|
megalodong posted:The class design was great. It wasn't balanced at all (paladins were far and away the best tanks due to the number of immunities they had, disciples could solo anything and everything), but the classes were really interesting and if you didn't care about Hardcore World First Raiding (lol there was none anyway), it was fine. This really touches on the main points. I loving loved the class design in Vanguard and it really deserves to be in a better game. Bards were touched upon upthread as a great example. All the healer classes were fun and good and were way more proactive than what people are use to in other MMOs. There really wasn't a healer that just planted their rear end in a spot and played health bar whack a mole with a big heal / small heal / regen / damage shield and nothing else. Blood Mages and Disciples were kind of the epitome of this: Blood Mages were cloth casting wizard healers. Their primary method of healing was literally by draining enemies to heal your party. They did have a standard healer single target big heal, but you damage yourself using it, so they needed to drain enemies to account for that anyways. Where things got really interesting was that as you cast spells (on both your separate offensive and defensive targets, another magical idea that belongs in a better MMO) you built up a blood bond with your targets. These acted kind of like reverse combo points for rogues in WoW. Some abilities were more potent or added extra effects if your blood bond with the target was high. Some abilities consumed some or all of the blood link for powerful effects. And if you already had another healer in the group they could take up a DPS stance and basically become a ghetto wizard that could switch hats back to healing at a moments notice if things got hairy. Disciples were basically kung fu healing monks and they owned. They had a secondary resource in Ki that built over time to power their big heals among other things, but in order to build Ki, you needed to actively be fighting, you *could not* just sideline and heal only. In exchange for this, they had the ability to literally kick the health out of enemies and did some pretty amazing group regneration simply by virtue of being a street fightin' person. In addition to this, they also had a combo system where if you used certain attacks in a particular order, you would get one of a handful of short duration buffs that did things like improve Ki generation, increase healing the group received, debuff the enemy in certain ways, and the like. Since they were a monk hybrid, they also had the ability to Feign Death and could flop over if poo poo got bad so they could revive in the aftermath. There were cool little mechanics and sub-systems all over the place in the class design. Dread Knights had a similar mechanic to the Blood Mage's blood bond, except each breakpoint on the dread bar added increasingly debilitating debuffs on the enemy (-crit chance, reduced defenses, reduced attack speed, ect). Shamans kind of had a psuedo WoW talent tree where at a certain level they pick one of three totems that gives them a unique pet and semi-permanently locks them in as more of a tank, more of a melee dpser, or more of a ranged blaster/debuffer. Clerics could pick from one of eight or so D&D style dieity domains that they pulled extra spells and abilities from. Every class had multiple WoW-warrior like stances to help adapt them to situations. DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Apr 6, 2018 |
#
¿
Apr 6, 2018 20:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 20:41 |
|
|
forge posted:This is basically EQ1 recreated. If you hated EQ1 then you might as well move on. I can understand why they want to do the 100% non instanced dungeons, but I really wish they would do like they did for the early EQ2 dungeons where most of it was non instanced, but the final encounter with the big bad was so a single group couldn't shut everyone else out of setting the big bad guy for hours at a time. In any case, here's hoping they adopt some of the good things that came after EQ. I would be very cross if warriors went back to 'taunt every 3 seconds, kick /bash every 10, wait for auto attack otherwise you chump'.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2018 18:31
|
|
|
forge posted:If you watch their last video, in the one dungeon they showed that is pretty much complete. At the boss a giant door falls and locks you in with the boss. I'm not saying you can't cheese it and run in. But they are taking some steps to keep others out while your fighting the boss. That might just be that zone only as we have not really seen anything else. Is less so about keeping others from loving with you while you camp the proverbial throne room waiting for the boss and more so about preventing one group from running a monopoly on the throne room encounter for hours on end. My preference would be for the final encounter of the dungeon to be both a stout challenge and also something everyone can access without calling a camp. Everything else in the dungeon? Sure, who cares, open dungeon for all the rest of that bullshit. At the very least I would hope for like a EQ1 Plane of Justice style events that sucks your group into a separate area for a little one off challenge for a modicum of a reward.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2018 18:20
|
|
|
MF_James posted:poo poo happened all the time in EQ1, I had specifically created a monk and leveled up to max, guild geared him etc just so I could train other guilds with him and my druid to fight for raid bosses. Ssra temple was the That's the thing though: That sort of stuff was fine for me in high school, but I've got way less tolerance for it now. One guild being able to monopolize content like that and actively body block people from seeing the endgame sounds deeply unfun in the context of modern MMOs.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2018 16:23
|
|
|
I was on Zebuxoruk back in the day and based on the stories I heard from the other servers, it was the most drama free place in the game. The uberguilds all cooperated and they kept running serverwide blacklists for known shitheads, ninja looters, and drama stirrers. Endgame raiding was done by a managed guild rotation and everyone involved was careful about taking their turns and not stepping on each other's toes. Getting into said raid rotation (specifically Temple of Veeshan during Velious era, both North and East) was as easy as proving you could hack it by being able to kill Sontalak at the ToV entrance.
DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Apr 24, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Apr 23, 2018 23:14
|
|
|
NLJP posted:I mean we did have some drama on zeb (Dethen is one I'll always remember but ultimately wasn't too interesting) but yeah compared to most we were tame. Dethen was just an outspoken idiot and was a permanent member of the server blacklist. He got outed as a notorious shithead pretty early in his career. His whole thing was that he would dissappear for a couple of weeks/months while he leveled an alt, would join a guild with said alt, do something stupid like ninja loot a Ring War head, /shout "You got Dethen'ed, bitch!" or something of that nature, and then said alt would join the blacklist as well. He was basically the EQ equivalent of a SA troll who keeps getting banned but kept paying to re-register, like the EQ equivalent of Caro. I think Dethen eventually had a 'friend' who would feed information about all of Dethen's alts to the guilds on the sly and the guilds slow rolled him, letting him get near 50 or so before he would get publicly outed and blacklisted. Fun fact: When World of Warcraft came out, Dethen inadvertently followed my guild to the Whisperwind server, back when the community and forum boards still got a lot of use where he Dethen'ed all over the place there and basically got blacklisted from the server. Edit: Also since we were Zebuxoruk buddies, if you ever remember a Gnome Wizard named Zumben, that was me. DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Apr 24, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2018 14:52
|
|
|
If you weren't in Tri-Lith you were making jokes about the people in Tri-Lith, IIRC. I for the life of me could not for the life of me remember the name of the guild I was in. I remember when we migrated to Wow we became Band of Brothers, but I can't remember the originating EQ golf choir the life of me. Is there an EQ equivalent of the SA Old Avatar Preview site that tracks your characters history?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2018 20:16
|
|
|
forge posted:I would say it's really been in development for around 2 years. There were a number of things that happened way back (failed kickstarter, getting private funding, etc) which slowed all development down. I think all the things you really see are from around 2016 and on. The old unity code might be from back then but I think most parts have been recreated. Yeah, I really doubt a lot of the game was salvaged from when the lead developer was that crazy evangelical lady and her family working basically for free. Back two years ago they had what appeared to be overworld content, but it was all made using stock Unity assets that were drag and dropped in. My guess is that as they have more time to flesh out their world, there will be less obvious Unity store cut/pastes, especially if they get enough early access whales that they can take their time making things. Even still, Brad McQuaid. Take everything he does with a grain of salt. If it's good, thank his employees. If it's bad, blame him. IIRC everything people loved about Vanguard (class design, diplomacy, crafting) was mostly out of his hands or something he said he didn't like after the fact.
|
|
#
¿
May 1, 2018 14:19
|
|
|
Zil posted:It was benzos I thought? I don't think he's choosy.
|
|
#
¿
May 3, 2018 12:59
|
|
|
TheAgent posted:vermintide 2 is loving great, but warframe checks a lot of mmo boxes without actually being an mmo (kinda sorta?) I liked warframe a lot back in beta when it was a buggy janky mess. When I picked it up in live many patches later it was like a completely different game that I was no longer interested in. You could say I'm a bad game aficionado.
