not for the lack of trying. Age of Conan and Warhammer Online are still months away.

I’m actually having fun in Vanguard. It is possible, even with all the apparent flaws. I kill stuff, I get equipment upgrades, I get to see new content and I’m doing it with a static group of great people and an active guild. That’s all I need, and Vanguard provides it. At some point the question of whether it all could be better becomes irrelevant. That’s the main reason I’m still playing.

Broken content pisses me off. Crashing and corrupted textures piss me off. Rogues being complete gimps pisses me off. Boring-ass faction grinds and mind-numbingly long collection quests piss me off. Collect five dusts to make one powder that can be combined with a vial to produce a beacon of which you need 15 to make a boss mob spawn? Fuck that.

Playing Vanguard can be an infuriating experience, but going on an old-fashioned dungeon romp with a good group in a non-instanced dungeon simply outweighs it all. Before Vanguard, I didn’t realize how much I’ve been missing this style of gameplay. WoW’s instances, while well-designed and fun, are very linear and heavily scripted. It’s just not the same thing, and after WoW’s success and Vanguard’s failure, we’ll never see this type of old-school MMORPG gameplay ever again. Vanguard is probably the last chance to experience it. And that’s my final reason.

F13.net has posted an interview with the man himself, Brad McQuaid. There is a heavy focus on the history of the Sigil / Microsoft relationship and Brad basically blames Microsoft while insisting that he doesn’t blame Microsoft. There is a followup over at the Silky Venom forums.

Being forced to produce milestones that are completely disconnected from the work that needs to be done is something I’ve experienced myself in the past. I don’t know whether Brad’s side of the story is accurate or just more bullshit but it does sound plausible to me.

His excuses for not being around on launch day and at the “firing party” are a bit pathetic. He was the CEO of Sigil and the executive producer of Vanguard. The alpha dog. Elsewhere he wrote: “I do not compartmentalize well and don’t handle these situations very well“. Cleary, the guy isn’t manager material and has no business in a position of responsibility.

There is stuff that’s new to me, like the falling-out between McQuaid and Jeff Butler and the nepotism involved in Sigil’s hiring decisions. Interesting, to say the least. He also offers a somewhat plausible explanation for the lack of QA personnel.

I think at this point we have a fairly good idea of what went wrong. I’ll leave it at that. There’s no point in commenting on it any further, I’d much rather focus on the game itself.

Ex-Sigil: There was input all around, but at each level, that input was simply discarded by the decision makers. Basically there were a handful of people who made decisions, regardless of input from anyone else.

[...]

Ex-Sigil: [...] The designers on Vanguard did amazing things with the horrific tools and systems in place [...] but there was no scripting language for example, even though nearly everyone wanted one except for the people who decided if we got one or not.

[...]

f13.net: How hands off was he [Brad] by this time?
Ex-Sigil: He was playing a lot right through about Beta 2 but then he vanished.
f13.net: As in, just outright disappeared?
Ex-Sigil: Yep.

[...]

Ex-Sigil: QA was one person up until about November… ONE.

[...]

f13.net: Who are these people who took over after Brad and Jeff disappeared. Who can we pin the tail on?

Ex-Sigil: Dave Gilbertson, Bill Fisher, and Darrin McPherson… Ryan Elam too, but he spread himself thin by trying to do too much. [...] Let’s just say they refused to listen to anyone on how to fix what was broken [...] they were so pig-headed and arrogant that they believed we were all wrong and they were right.

[...]

f13.net: And what was the attitude by the team towards Brad and Jeff by now? Surely Brad’s disappearance absolutely wrecked morale.

Ex-Sigil: Not really. When he was at work he was more an obstacle than a help. A lot of people wanted Brad to just go away.

Only one QA tester. Horrid developement tools. Decision makers who were either absent or incompetent. Or both. There are more gory details, tons of them. Particularly enlightening is the stuff on how Brad and his accomplices ripped off Microsoft.

OK, this is clearly a disgruntled ex-employee talking but I think the current state of the game lends credence to his accusations. Five years of developement, funds in excess of $30 million. Something must have gone wrong and the explanations offered by this ex-developer sound plausible.

Another interesting bit of information is the subscriber number: about 90k. And then, there’s this:

Ex-Sigil: Co-publishing, with Sigil retaining all IP rights… is what we were told.

