Vanguard: Making the game as they go?

[Soygen]

Originally Posted by Cad

Doesn't matter if he's right or not. Hell, he probably is right. The game probably does suck right now.

I just dislike him because he annoys me with his argument style, his posting style, and his obssession. I couldn't give less than a shit if Vanguard shuts down tomorrow.

Yeah, I think the general concensus from people who can think for themselves, is that it isn't Ut's arguing points that are the problem.

[ArkturusMaximus]

Originally Posted by Cad

Doesn't matter if he's right or not. Hell, he probably is right. The game probably does suck right now.

I just dislike him because he annoys me with his argument style, his posting style, and his obssession. I couldn't give less than a shit if Vanguard shuts down tomorrow.

How do you even have time to read his posts with you approaching number 2800 in less than 6 months?

[Utnayan]

Originally Posted by ArkturusMaximus

You know who I AM going to start ignoring? The fucks that keep telling everyone else who to put on their ignore list. Do yourself a favor and stop reading these threads if Ut and co. bother you so damn much.

But that would mean they possess common sense, or the guy pointing a gun to their head forcing them to follow my posts fell asleep.

I just dislike him because he annoys me with his argument style, his posting style, and his obssession. I couldn't give less than a shit if Vanguard shuts down tomorrow.

Then don't read what I write? Holt shitballs what a revelation!

EQ2 dungeons are not instanced for the most part, and they do contain PH and named mobs with common and rare items. Guess what, it's much more fun than any instance in WoW. I never had problems finding an area to "camp" in all my play time. There are no lists in EQ2. There is no waiting around. Just because EQ had those side effects doesn't mean that the game can't be designed to prevent that from happening.

The reason why you aren't seeing if happen in EQ2 is, in my opinion, due to the fact that there isn't a population to warrant it. They don't even have half the subs EQ had at peak, which arguably, doesn't mean much since a good chunk of those 430k were double, triple, quad accounts - but still. Less players over 2 expansions = of course you'll be able to find a group in a static dungeon when the game isn't near as popular. EQ2's leveling curve is also MUCH faster - so people absorb content at a quicker pace leaving static dungeons open to play in.

Now let me change hats. Vanguard becomes a great seller - is popular, and hits 200k in the first month. There is no way they are going to have enough static content on a much slower leveling curve at launch. None what so ever. People will stall out in certain dungeons for a good chunk of time because it takes so long to level. Traffic jams, lists, content denial... Same thing with EQ. What you say could work *IF* they have enough static content across the board for a huge level range, with the same reward structure, with enough variety, and each and every signle one is fun without having to force a group into one specific dungeon, ala EQ, because there is more XP there, better loot, etc. But 1> They have to have a lot of it, which in no way is possible this year. 2> They need to make sure the dungeon designs do not favor one over another. 3> They need to have a shitload per every 5 levels of advancement over level 20.

[karisa]

Originally Posted by Deris

Who died and made you God of deeming what shouldn't be Beta and what should?

I’m a qualified designer with formal qualifications in design.

Traditionally speaking, beta is the late stage prototype that goes out to your testers/users to get both qualitative and quantitative data as you drive towards a feature complete release. A beta release needs to have implemented all of its required features.

The indications are that Sigil is still changing its design principles for vanguard. Without these principles how could they have even scoped their required features?

[karisa]

Originally Posted by ilian

*shrug* we have made pretty sweeping design changes in repsonse to playtester feedback in Beta, and the game turned out better for it.

What game?

[Eomer]

Originally Posted by Myself

The game looks very good now, IMO. The new sky is beautiful at night (not sure what daylight looks like), and they've obviously done work on water reflections, HDR and other things. Big improvement. It is however disconcerting to see that texture flickering is STILL an issue, and has been for Nvidia hardware since before Christmas (reverting to ancient Nvidia drivers fixes the issue, but I don't feel like running driver cleaner 10 times a week). But otherwise from a technical standpoint it's made some big strides lately. I'll have to see if I can find some time to actually test the game again one of these days.

I've been informed that this is infact an Nvidia bug, which both makes sense and is surprising. Makes sense since it seems it can be fixed by reverting to older drivers, surprising that they haven't bothered fixing it in the past 6 months since they originally broke it early in the 81.xx series. Then again, I've been finding that their latest WHQL drivers also have bugs that reverts my 720p display to NTSC every time I reboot my computer.

