[VG] Producer's Letter

[jayrebb]

Originally Posted by Shinrai

Being Australian I play at "low" peaks and I reckon the servers to have an online population of about 300-400. And this is while APW is still thrillingly new. For a world the size of vanguard that's certainly not enough to make the game feel anything other than empty.

And thats on PvE? Ouch.

They could make a case for merging ALL the remaining servers at this point.

Theres no way Vanguard is at anything more than 7k subs right now, using Brad's concurrent player estimate figures. My how far we've come from 220k. What a disaster.

Microsoft would have AC2'd this game already.

[Ashes Emberblade]

Originally Posted by jayrebb

Microsoft would have AC2'd this game already.

And Utnayan would've given it a rest.

[Deris]

Originally Posted by Ashes Emberblade

And Utnayan would've given it a rest.

I think the phrase "told you so, neener, neeener" comes to mind.

[Gryeyes]

Originally Posted by Grizzlebeard

Worst case they have 20k subscribers among 4 existing servers. That's 5k people per server roughly, of course the mix may be different. Last I checked 5k people per server was classed as a healthy server. It's a fuck load more than most MMOs have currently excluding WoW.

Even assuming 20k active subscriptions split between 4 servers that would STILL make those servers horridly underpopulated. I have no clue what total % of existing accounts are online at what time but i would be pretty shocked to find it was more than 15-20%. Probably even less for a game in vanguards state.

[larseny316]

Tried it again today, played for the day. Performance was still shit for me, I don't have a top of the line system (but it was good enough to play vanguard way back). Its got 2gigs more ram, and a far superior video card, but the game constantly hitched. I could see through parts of my character. I'm sure that a driver change, or some settings tweaks would fix it all, but from the pov of a jaded gamer, I don't care too. If I can't login and play right off the bat, I'm not going too.

Back to wow (and I hate the fact I enjoy wow)

[Dreven]

As my month long retry for VG is almost up, I think there are just too much still wrong with the game for it to recover.

Still too many crashes, graphical glitches, and game freezes. The performance is generally better, but the game still locks up for seconds at a time when you enter a city and when menus are opened your screen will sometimes lock up or you only see a rainbow of colors where the menu is suppose to be, and this happens a lot. Raiding is half decent but if two or more groups are in the same shard, it becomes lag city, I'm talking 2000 - 4000 ms or worse (worse I saw was 7800ms).

Uninspired content development. I have seen some of the gear that's coming out of APW. The set gear that I have seen in particular are all named after Devs, no time wasted on lore or creativity here! So for instance, you might have a heavy belt from a set called Glip's belt of tankage, if you get my drift. Very cheesy, and lazy in my opinion. There is a set named after Silius, and other names I can 't remember.

On top of that the items don't seem all that great. The items have red names but that's about all that's legendary about them. Just a few stat points better or might reduce your cast time by .000002 seconds or some mess. I stopped paying attention when I saw how pointless it was to spend hours trying to get this stuff. I may be expecting too much from legendary items I guess, *shrug*.

Graphically the place is also damn boring, all the rooms look very similar and is just very drab. I guess they had to reuse as much of the old textures as possible to save time and resources.

Overall I would give APW a grade of B-, it is interesting in spots and not totally a mess, plus I have only killed 4 or so lock out mobs, so that grade is based on my limited experience. I don't feel it is very compelling, and not the type of dungeon I would log in every day to play.

As far as the game goes it is still very average (C-), and it probably wont die out completely with folks like tad and kciv to will stick around another year for the next raid dungeon, but it will probably remain stagnant, this free period isn't going to do squat in that regard.

[Arrr]

Uninspired content development. I have seen some of the gear that's coming out of APW. The set gear that I have seen in particular are all named after Devs, no time wasted on lore or creativity here! So for instance, you might have a heavy belt from a set called Glip's belt of tankage, if you get my drift. Very cheesy, and lazy in my opinion. There is a set named after Silius, and other names I can 't remember.

for better or worse, they basically took this straight out of EQ1. Almost all of the vulak loot was named after devs.

On top of that the items don't seem all that great. The items have red names but that's about all that's legendary about them. Just a few stat points better or might reduce your cast time by .000002 seconds or some mess. I stopped paying attention when I saw how pointless it was to spend hours trying to get this stuff. I may be expecting too much from legendary items I guess, *shrug*.

I feel this way about wow loot too, to be honest. Formulas can leave you with pretty bland items.

Graphically the place is also damn boring, all the rooms look very similar and is just very drab. I guess they had to reuse as much of the old textures as possible to save time and resources.

My understanding (and I'm sure kc will correct me on this) is that the various wings have different themes. The first 4 are just the entry wing, so of course it would have the same theme.

[kcxiv]

Originally Posted by Dreven

Uninspired content development. I have seen some of the gear that's coming out of APW. The set gear that I have seen in particular are all named after Devs, no time wasted on lore or creativity here! So for instance, you might have a heavy belt from a set called Glip's belt of tankage, if you get my drift. Very cheesy, and lazy in my opinion. There is a set named after Silius, and other names I can 't remember.