|
|
#
¿
May 7, 2018 03:58
|
|
|
keep it down up there! posted:Sounds like Ranger isn't a pet class, which is nice. I'm not a fan of pet classes but I like the general theme of bow users. Most MMOs mix those. They are pulling their influence more from EQ, in which rangers weren't pet classes either. It also took them like 3-4 expansions to get EQ1 ranger bows to be actually worthwhile as opposed to something you spend a shitload of money (level and skill appropriate fletching materials cost $$cashmoney$$ to feed) with to do substandard damage even compared to a rangers already mediocre melee damage output at the time. It's hard to underestimate how bad EQ rangers were and for how long. It was really something tragic. Here's hoping Pantheon rangers aren't total poo poo as well.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2018 21:18
|
|
|
Groovelord Neato posted:hybrids in everquest were 2/3 warrior and 1/3 the respective caster (paladin 1/3 cleric, shadow knight 1/3 necro, ranger 1/3 druid). the problem was rangers were more like 1/3 warrior 1/3 druid 1/3 poo poo. Ranger always seems like more of a rogue hybrid than a warrior, with the lower HP than other hybrids and chain armor and whatnot. It's just that what ranger gave up compared to rogue (hide+sneak, backstab) was way way better than what they got for it in exchange (low level bullshit druid spells and not even the good ones). They don't even get spirit of the wolf until what, mid-30s? To top that off, before Velious they ate poo poo on that hybrid xp penalty. They had warrior taunt but a glass jaw to go along with it. Granted rogues had their own terrible mechanics to deal with (see poison making and how few people actually engage with it in any meaningful manner) but at least they excelled at putting pointy objects in squishy things with even minimal investment.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2018 20:49
|
|
|
Macdeo Lurjtux posted:Just because the content is era specific doesn’t mean the classes are. EQ TLE servers still run on modern architecture with years of bug fixes, buffs and QOL improvements. Like in ‘99 a ranger wouldn’t start receiving spells until level 9 and wouldn’t have enough to fill all 8 gems until mid 20s. Not to mention a skill caps well below what they currently are. I think at the time rangers dual wield capped at 100 at level 50. No, IIRC they actually got dual wield up to 200 skill. They had a lower cap on double attack (iirc it was 175, which was still pretty respectable) but they didn't get the big damage backstabs/flying kicks like rogues/monks nor the beefy crits/crippling blows like warriors. Their spell damage options were roundly pretty terrible by the level you got it and yeah flame lick + snare did ok for aggro, but you know what worked better? Pal stuns and SK disease cloud and those were attached to classes that didn't have glass jaws. The only thing Rangers had that could make the other tanks/pullers truly envious was harmony, which druids had access to as well and was also really more useful when tandem pulling with a monk or SK. I think the only dual wielder that capped out at a dual wield skill below 150 was Bard, and theirs only went to like 75-100. Monk DW caps went up to like 225, I think warrior/Rogue went to 210, Ranger 200. Double attack was like 220 Warrior, 215-210 for monk/rogue, 200 for SK/Pal, and 175 for ranger.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2018 21:02
|
|
|
Dungeons in everquest were glorified chat rooms where you occasionally squash goblins. That's why they were awesome and awful at the same time. To be honest, I'm kind of okay with the over world having a lot of empty space and traversal being a thing. If you shoehorn every place on the map to have a purpose it turns the world into a theme park. I kind of like big spaces that don't necessarily have a lot going on with it, add poo poo that fleshes out the world that doesn't necessarily have an NPC nearby to give you a quest involving it. I loved the odd poo poo off the beaten path like the chessboard in butcherblock and the like.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 16, 2019 23:48
|
|
|
Percelus posted:cc really has been left at the wayside in favor of aoe'ing everything in a dungeon at once The reason wow moved away from CC intensive fights / Dungeons was because of their attempt in going from the vanilla game to the first and especially second expansion to make all the dps specs group viable. Player groups were already one person smaller than EQ but the only classes that had consistent crowd control were the dedicated hard dps classes (hunter, mage, warlock, rogue). The hybrid like shaman and paladins and druids in vanilla EQ were kind of a mess outside of their respective healing specs and not super viable, leading to things like elemental shamans and ret paladins being forced to wear healing gear and heal anyway. TBC did a lot to bring those hybrid dps specs in line with dedicated damage classes, but