I cancelled my Vanguard subscription a few days ago, I’ve rarely been playing in recent months anyway. Despite the flaws, Vanguard had kept me entertained for for about four months of intensive gaming and then some, which is more than the combined time I spent during my three stints in EQ2 and about half the time WoW managed to keep me interested. Despite of all the game-breaking flaws, the game isn’t all crap.
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.
I’m not sure what makes me keep coming back to games that I have played and rejected before. I gave EQ2 three tries. I hated Vanguard during beta, yet I gave it another try at release. Back when I played DAoC, I quit the game only to return a few months later. Now it’s EVE Online. I played the free trial and didn’t like it. I gave it another try a few weeks ago. Oddly enough, this time it stuck. Two weeks ago I upgraded my trial account to a full subscription.
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.
Tehatamani is a level 45+ zone with an ancient Egypt style theme. It’s one of the three or so areas that currently pass for high-end content in Vanguard. Some really cool stuff is going on there, but it too makes use of one of Vanguard’s most overused time sinks: the faction grind.
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:
I’ve been a longtime Fallout fan. I must have played through each of the two Fallout games half a dozen times. The first Fallout game has been one of the defining gaming experiences for me, only surpassed by Everquest.
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.
I reread F13.net’s interview with McQuaid last night, mainly because I wanted to read again Brad’s hilariously schizophrenic rationalisation for why he thinks that it’s okey-dokey to have witchcraft, wizardry, polytheistic gods, occult symbolism and genocidal violence (”Kill 100 sentient fluffies”) in games, while demons and angels are problematic. Does he seriously think that there Christian parents who believe that demons are real and who don’t object to all the other ungodly stuff?
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.