From SOE’s press release:

In May 2006, SOE acquired the title’s rights [...]

Either the press release is wrong or Brad not only lied to VG’s fanbase but also to his employees. Not that I’d mind if SOE had bought the IP rights back in May 2006 but it might be yet another example of how McQuaid bullshitted just about fucking everyone.

]]> http://www.krankykraut.net/2007-05-16/ex-sigil-dev-spills-the-beans/feed/ 0 http://www.krankykraut.net/2007-05-16/vanguards-future/ http://www.krankykraut.net/2007-05-16/vanguards-future/#comments Wed, 16 May 2007 11:30:54 +0000 ze Kranky Kraut http://www.krankykraut.net/index.php/2007/05/16/vanguards-future/ Details on SOE’s acquisition of Sigil are slowly emerging. It doesn’t look pretty but it could be worse. From Smed’s posting on the official forums and his interview with GameSpot:

• Staff will be downsized from about 100 employees to 50
• The remaining developement team will be approximately the size of EQ2’s developement team
• Dave Gilbertson will be responsible for operative management, as far as I know he has been for a while anyway
• No major gameplay revamps are planned
• McQuack will become an external “Creative Advisor”, whatever that means
• There will be official forums
• In the long term, the Carlsbad studio wil be subsumed into SOE San Diego, some devs will be moved to other projects

Some interesting points from the official press release:

• Vanguard sold almost 200k units
• “In May 2006, SOE acquired the title’s rights” - interesting. This is in direct contrast to what McQuack told the community back then.

From various sources:

• The crafting team was cut in half (see here)
• The class developers are gone, except for Talisker (see here in the comments section)
• The diplomacy team loses at least one (see here)
• GM Keejay didn’t make the cut (see here)
• Todd Masten and four others will move to a different position within SOE (see here)
• The Community Representative is gone (see here)
• Two more Associate Game Designers gone (see here and here)

No one knows who else had to go, most developers were never in contact with the community and I assume some of those who were, understandably, just don’t bother to post.

From Todd Masten’s posting at the FOHrums:

I hope those truly responsible for the deep rooted failings of the company lay in bed tonight and relive the events that transpired today in their heads, over and over. For not ONE of you is without your job come tomorrow morning.

Great. So those who were responsible for fucking up Sigil and Vanguard still have their jobs while the little guys got shit-canned. If there is one lesson to be learned, it’s that in the corporate world, your contribution is rarely rewarded. No matter how much you bust your ass, in the end you’re just an expendable ressource and you will eventually be treated as such.

This sucks. It sucks for the people who got fired, it sucks for the employees who still remain but lost friends and colleagues, it sucks for the game and it sucks for the customers. But it was probably unavoidable, thanks to the idiots who mismanaged Sigil.

An interesting bit from Grouchy Gamer:

I have heard that Brad is worthless for anything important, and a lot of people probably found him an irritant.

Sounds awfully like that anonymous forum posting that appeared back when Brad quit SOE:

Kelly Flock spins off redeye/verant basically to give Smedley an object lesson– surrounding yourself with talentless friends leads to ruin. Brad McQuaid was, and is, one of Smedley’s talentless friends.
[...]
Brad himself had basically done no work whatsoever since Everquest’s release, and many (including Kelly Flock) think he didn’t do anything *before* its release.
[...]
Some were “promoted” off the team. Like Brad McQuaid. He was moved because they were “borderline ready to revolt”. They “hated Brad so much they wanted to puke and constantly bitched about him.” Now the EQ Live team is “busy hating Jeff Butler with a passion”. Butler is a “major Brad lackey”. The factions are split “more like 90:10 on the hate Brad/Jeff vs. like Brad/Jeff side. It was BAD.” He is “so hated at Verant that out of a team of 60 people less than 10 would go with him. Probably closer to 5.”
[...]
Brad and Smed get flustered, some words are thrown around, accusations are made of Brad being a no-talent weenie, and Brad decides on the spot to leave.

An ex-guild-mate of mine who used to work at Verant told me that the content of this posting was more or less accurate back in 2001. When McQuaid and Butler announced their new company he predicted that Sigil would turn out to be a failure because Brad supposedly was too incompetent at managing teams and that Brad’s good reputation was largely undeserved. I didn’t lend it all that much credence back then, but turns out he was right.