the Dungeons (especailly hard modes before everyone had really good gear) were tuned with a group with 2ish CCers in mind. While my elemental shaman could tear it up damage wise with the other dps classes, I still was losing out (and sometimes actively kicked from groups) over a mage or warlock who could cc a spellcaster in a nasty 5 mob pull on top of bringing top shelf dps. By the time Wrath came along, Blizzard's answer wasn't necessarily to give everyone hard recastable CC, it was just to adjust the tuning such that you didn't need it. By this point, all the tank kits were adjusted to all have some measure of area effect threat (I vaguely remember druid tanks having a lot of problems with this in TBC) such that they could better handle big crowds of bullshit and the need for hard cc for dungeon groups want near as intense. I would trust that any direct everquest descendanta that had hard crowd control requirements would work that into the meta. EQ grouping really was balanced around having 1-2 hard support classes like enchanters and bards and shaman. Vanguard carried that philosophy, and psionicists in that game were really neat (I give Vanguard credit - the class design in general was really cool, shame about the rest of the game). That being said, I'm still skeptical about this game. I don't trust that Benzo Brad has learned the mistakes of the past and he's going to ride his vision of the edge of a cliff.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2019 15:13
|
|
|
please knock Mom! posted:EQ enchanters were a dps class tho I mean... Nobody took an enchanter for their brown-hot dps numbers (at least in the early expansions). They took them because of their ability to control a fight and make the dedicated killers that much more killy. They could throw out some damage spells when dealing with single pulls or when soloing (or when paired up with another enchanter / bard who was running crowd control). Charmed pets could tear poo poo up, but they could also be a liability if it broke mid fight or pathing broke and it starts running off in random directions. If an enchanter got in a group and said he wasn't going to cc or debuff because he was a dps chanter, that would be an enchanter not long for that group. At that point you're a third rate wizard with better mana regen, and wizards are already kind of not great if you're use to the era of EQ that Project 99 lives in. Charm becomes a lot more potent a damage tool in the later expansions with dire charm and AAs and the like.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2019 17:26
|
|
|
onesixtwo posted:enchanters Fair enough. I never played enchanter in classic and my experience with pub enchanters tended to be very hit or miss. The ones that were on top of keeping their charm under control were aces, but about as often as it worked out it would usually be the prime cause of things falling to poo poo, especially if it was a risky charm like a wizard npc. Lower to mid level before the charms really start lasting a long time and before chanters had their -resist debuffs it was usually a big enough gamble that I remember some tanks/healers saying not to charm.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2019 23:50
|
|
|
The important thing to note between a wizard and a mage is that a Wizard is straight up a blaster, it's their one thing they do (besides teleporting) and they have the highest damage spells as well as the highest mana efficiency direct damage spells of any class. They also have guaranteed damage against even highly resistant enemies with the Lure of ___ spells that are nearly unresistable. The major problem being that big shots of burst damage in EQ got you killed, and there's no bigger shot of burst damage than ripping 1600 damage sunstrike and the monster remembering why he doesn't like you. Mages have less options available to them in terms of dealing spell damage (and it is also less mana efficient too), but their pets and their summoned utility items bring a lot more utility to the table. Mages also have a couple of very in demand spells for grouping in the form of Call of the Hero (which instantly teleports someone to your location so they don't have to leg it to you through an entire dungeon) and Modulation rods that you can use to convert health to mana for so casters get an extra shot of mana in longer fights.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2019 07:42
|
|
|
FrostyPox posted:Isn't there some nominally playable form of Star Citizen right now? Seems like even that trainwreck is more a of a thing than Pantheon. There was a couple of things that vanguard did right (namely, I will defend the class design in that game to the death). It's just a shame about everything else in vanguard that was awful. Edit vvvvvv I mained disciple and the way the combo system was set up was amazing on top of the whole "kicking people to make your allies healthy" thing. DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Aug 24, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Aug 23, 2019 22:29
