Vanguard goes F2P

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evilsofa

[H]F Junkie
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Vanguard: Saga of Heroes was released in 2007. Despite its disastrous launch, it is still alive and it is going free to play sometime this summer:

http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/newsArchive.vm?section=News&month=current&id=1374

Here's an interesting writeup by a player about the weird afterlife Vanguard has been in since everyone quit four months after it launched:

http://rwillmore.wordpress.com/

And the current players on the official forum are not cutting SOE any slack on the quality of recent updates:

http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/posts/list.m?topic_id=56885

I played it for the couple of months and then abandoned it along with everyone else. But what I saw back then was so promising that I might give this a shot when it goes F2P, just to see what it's become.
 
I was in the beta..... After that I never even gave the game a chance.
 
I played for way too long as it is... Then they gave me some free come back n look time... They should have called it come back n hitch time.
 
Played beta and 2 months after release day...big disappointment. I did enjoy the crafting system quite a bit before they made it easy-mode though.
 
I played shortly after release and was fortunate not to have the stability problems many others experienced. About a year later I came back for a few weeks to play around and actually found the game had improved.

It has many problems, not least of which is a small community. But there's something about the game...few games - but Vanguard is one of them - have had me running around to see what's around the next hill, playing with game mechanics just to see how the world works, and so forth.
 
Played beta it was ok, kinda reminded me of Classic EQ since Brad MQquaid did run it, but i think the issue was he was trying to be niche and capture that old EQ feeling and by then WoW was running pretty well.
 
I played at launch for a few months like the other posters here. My EQ2 guild changed to Vanguard for like 6 months after it stabilized as well. We leveled up, built boats/houses and such. It was a pretty decent game, but the server we were on just didn't have the population so in the end we went back to EQ2 at the time. We just couldn't find enough people at the high end to field raids at all, since we only had like 16 peeps.
 
Wow....havent heard about this game in years.

Might give it a shot.
 
There was so much potential here, unfortunately SOE completely bungled it after buying it. I just don't think SOE wanted competition for EQ2.
 
Glyphic said:
I was in the beta..... After that I never even gave the game a chance.
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I was in the beta for about a year and a half, also the Alpha if I remember correctly. I told EVERYONE how it was incomplete and it was going to bomb. Nobody wanted to listen to me. Game was outrageously bad.
 
braamer said:
There was so much potential here, unfortunately SOE completely bungled it after buying it. I just don't think SOE wanted competition for EQ2.
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To be fair I think Sigil bungled it long before Sony stepped in. But you're right about the potential, and it had an amazing sense of scale that I haven't encountered anywhere else.
 
Had an amazing time in this game for awhile with some friends. Had lots of potential. The issues went far back before SOE ever acquired this. Sounded like lots of mismanagement when MS was putting millions into this and never got anywhere over the years. $30 million was it?
 
I think that, in general, it's a mistake to start a MMO and want to ship with an enormous scale. Too many try to compete with WOW in terms of size and scope, and they fail, ie, 38 Studios.

If I was to build a MMO it would have sensible goals, you can always add-on with expansions or bring up more servers.
 
VG had like no potential at all.. the execution on everything in that game was HORRIBLE... horrible animations, models, music, everything... its straight out of EQ1. Complete piece of garbage. I still have my original copy because it's like my trophy for the top MMO failure of them all. I guess financially TOR would probably compete but Vanguard was the first "WoW killer" to come around and then fall on its face... hilariously. Bad design, bad decisions... bad game. Still might check this out for kicks though.
 
Flopper said:
Hope he never makes another game, he missed the boat big time with Vanguard.
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I heard rumors that Brad had a bad drug problem in 2005 and 2006 that caused a lack of direction in the company. I don't know if it was true, but it was supposed to be the game came out so buggy and never seemed to get better before about 6months out of launch in beta. I had an early beta for that game and some patches were huge and totally changed the way the game played, but I do remember there being little content/updates before launch like SOE or Sigil was just trying to get the thing out the door as quick as possible.
 
lombasto said:
VG had like no potential at all.. the execution on everything in that game was HORRIBLE... horrible animations, models, music, everything... its straight out of EQ1. Complete piece of garbage. I still have my original copy because it's like my trophy for the top MMO failure of them all. I guess financially TOR would probably compete but Vanguard was the first "WoW killer" to come around and then fall on its face... hilariously. Bad design, bad decisions... bad game. Still might check this out for kicks though.
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If they did everything like they said they would... In beta I remember early versions of building boats, sailing, buying land plots, building and decorating houses. I even made an Inn that I ran some roleplaying sessions at. The crafting was tough and used a sort of combat system with skills to chop down trees and whatnot, then they dumbed it down so it was just right clicking to gather. So many ideas and none of them were ever finished.
 
lombasto said:
... its straight out of EQ1.
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And in my opinion, that's where the potential came from. As an EQ1 player for many years, myself and my peers were looking forward to the similarities.

VG originally had a lot of positive potential. When it went downhill is when they took their good concepts and dumbed them all down to try and compete with WOW.
 
I played VG in the beta and had fun but did not think it was worth paying a subscription for. I'll probably check it out again when it goes F2P.
 
I'd be interested in seeing the profitibility of the sub->f2p conversion of some of the recent games, like Aion.

It just seems to be getting a bit too far along to save some of these at this point.
 