Vanguard’s failure carries all the hallmarks of bad management. Over-optimistic goals, faulty planning, bad resource management, wrong priorities, abysmal execution… you name it. Add the various game design atrocities and you have an epic failure.

Brad thought he could take a bunch of experienced developers, license a shitload of middleware and developement tools and then churn out a massive amount of quality content, completely skipping the process of building a technological base for his product. Evidently, content creation never worked as efficiently as planned, the licensed middleware had to be customized heavily and a lot of their kooky game concepts didn’t work out (like the ill-fated original combat system).

I hope this debacle doesn’t spell the end of Vanguard. The most likely scenario is probably that Vanguard will be maintained by a skeleton crew and developement will slow down. Maybe SOE can turn things around. They did a decent enough job with EQ2 lately. Hope may spring eternal but right now, I don’t think that Vanguard has much of a future.

]]> http://www.krankykraut.net/2007-05-15/sigil-gutted/feed/ 0 http://www.krankykraut.net/2007-05-13/vanguard-saga-of-failure/ http://www.krankykraut.net/2007-05-13/vanguard-saga-of-failure/#comments Sun, 13 May 2007 22:01:20 +0000 ze Kranky Kraut http://www.krankykraut.net/index.php/2007/05/13/vanguard-saga-of-failure/ Before I dive into any specifics about the game itself, let’s have a look at where Vanguard stands three and a half months after release.

The game hit the market amidst a torrent of really bad word of mouth from beta testers, shortly after Blizzard released their Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft. Bad timing. Negative game magazine and website reviews followed soon. Brad McQuaid had hoped for 250k – 500k subscribers but only slightly more than 150k signed up. Since then, player numbers have been in steady decline. I’d be surprised if Vanguard has more than 100k subscribers at the moment.

Gelenia, the server with the highest population (because most of the European player base is crammed into it), can sport a mere 1800 players during peak hours. Considering the enormous size of the world, 1800 not a very large number. From what I’ve gathered, most US servers don’t fare nearly as well. EverQuest had higher population servers eight years ago.

People quitting left and right makes it hard to find groups in Vanguard’s already oversized world, which drives even more people to cancel their accounts. And those who remain are constantly asking themselves if the game even has a future. Vanguard needs server mergers ASAP.

The situation seems dire. My ex-guild disintegrated a few weeks ago when the number of active guild members fell to 5, down from 25 two months ago. The release of LotRO was the final death blow. Most of my former guild mates never made it past level 30. My new guild seems to be hemorrhaging high level players at an alarming rate, so far six level 40+ members have been AWOL for more than two weeks despite that fact that raid content is being pushed onto the test server.

Looking at my ‘friends’ list is even more depressing. Virtually all the people I’ve met leveling from 1 to 30 seem to have quit the game. Fortunately, the static group I’ve been leveling with to 50 during the past few weeks is still largely intact, though we did lose our second rogue. Every time someone unexpectedly doesn’t show up I’m worried that he might be gone for good. Playing a dying MMORPG isn’t fun.

Vanguard is a very flawed game but it’s far from being horrible. Pre-WoW it would have been considered a solid MMORPG release. Yes, it still has some major bugs, the system requirements are insane and there is a whole slew of other issues but the game has shaped up considerably during the past three months.

Vanguard deserves a chance and I hope that subscriber numbers stabilize sufficiently for developement to continue.

Anyway, it’s time to resurrect this blog. No particular reason, I simply feel like it. My command of the English language is getting worse by the hour and writing again might help. Plus, I’m bored.

Future updates will mainly focus on Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. It’s the only MMORPG I am currently playing and everyone and their dog seem to write about LotRO these days. Vanguard is an interesting case study for how MMORPGs can go horribly wrong. It’s a dying game and I fully intend to stick around molesting its rotting corpse.

My female Halfling Rogue (cute, eh?) just ding’ed level 50, so I might be the only MMORPG blogger who actually knows what the fuck he is talking about when it comes to Vanguard.

It’s clear that the game has some huge problems but most of the things that I’ve been reading have either been commentary on some news blurbs or bullshit by people who know very little about the game as of May 2007.

I’ll try update this weblog at least once a week, twice if time allows. Let’s see how long it’ll last this time.