|
|
|
CoffeeBooze posted:Have you seen warplots? Did anyone? Wasn't the whole problem with that being it was pvp Raid vs Raid preform and nobody wanted to put up with that much organizing to pvp when you could do any of the drop in stuff?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2020 18:05
|
|
|
Givin posted:I wish World of Warcraft was really Warhammer Online every day except they had three factions instead of two. God could you imagine if Warhammer online was the order races vs chaos, dark elves, and beastmen and the green skins were just a third faction who was fighting whoever was the most powerful at the time? (including other greenskins should they be the most powerful)
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2020 19:19
|
|
|
Freakazoid_ posted:It worked in UO because you had plenty of stuff you could kill on your own and there really wasn't a shortage of decent gear on the low/mid end, so if by some mishap you die and can't get to your corpse you probably had plenty of back-up gear stored at your house. Yeah, the thing about like all the MMOs that came out after EQ is that you completely upgraded your gear/outfit like every 3-5 levels when leveling up. Once you got a decent kit of gear in EQ you kept it for 20+ levels. My wizard used the same robes for like two years. If you had no-drop (or god forbid epic weapons) or otherwise quite expensive items from a zone that wasn't ran often it could be near-irreplaceable if you lost a corpse.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2020 20:03
|
|
|
The weird thing is, I think that there is space out there for a successor to the EQ style MMO. McQuaid was absolutely NOT the person who should of been at the helm though. Everything he did post-EQ showed that he learned all the wrong lessons and was operating out of a place of ego. I kind of wish when McQuaid came to these forums once upon a time that we didn't immediately run him off because one of the things I really wanted to ask him was what he learned from Vanguard. This was always doomed to a comedy of disasters. Too bad though.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2020 16:40
|
|
|
Groovelord Neato posted:Didn't Richard Garriott get an insane payday because NCSoft forged his signature on stock documents. They forged his resignation letter while he was in space, and yes, I believe he won that suit. The guy comes from money though to begin with, so he was always going to be able to live comfortably no matter what.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2020 19:21
|
|
|
hobocrunch posted:I mean the fact that a 28 year old kid is basically schooling them on programming language is a pretty good sign that literally everyone at that company is out of touch and still living in 1999. It's one thing to make a game that pays homage to EQ1 but it's entirely another negligent thing to program it the exact same way, and then spend peoples investment on that as well. Furthermore, no one is going to loving apologize for it either because Brad is dead and it's most likely his fault. I mean, at this point I wouldn't have been surprised if the codebase Brad was using for the game was literally the EQ1 code from 1998 that the team has been aggressively trying and failing to modernize to 2020 standards.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2020 14:44
|
|
|
frajaq posted:wait what happened with that Complete vaporware: https://massivelyop.com/2020/09/01/camelot-unchained-promises-that-a-game-is-starting-to-emerge/ 8 years of development: "A game is starting to emerge" That was in September 2020 mind.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2021 02:29
|
|
|
cmdrk posted:EQ is kind of a strange game because it embraces fundamental imbalance between classes. To be fair, compared to any modern MMO the original EQ was downright glacial in terms of APM economy. Even on the classes that were extremely fidgety (bard, shaman, chanter, paladin) that were at the time considered arthritis inducing still basically doesn't compare to something like FFXIV, which itself is significantly slowed down compared to WoW. But I feel like the classes in EQ also specialize in their particular niches way harder than anything that came after. Yeah clerics got DDs and Stuns and some AoE and undead nukes, but the mana efficiency wasn't there like it was for a Wizard/Mage/Druid and that 300 mana that went into a single nuke takes a minute to regenerate, so that's both time and mana that could of been spent keeping your team alive with your incredibly mana efficient healing. Compare that to something like WoW where even the hard healing classes could respec into damage or tanking respective to their classes - or XIV where even if you are playing a healing class, it's still generally expected that you help throw out damage when you aren't immediately needing to keep someone alive at that very second because