Originally Posted by Algrinon

Point 2: Anyone with a history on these boards no Eomer and I are oil and water. However, his NDA leakage is refreshing in that shit is improving gradually. Not at lightning fast speed like Utnayan would want, but it is improving.

I am going to continue and pray that sane people, who have been on this board for awhile and have a decent reputation, continue to post honest criticism and posts like Eomer's.

The good with the bad. Hell, I am an optimist.

I'm not really criticizing the game, just trying to correct people's misconceptions. For example, there's lots of whining about how poorly the game runs, when in reality my old XP3200 w 9800Pro and 1gb of ram can run it fairly well at low detail and resolution, and my newer X2-3800 w/7800GT and 2gb of ram can run it at the highest detail settings at 1280x720 with an average framerate of 20-30 while running around in Tursh, one of the starting towns. That computer is NOT top of the line even today, let alone by release sometime late this year or early next.

The game is indeed improving from a technical standpoint, which is nice to see, because to be honest I was pretty pessimistic about that aspect a few months ago due to how poorly the game looked on my Nvidia setup and how long it had been that way.

I just don't think it's very fair to criticize technical aspects of the game, this far from release, as a lot of people seem eager to.

Gameplay wise, I'm going to continue to refrain from commenting because I have no reasonable basis to do so. I've levelled a handful of characters to their teens, and that's about it. And that was months ago, before all the redesign and tweaking they did with combat. So I really have no business saying either way whether or not the gameplay is good or bad as it would be irresponsible of me to do so (hint: Utnayan).

Also, I'd like to thank the devs for being cool enough to PM me and inquire about the flickering, as opposed to banning my account or something like that. While I'm obviously in breach of the NDA by even acknowledging I'm in beta, I'd like to think that I'm still keeping with the spirit of it and not releasing "secret sauce" or commenting on the game with an agenda, or posting a whack of screenshots.

Although I'm tempted to take a picture or two of it running on my HT, just to make you guys jealous and my e-peen larger.

[ilian]

Originally Posted by karisa

What game?

Not an MMO, so there could be a huge difference.

[karisa]

Originally Posted by ilian

Not an MMO, so there could be a huge difference.

It might do, it might not; I was just interested in your game. I'm a on again off again lurker of fohguild (since eq, only recently joined though), so I can't recall what game you have worked on (or even if you have mentioned it).

I’m not a game designer, but I’ve always been very interested in game design.

A sort of side passion of mine has been designing amateur games and implementing mods for them. Normally I never get past the first conceptual prototypes and either paid work or more interesting ideas distract me.

I could see why that might be a problem to tell me what game you where/are working on (I couldn’t tell you what I was working on directly ), maybe I could ask a few questions about it?

What kind of changes to your game system did you implement in beta due to beta processes?

Where the changes the introduction of fundamental systems or where they tweaks of existing systems?

Could the problems have been identified with early lightweight or specific prototypes (simular to the concept of spikes (from agile development))?

What kind of user centric design did you guys do before development to try and capture problems in the design phases?

[reala]

I'm in beta and i've logged in twice for about 15mins max. The game is utter shit. What a complete fucking let down, i'm not even going to buy it and give it a try like some titles. Visually it's nice but the game play and mechanics is simply retarded.

I don't give a fuck if i'm breaking the contract, they broke their promise as far as i'm concerned.

[Vorph]

Originally Posted by Utnayan

The reason why you aren't seeing if happen in EQ2 is, in my opinion, due to the fact that there isn't a population to warrant it. They don't even have half the subs EQ had at peak, which arguably, doesn't mean much since a good chunk of those 430k were double, triple, quad accounts - but still. Less players over 2 expansions = of course you'll be able to find a group in a static dungeon when the game isn't near as popular. EQ2's leveling curve is also MUCH faster - so people absorb content at a quicker pace leaving static dungeons open to play in.