More on that later.

The most recent NDA breach, to my knowledge, was the posting of a number of screenshots on the FOH Forums. The screenshots were taken on a mid-range PC and are probably indicative of the level of visual quality most players who don’t have high-end hardware can expect.

What I found most disheartening about these screenshots is the apparent blandness of the landscape. It’s all rolling hills as far as the eye can see, there are very little distinguishing features. The landscape looks like it has been created with the help of some sort of middleware for algorithmic terrain generation. It all looks rather sterile and objects like trees and structures look oddly out of place. The most horrible part of it is the combination of low-res landscape textures and bump mapping, which can best be seen on this screenshot. Apparently, the bump-maps are supposed to make up for the fact that the textures lack in detail and diversity. It doesn’t work. The result looks like a moon landscape.

Bump Mapping everything doesn’t magically make a game look good. There are good uses for bump maps and then there are cases in which the technology doesn’t really offer anything in terms of visual quality. I feel that someone at Sigil called some really bad shots with regard to technology, artwork and visuals. Besides the ugliness of the terrain when viewed from a distance, Vanguard’s bump mapping approach also breaks down horribly when viewed from up close. This screenshot is a good example. The road textures look OK when viewed from a steep angle but as the angle of view gets flatter it all turns into one distusting grey/brown low-res mess. Bump Mapping is no substitute for good texturing.

I find Vanguard’s graphics rather unappealing but that’s something I could live with if the game had kick-ass gameplay and great content. Problem is, the information from the beta leaks doesn’t really reinforce my confidence in Vanguard’s gameplay or the quality of its content. I’ve compiled some of the more interesting postings by beta testers that can be found in public forums. The comments are predominantly slanted towards the negative, probably because beta testers who actually like the game won’t risk getting kicked out of beta for breaching the NDA. Keeping that in mind, I still think these postings offer an interesting insight on the current state of Vanguard’s beta.

Something Awful Forums

I’m on a 7800 GTX, 3.7 AMD 64 bit with 2 gigs of ram – the game runs consistently at under 20fps. I don’t mind that, it’s in beta and I’m sure it’ll be optimized, but a prerequisite for me not minding about shitty frame rate is if the game has jaw dropping visuals, it doesn’t.

The characters are ugly, they’re not especially detailed, totally bland with terrible hair – these characters are sub par to Galaxies, and in fairness Galaxies had a better customization system.

The environment is bland, the tree’s jut out awkwardly from the landscape, none of it really blends together, sure it’s big but there’s nothing of any interest, and lets not mention the water. NPC’s, enemies, armor, weapons – there’s no imagination here [...]

Having played this game I would definitely put my money on Microsft being able to see how big a stinker this game is [...]

They just recently sent out a survey to beta testers asking why they don’t play the game and what they should do to improve it and make it fun. 9 months into beta. They don’t know how to make their game enjoyable.

The truth is they have had no direction or concept beyond “make Everquest again” and not only did they fail in doing that, even if they manage to succeed through some divine miracle it will still suck because it’s a horrible idea to simply copy one of the first generation MMOs with gameplay that no one in their right mind enjoys anymore.

They touted it as a next generation MMORPG when it is a step backwards in every single aspect.

I think Vanguard is shit. I don’t want you thinking I am a whiner who hates difficult gameplay. The problem with Vanguard is that it tries to keep things like horrible travel times and unforgiving difficulty but DOESN’T keep the charm of Everquest.

The art style is horribly generic, so nothing feels special or interesting. When my Gnome Wizard in Everquest returned to Ak’Anon, it felt like home. There was a certain joy in meeting friends at Kelethin bank. When I played a dark elf, I loved looking at the corpses of idiot ‘good guys’ that got wrecked by Dragoons. Similarly, I loved the danger of trying to sneak through Guk, or finally taking down some great evil like Venril Sathir or Trakanon. I felt GOOD about these things. [...]

Vanguard has no such feeling. Locations serve only as a place to click on people for quests, or click on people to kill. There’s no feeling of accomplishment, just annoyance. Nothing has any personality. The gameplay is nothing special, so it isn’t even fun. I can’t go into specifics for the same reason that others can’t, but I can say that I see no reason to play Vanguard. I’d love for a game to capture the feeling of Pre-Luclin Everquest, but Vanguard is not it.