On top of that the items don't seem all that great. The items have red names but that's about all that's legendary about them. Just a few stat points better or might reduce your cast time by .000002 seconds or some mess. I stopped paying attention when I saw how pointless it was to spend hours trying to get this stuff. I may be expecting too much from legendary items I guess, *shrug*.

Graphically the place is also damn boring, all the rooms look very similar and is just very drab. I guess they had to reuse as much of the old textures as possible to save time and resources.

Overall I would give APW a grade of B-, it is interesting in spots and not totally a mess, plus I have only killed 4 or so lock out mobs, so that grade is based on my limited experience. I don't feel it is very compelling, and not the type of dungeon I would log in every day to play.

I give you that, the gear is all named after the dev's. That doesnt bother me though. Pretty much all gear in every game has stupid names.

APW the actual zone has been there on release. It just didnt have any raid content inside. There is also 3-4 more other raid dungeons in the game unpopulated.

For the first raid zone, some of the gear is alot better. Its not going to be 200 damage weapons already. lol

You also only did the entrance wing. The Dev's said from the get go that part is going to be fairly gimp and it is. Vicus is the only challenge in the entrance area. Deeper you get inside it gets harder, but for the first raid zone i am not expecting every fight to be like Queen Sendaii, Performer or OMM. Sorry, thats the only pain in the ass raid mobs i really know. Never did the wow thing.

[tad10]

Originally Posted by Dreven

Overall I would give APW a grade of B-, it is interesting in spots and not totally a mess, plus I have only killed 4 or so lock out mobs, so that grade is based on my limited experience. I don't feel it is very compelling, and not the type of dungeon I would log in every day to play.

What the fuck is it with people making statements about zones they no fuck-all about?

It's like killing the first two bosses in a WoW zone and then basing your grade on the entire zone.

The entrance wing is designed to let casual guilds experience (and learn how-to) raid content. As Kcxiv noted the only real challenge is the General -- the rest are just some basic co-ordination issues. Yet you're basing your entire grade of the fucking zone on the Tier 0 wing.

As an entrance wing it is fine. There is one shit boss (Archon -- seems mistuned and worthy of your C- rating) -- where if you wipe it is because you and everyone in your raid is mildly to seriously retarded. There are two bosses that require you to do some basic raid co-ordination to get 'er done--but there is a little play so if someone fucks up by say over dpsing and stealing aggro from the MT you won't necessarily wipe. And there is one tough boss that requires everyone to do their job correctly or it is a wipe everytime (General).

It is a solid starter wing for figuring out who in your 18 man raid is dross. As Kcxiv says it gets much tougher.

[Istros]

You know, I used to think that tad10 is a moron. Now I kinda admire the guy--hope VG manages to survive for its remaining players' enjoyment.

[Wolfen]

Well, I started playing last night. My initial impression: not nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

I wasn't thinking that for the first few minutes. The framerate was horrible and changing settings didn't help. I then crashed to the desktop. When I logged back in, everything was 100% better. I had smooth framerate and everything went well.

I created a half-elf druid and started in the Tanvu area. I actually saw several other newbs playing in the area. One thing I can say about the starting areas is that there really isn't any risk of dying. I played up to level 7 and never felt at risk. I never got low on mana no matter how often I cast my spells.

I started on Seradon. I suppose someone wanted to impersonate the king, because the name Wolfen was already taken. So, I am Wolfenn.

[Fratley]

Originally Posted by tad10

It is a solid starter wing for figuring out who in your 18 man raid is dross. As Kcxiv says it gets much tougher.

Seriously, entrance is meant for serious guilds to plow through in a couple hours. Non-nameds in the marina and vault, hell even the library, are harder than any boss in the entrance.

[Twobit Whore]

GameSpy's Game of the Year 2007

[Wolfen]

I have to say Vanguard has plenty of quests to do in the early levels. I'm level 10 with plenty of quests yet to do.

[CylusSoulreaver]

Originally Posted by Grumpy Old Fart

GOOD
- If you set it up correctly, the graphics are very nice - except for the teeny problem of there being NO FUCKING ANTI-ALIASING allowed (even forced AA) in a 3D game released in 2007. Not having AA drops the graphics from a 10/10 to a 7/10 all on its own, besides making the developers look like fucking idiots.
BAD
- No anti-aliasing (even forced via your graphics card CP) in a 3D game release in 2007. Absolutely ridiculous.

For the sake of argument, which is what this forum seems to be all about, Bioshock doesn't officially support AA either, even thought it's one of your touted year 2007 video games (yea, I realize that you can trick the drivers into supporting it, texture anomalies aside).

Not that VG will ever deserve to be compared to Bioshock. It's just a hell of a lot easier to ignore it in Bioshock, although it f'n annoyed me almost as much in Bioshock as it did in VG 'Course, with the trickeration, no jaggies in Bioshock made the hard edges on particles acceptable, the few times that I was paying enough attention to notice 'em, that is