some light in the darkness?

For a short time, there was hope. In a recent forum post, Blizzard announced to adjust the way elixirs and buff potions work.

"In an upcoming patch we will be changing the way elixirs function, allowing a player to only have two elixirs on them at any one time. The change will allow you to use one offensive elixir, and one defensive elixir. All elixirs will be set into one of these two categories."

The short glint of a candle in the cold and retarded farming grind. A deadly backstab into the spine of the WoW farming lemmings. And the loss of an e-penis:



Blizzard even admits the buff elixir system forced the players to farm:

"In many cases this resulted in the spectrum of elixirs being necessary for dungeon and raid attempts as they were balanced to be more difficult. ...

The need for herbs and materials, and thus the strain on a guild or individual alchemist to collect these items is lowered substantially, ..."

A late insight, but an insight at least? Not necessarily. Mana, health, and resistance potions will stay the way they are. And even though the change 'removes the need to design and balance encounters around the potential use of all possible elixirs' it does NOT remove the need to design encounters to maintain the item grind hamster wheel.

another McQuaid

That guy is funny:

"I think if we had got the message out that Vanguard was not just another EQ with all of its time sinks, tedium, leveling times, necessary raiding, need for contiguous time commitments, and somehow got that message clearly and strongly through we would have launched more strongly."

Source

Ok, let's see...

1. no time sinks - wrong. Long-lasting travel times and journeys, farming hours for crafting,...
   
2. no tedium - wrong, bashing on many different but soulless mobs to gain a level is tedious.
   
3. no leveling times - wrong. Leveling takes comparably long in Vanguard.
   
4. no necessary raiding - wrong. That'll come as soon as enough players have reached lv50 and when they demand more and new content.
   
5. no need for contiguous time commitments - wrong. It's even three meaningless grinds: adventuring, crafting and diplomacy.
   

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Mr McQuaid, you fail.

Meaning

The dynamic world embodies the concepts that will become the future of MMORPGs. As the Internet and gaming communities continue to grow, gamers are taking an increasing interest in plugging the community itself into the game world in such a way that everyone can experience a world that follows one rule: what you do means something. Meaning is what everyone searches for in everything they do and is exactly where the spirit of all these details becomes apparent. Meaning enthralls and grabs us. It holds us to our seats and doesn’t let go. For thousands of years mankind has used the ideas of conflict and emotional attachment in stories to move us and compel us.

Great article. *clap*

Sigil - planless

A recent forum post of former Sigil-worker Kendrick sheds light on some of the things that went wrong in the development process of Vanguard. 

1st, Sigil planned a way too large game world:

The world size at launch WAS cut down dramatically.

Plan A was to ship with Thestra, Qalia, Kojan (a much larger Kojan) as "starter" islands, 3 "intermediate" islands about 75% of the size of the starters, and one huge "advanced" continent 4x as big as a starter, and quite a few small theme islands, with a level cap of 100 on release. The starter continents would have contained 1-30 content, intermediates 30-70, the advanced 70-100, and the theme islands would vary. [...]

Plan D is what you see now, with a downsized Kojan, and that started around 2005.

They planned to implement the quadruple (!) size of a current world. A world that is so large right now that you often feel lost in the middle of nowhere. Not until 2005, three years after the start of the development, they discovered the weight they took on their shoulder might be a little too much. And switched to the somehow doable current version of the landmass.


2nd, their staffing was unbalanced:

For the entire time I was with Sigil, the Art department was the largest department by far. It was only at later stages, after a goodly bit of the world had been constructed, that they ramped up designer staffing.

This may explain why many classes appear generic and superficial, why several class-race combinations lack of game world background. Why interracial and cultural conncetions are missing,...


3rd, Sigil exploited their art workers:

And almost the entire time I was there, the Art department was in crunch mode, furiously trying to build as much of the world as they could, at the same time having to go back and rework things as engine tech and building methodology evolved.

Four long years of crunch mode. Four years work-weeks of 60+ hours. This is madness?! *looks angry* This is [Sparta] Sigil!

When do companies finally learn that demaning 'the extra mile' every day does not lead to better results? Art is a creative job. If you don't give your workers some time to regenerate and to develop new ideas, the creeps and characters they design become soulless digital things you just bash on.


4th, content overload and lacking gameplay / code depth:

It was still easier to tweak geometry and apply new shaders than it was to just throw out already built work, btw.

The oft-cited "redesign(s) of the game" last year were almost entirely gameplay and code, both much easier to do than reworking art assets that had taken nearly 5 years to construct.

Art content can easily be added. It's 'just' feeding the databases. Gameplay is what matters. What makes the people play the game.


5th, too much self-esteem, over-estimation of their ressources:

Do it better than they (Blizzard) did, and do it bigger, while still retaining what we liked about EQ1.

Translation: produce a wonder. You CAN make it better than Blizzard - but then you'll have to make it smaller if you want to get done within 3-4 years. Or you make it bigger but similar in design. But you can't make both.


6th, quantity but quality in staffing:

Polish does need help, partly because the content designers there need more experience under their belts (and they're getting it...the hard way), and partly because things were rushed. Bugs happen, especially in a rushed environment, but they're doing a fair job of squashing those.

Translation: we hired tons of content designers - still they had no idea what they were doing. Maybe instead of teaching it to them "the hard way" they should've down-sized the content mass and give the experienced designers some time to share hints and tips?


7th, hardware requirements:

From my point of view, that's Vanguard's biggest shortcoming. Poor performance is real for many. Gameplay decisions, art style, etc, are subjective, some like it, some don't. But it's hard to decide if you like it or not if you simply can't run the game.

Exactly. When you release a game, you better make sure a lot of people can play it. Especially MMORPGs where a lot of marketing and information is spread by word-of-mouth. If the word spreads but not the game because the people don't want to or cannot afford a new computer system, you won't be able to refinance your development investments. Brad McQuaid, the producer of Vanguard, said they developed Vanguard 'for the long term'. As soon as players' hardware catches up, they would buy the game. Well, when I get a new computer system, I want to play the latest releases to test my new power horse on high details.

When the players have catched up to Vanguard hardware-wise, Vanguard will have to compete with Age of Conan or Warhammer. And that competition, I'd say, will be won by the later two due to overall better game design.