Vanguard doesn’t have the art style or the humor of WoW. It’s not nearly as optimized (which is fair since Vanguard is in beta), and while it’s much harder, it somehow manages to be less rewarding. WoW may be very close to instant gratification, but sometimes it seems like Vanguard has zero gratification. [...]

It’s not the fun kind of difficult, its the tedious and irritating kind of difficult. [...]

With no personality, no enjoyment, and seemingly no fanbase, this isn’t EQ. This is just a bad game.

FoH Forums

It doesn’t attempt anything new, infact it disregards any and every improvement made to the genre since original EQ. It runs like pure shit on every computer, and it’s a mystery why, because it’s ugly, bland and unimaginative. It’s like someone gave a bunch of retards the ability to bump map high resolution textures and let them have at the world.

The models are ridiculously bad. You’d think since they recycled 1 model for every single race in the entire game that 1 model would atleast be decent, it’s not.

This game has no direction whatsoever, if someone told me the developers had been locked away in a basement somewhere since the release of EQ I would believe it. These people simply don’t have it in them to make an entertaining, current mmorpg.

If you pine for the days of sitting with a group killing things over and over in some random, barren location, and wish not only that you could revisit your days of killing wildlife in the karanas, but do it with sub 15 fps, then Vanguard is the game for you.

I really can’t go into depth beyond that because this game is that vapid, it has absolutely no depth to it. I can’t tell you gameplay element x doesn’t work nearly as well in this game it does in WoW, because this game doesn’t have it. It has running around killing things and it has sitting around complaining about how shitty it is.

the most generic korean mmo has more going for it than Vanguard. I can’t think of anything else to say beyond that.

Combat is just reaction not planning. As a melee tank most of my time in combat is spent waiting for certain icons and refresh timers to pop up so I can hit a skill. My skills just seem to do a little more dmg and nothing else. I’ve yet to see the big deal about all the talk of targeting a certain part of an enemy(like an arm or leg) to take advantage of a weakness. [...]

The story arc of the main starting town is help protect the world from the undead forces behind a wall. The wall is about 80 feet long and has less then 10 guards. Your main contribution to this effort is to bring them a sack of food. In 3 quest, including one that just tells you to run up the road alittle further, you cover this whole story arc. The other starting town I tried doesn’t seem to have any type of story. [...]

Most dungeons just have one path through them and no good camp spots. Mobs respawn so fast that you just have to burn through the place as fast as you can. Get 3 groups in a dungeon and it becomes over crowded.

CR’s still suck. If I want to spend an extra hour of my time playing a game its not to recover my body from a dungeon with a super fast respawn rate.

Character creation involves stretching your character out like putty to make it taller or larger. It lookes horrible. [...]

I can’t say strongly enough though that this game just feels wrong and that the design philosphy just seems to be out of touch. Its like something I should have tried in 2000 not 2006. Besides rethinking the whole game I don’t see how they can save it. After putting a week into when I first got into beta and then a few more when the fileplanet relaese hit I just can’t get myself to log on. It just makes me sad after all the hopes I had for this game.

There’s alot of shit in the game that makes no sense, specifically the complete lack of direction at low levels, the terribly bugged animations and…god, lots else. The most amazing thing is the game somehow manages to be so complicated and so mind numbingly simple at the same time. I have 6 buttons to push in a fight, and combined theres something like 30 different effects I can push out as a ranger. Holy shit, that is the most pointless shit I’ve ever seen, and I don’t even want to go into it. [...]

With that said, I STILL have faith in the game for some reason. If made concise the combat system has the potential to be pretty fun, and the non cookie cutter dungeons are pretty good. Of course there’s something like 3? non CC dungeons.

On a related note: Russia plans to build a new pipeline; Poland is pissed.

If there is one thing you can always rely on it’s the self-aggravating nature of internet community drama. Once the negativity bandwagon starts rolling, everyone wants on. Things that are barely relevant are inflated to epic proportions. A couple of years ago, one of the writers of IGN’s Xbox sub-site made a humorous remark in one of his articles that likened the exuberant Nintendo fanboyism at E3 to “skinheads cheering at a Nazi rally”. Granted, as a metaphor for “ridiculous fanaticism without substance” this statement was probably a bit ill-concieved but what’s the big deal? It’s not like anyone had implied that Nintendo fanboys actually were Nazis.