And he's wrong about instancing and eq2 anyway. The best-designed dungeon in the game that I saw is instanced (Nektropos Castle), and many of the things you have to do in the zone that make it so cool simply would not work at all if there were 30 other asshats in the zone. The non-instanced dungeons of the same level were lame by comparison, and in fact the only non-instanced dungeon I liked much at all was Runnyeye. The had a lot more to do with the fact that the loot in the place was top-notch than having to deal with groups of faggots trying to steamroll past my group to get to nameds.

[Slick Willey]

Originally Posted by reala

I'm in beta and i've logged in twice for about 15mins max. The game is utter shit. What a complete fucking let down, i'm not even going to buy it and give it a try like some titles. Visually it's nice but the game play and mechanics is simply retarded.

I don't give a fuck if i'm breaking the contract, they broke their promise as far as i'm concerned.

[Esmo]

Originally Posted by Eomer

Although I'm tempted to take a picture or two of it running on my HT, just to make you guys jealous and my e-peen larger.

If you do, I'll post one from my P4 3.6, 2gig mem, x800 (256) system which runs the game at low quality render just so I can move the clipping plane out two notches above the minimum (@ 1900x1200 reso). Horrible animations aside, my major visual complaint is that my clipping plane has to be so close just to get a decent fps. The choppy animations only make a decent fps feel like it is worse than it really is. Love or hate WoW all you want, but god damn that game has the smoothest animations ever.

I was out of town for a Magic tournament this weekend and downloaded the necro patch last night to try the class out. It sounded really nifty and I wanted to see how the first pass played. I only lasted about twenty minutes before I looked at my watch and logged. They continue to make improvements to many aspects of the game but it still doesn't have any life. The comments made earlier about the questing/grouping issues are spot on btw.

(9pm EST last night, even with the new patch the beta server had 117 people logged in)

The one design analagy that comes to mind (probably because it is lunch time):

Sigil wanted to make pizza to feed a million. So they decided to make one gigantic pie but the problem is they just don't have what they need to make it: the crust is too big, the sauce is too thin and the toppings are too spread out. If they had taken a different design approach - making a lot of smaller pizzas - they could have perfected them one by one and satisfied a good number of people in the process. Even if they ran out of time/money/whatever they still have a number of great *finished* pizzas to offer. They did not choose that route and instead they have one gigantic raw pizza, long on crust and short on focused flavor, that won't satisfy anyone.

[Soygen]

I don't really care about Vanguard, but I sure could go for some pizza.

[Slick Willey]

Originally Posted by Itzena

You want to picture something amusing?
What if Ut's right?

Heh, doesn't it just warm the cockles of your heart imagining the aftermath of the Vanguard launch with him saying "I told you so!" over and over again?

He'll be saying "I told you so!" by virtue of the fact that Vanguard simply will have no where near the subscribers that WoW has, and he will argue that this is proof he is right -- that Vanguard sucks.

When Vanguard comes out, it will jump out of the gates to maybe 400K subscribers in the first 3 months or so, and then will likely settle to a steady 250-300K subscribers. This will be, in Utnayan's opinion, an unmitigated disaster, regardless of whether those 250-300K people think the game is in fact Christ reincarnated.

Then we will get to hear Vanbois arguing (ONCE AGAIN!) that WoW's subscription numbers are skewed and that everyone knows it only has millions of players because of its established Blizzard fanbase, and not because the game is, you know, fun. We'll get to hear a whole new round of analogies of Wow to McDonald's, WoW to Brittney Spears, WoW to AOL, . . . you get the idea.

Good times ahead for this board, fellas. Yep, good times.

P.S. To Etad's point about longing for the days of non-instanced dungeons and "community hub" zones -- I fondly remember sitting at the zone in in Sebilis shouting out for a group every 3-5 minutes, waiting sometimes an entire evening without getting a group. Oh yeah, those are good times that we ought and should return to

P.P.S. And as for Holymight's argument that EQ2 currently has non-instanced dungeons without those problems . . . look at how itemization is done in EQ2 and you might understand why people aren't camping one dungeon non-stop for the "ubah" Froglok Bonecasters Robe, the RBG, etc.

[Neric]

Brad McQuaid reminds me of a cook. He followed his recipe, he used only the finest ingredients, he cooked them with love and when he finally presented his wonderful meal, it simply didn't taste well. Maybe he forgot the salt or maybe he shouldn't have used the steam-cooker, I don't know.