Oomps said:
I'd be interested in seeing the profitibility of the sub->f2p conversion of some of the recent games, like Aion.
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SOEs f2p really is just a way to entice old players to give the game a shot and boost some sales via the marketplace. IMO, at least with what I have seen as an active EQ subscriber is that the population has gone up since f2p, and tons of people have created boxed accounts. Some spend money for classes/races and other stuff, but the majority don't. Also, it really does not effect the base of the population which is basically what keeps these games going. Either way, IMO it's a good thing for SOE to do, because I wouldn't mind giving Vanguard another shot(haven't played in like 3 years) and would probably subscribe to it if I liked it...
 
I bet it looks like garbage on a LCD screen though most of the older games I've tried don't look good on modern displays.
 
I got back into this and then quit again when they scrapped the updates for AAs and the character model revamp they were working on. I hope bringing Brad back will pull some EQ/VG loyalists back to funnel some money into the game. If they could get to the point that they could complete and roll out their previously promised updates, I'd give it a shot again. It was a great game but man it was empty, and the world is HUGE so when it's empty it feels REALLY empty.
 
EPOQ said:
I got back into this and then quit again when they scrapped the updates for AAs and the character model revamp they were working on. I hope bringing Brad back will pull some EQ/VG loyalists back to funnel some money into the game. If they could get to the point that they could complete and roll out their previously promised updates, I'd give it a shot again. It was a great game but man it was empty, and the world is HUGE so when it's empty it feels REALLY empty.
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In today's webcast, Silius said that AA's are in the plan and that they have a basic system in place. He said fully implementing it will depend on how successful the relaunch is.

I think the focus right now is F2P and the newbie/1-50 game, then as the measure of new players come in, they will know whether or not to invest more development resources into the 50-55 game (raids/aa's)
 
braamer said:
There was so much potential here, unfortunately SOE completely bungled it after buying it. I just don't think SOE wanted competition for EQ2.
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SOE bungles everything they get their hands on. They bungled SWG a few years after release. They bungled The Matrix Online after getting the rights from Monolith.
 
HulkaCaniac said:
SOE bungles everything they get their hands on. They bungled SWG a few years after release. They bungled The Matrix Online after getting the rights from Monolith.
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They didn't with EQ1 or EQ2 both of which are going strong.

MMO's either live on with strong but small community support or they fail. SW:TOR is going to fail because its community is fed up with how long its taken Bioware to address issues that should have been addressed during its very long beta process.

I think we should all not be allowed to use "WoW" in any sentence or meaning towards the genre of MMO's. WoW is a freak of nature that worked out under very specific circumstances. I do not believe that if you launched WoW today it would receive the same success. 99 percent of MMO's are limited successes , very few have paid off in the way WoW has.

MMO's need to be tailored not only for large groups of people but for small but dedicated player communities. Bioware dumped $200+ million on SW:TOR thinking it would have a massive community and look where that has got them.
 
I have looked forward to this for a while, but expected SOE to screw it up with their horrible F2P model. Being an old school EQ1 player and a fan of EQ2, I believe they can revive Vanguard I just don't know if their usual F2P would do the trick.
 
I picked it up on launch day, the game itself was pretty cool except the client ran like shit and the content dropped off significantly after level 40 or so. Balancing was a bit off but supposedly they fixed that a few months after I stopped playing. I'll most definitely be checking out what they've changed. Low hopes for a successful FTP model though.
 
The world in this game is comically enormous.

I remember playing the beta and eventually stumbled into some area that was a castle town thing. It was fucking enormous, had caverns leading all the way up from a small dockside area to another city area and eventually this gigantic fucking castle.

I think this was the place I mean:
http://vnmedia.ign.com/screenshots/vanguard/62941985.jpg

The scale is deceptive, it was massive. The inside was modeled out and everything... and that was just a small bit of the area. I have no idea how they thought they could fill all this shit because god damn.
 
bigdogchris said:
In today's webcast, Silius said that AA's are in the plan and that they have a basic system in place. He said fully implementing it will depend on how successful the relaunch is.

I think the focus right now is F2P and the newbie/1-50 game, then as the measure of new players come in, they will know whether or not to invest more development resources into the 50-55 game (raids/aa's)
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If they put them back in, I'd re-sub. GW2 is on my list as the next "go to" MMO but I would definitely pick Vanguard back up if they delivered on some of the stuff they promised. Did Brad speak at all on the webcast? I looked at the "welcome back Aradune" page and there was lots of player comments but NOTHING that I saw actually posted by him. You'd think he'd stop by and say hello or something.
 
EPOQ said:
If they put them back in, I'd re-sub. GW2 is on my list as the next "go to" MMO but I would definitely pick Vanguard back up if they delivered on some of the stuff they promised. Did Brad speak at all on the webcast? I looked at the "welcome back Aradune" page and there was lots of player comments but NOTHING that I saw actually posted by him. You'd think he'd stop by and say hello or something.
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Brad was not in the webcast as he is not a lead producer of any department. He did comment in the forums though and thank people for welcoming him back. I think Brad has been humbled over what has happened to him the past 5-7 years, so just having a job is enough to keep him quiet and happy.
 
Unless it becomes clear that Brad is doing anything that has any influence on the game, his return is a non-event. His current state of infamy is due to the perception that he worked a total of 15 minutes on Vanguard during the 5 years before it launched.
 
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