The Nintentards at the IGN web forums went completely bonkers over this. Hundreds of postings demanded the blood of Brandon Justice. Nintentards were acting like they were incredibly insulted. Internet community drama was taking its course, everyone suddenly turned into an oversensitive pussy so they could pretend to have a reason to join the lynch mob. There was even a poll in which 2/3 of the respondents demanded the guy to be fired. Eventually, Brendon Justice was forced to quit his job. Yup, fucking web forum drama forced a guy out of his job. This was one of the archetypical showcases for how trivial things can develope into retarded mass-outbursts of exaggerated emotions, as the members of an internet community whip each other up into some sort of pathetic simian frenzy.

I think the extreme expressions of hatred towards Smed and SOE are the result of a similar process of internet group dynamics. Every time someone brings up anything even remotely SOE-related, someone else feels compelled to chime in with a burst of vitriolic anti-SOE rhetoric and others are soon to follow. The discussion degenerates into a repetitive SOE hatefest. Smed is the focal point of all anti-SOE sentiment. It seems that the guy, who may very well be a complete jackass for all I know, is personally responsible for every shitty business decision, every misguided gameplay change and the personal frustrations some people may have developed about SOE games over the years. Smed, so it appears, is the Satan of MMORPGs, a fiendish creature who made it his personal agenda to ruin everyone’s fun and cheat gamers out of their money. Um, okay.

Sure, SOE is known for rather questionable business practices and Smed is likely responsible for some of them. It’s perfectly understandable that some people may not want to buy a SOE product again and are distrustful of everything related to SOE. But why the intense hatred? I mean, most people shrug it off when they hear news of yet another terrorist attack in Iraq or a hundred people getting killed in a plane crash. Yet, if SOE cheats them out of a few bucks by releasing an unfinished expansion they go completely apeshit. I find that fairly ridiculous and it’s sure as fuck not rational. Under normal circumstances, no reasonable person would react so strongly.

The sheer amount of hysteria over the SOE/SGO co-publishing deal at the official Vanguard forums is astounding. People seem to be more worried about a SOE logo on Vanguard’s retail box than about the reason why MGS and SGO ended their business relationship in the first place. The details of the SOE/SGO deal are sketchy but shouldn’t people worry about the current state of the game rather than the hypothetical possibility that Smed himself waltzes into SGO’s office and personally makes sure that the game will suck and the subscribers are milked for all they’re worth? That seems to be the common sentiment: SOE will make the game suck, somehow.

I can’t help but feel a certain degree of Schadenfreude towards the relentless SOE-bashers that make up a large share of Vanguard’s fan community. I found reading through the discussion threads at the official forums rather entertaining. Exaggerated pessimism, desperate optimism, outright hysteria, anger, resentment, pretend rationality and oodles of SOE-hatred. And on top if it, McQuaid desperately trying to do some damage control. Good stuff.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO No NO!!!!! NOOOOOOOO!!!!

I will never EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EEVERRRRR play another game where John Smedley and the ************EVIL************** SoE
people are involved in ANY FORM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Vangaurd can crash and burn for all I care if SoE and John Smedley is involved.

There is evil, then there is SoE and John Smedley! They are a whole new form of evil.

Oh but it’s just business… NO! These are the same people that PRE-SOLD copies of the Obi-Wan expansion for StarWars Galaxies to SWG fans telling them that there would be big upgrades in the expansion for the Beast Handler class. Then they announced ON THE SAME DAY THAT THE OBI-WAN EXPANSION SHIPPED THAT THEY HAD REDONE THE WHOLE GAME AND THAT IN TWO WEEKS THE BEAST HANDLER CLASS WOULD BE REMOVED FROM THE GAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Did they offer refunds to all the hundreds of thousands of pre-orders? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
They were working on the “NGE” release for many months before it’s release. They KNEW the beast handler class would not exist when the “NGE” came out. Yet, they advertised the new Beast Handler class upgrades TO SELL PRE-ORDERS OF the OBI-WAN EXPANSION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That’s technically a scam and as such John Smedley and his crew of evil people should be in jail right now!

Do not associate yourselves with criminals!

Sigil + SoE = BAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!