MP constraints really aren't that big of a deal. Hard support classes like EQ Shaman/Bards/Chanters have kind of fallen by the wayside in post-WoW world too. Since MP and HP regen in and out of combat really isn't a thing anymore and crowd control / debuffs have been completely de-emphasized what you're stuck with is just being the guy what has the buffs and that's kind of boring. I remember back in the early days of Vanilla WoW where they still tried to do hard support Paladins and Shamans and it kind of sucked because the buffs weren't event close to being as impactful as the old EQ era bards, but they were still incredibly fiddly and micromanagement heavy, and when you weren't fiddling with the blessings and totems you were expecting in groups/raids to heal, offensive buff support like the EQ bard basically wasn't a thing in Vanilla raids. Killing off the hard buffing micromanagement aspect of those classes and adding that functionality to other classes in Black Crusade was kind of necessary - and I say that as someone who primarily played a Shaman in Vanilla / TBC era WoW specifically because I wanted to be a hard support analogue like the EQ Bard but the way WoW was designed and balanced they were pretty much completely neutered compared to how Bards were in EQ1 and even EQ2.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 25, 2021 20:11
|
|
|
Sachant posted:^ These were all bad changes. Probably. But they also made the games a lot more accessible to people who didn't have the time and the patience to sit in one spot in a dungeon to bash goblins while they shitpost in /party and /guild. In order to have that strong social aspect you have to have gameplay and mechanics designed around being social. If you have to be in a group to make significant progress, that forces you to be pretty social. If it takes a long time to get things accomplished combined with If you have a hard support class that excels in party dynamics, that forces you to be social. The problem being that the sorts of mechanics and design you do for something you want to have a strong social aspect fundamentally raises the bar for entry for more casual players who may not have the time to commit to it. Ultimately I think there is a balance point to be made in that is welcoming to more casual players while still having a very group-oriented playstyle, but the developers would really have to thread the needle in a way that I don't think Pantheon can accomplish.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 25, 2021 23:17
|
|
|
Vanguard also had separate offensive and defensive target, which I wish more mmos stole, it made classes like disciple and blood mage actually playable. The disciple straight up had spells that keyed of both the offense target and defensive target, where you could life tap the enemy and give it to the tank in one button press.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2021 00:57
|
|
|
I said come in! posted:How is the state of the game now? Is a lot of skills and quests still not working? It comes in waves. Combat more or less works and the skills are in as they were mined. Content is sparse and largely relegated to the lower level stuff that had a lot more traffic as they bring in the higher level stuff. I think a big problem is that Vanguard wasn't as succinctly datamined like WoW / EQ / Et Al were so especially as they get into the higher level stuff, there are dungeons and quests that they are probably going to have to make up wholecloth. I kind of wish when they shut it down that they could of got one of the developers to grab the quest and item databases because IIRC most of it is being rebuilt from the ground up, in some places by memory, which is why it's taking so long.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2021 18:36
|
|
|
FrostyPox posted:
Blockchain is a buzzword invented by scam artists to part the idle wealthy from their money. It's scammers and idiots all the way down.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 14, 2021 20:13
|
|
|
Zil posted:I was going to say Omens, but Gates might be more accurate. Legacy of Yakesha was where I ultimately pulled the rip cord and bailed on EQ. I was a broke high school student and never was able to buy Lost Dungeons of Norrath, so I never really got to tool around with the augments or the instanced dungeons. By the time that I had money and was able to afford buying xpacs again, WoW was right around the corner and I pooled money for that. Edit: I remember hearing my guildmates talking about the LDON and being really unimpressed with it, and their response to LoY was "But y tho?"
|
|
#
¿
Apr 20, 2021 17:44
|
|
|
Sachant posted:I always wanted to see the DAOC Friar make a comeback. The appeal of being a dude who whacks goblins with a stick in order to heal his buddies is hard to argue with. Vanguard also had the disciple, which was a monk / healer hybrid that kicked people healthy. It was what I maimed back in the day and it ruled. Their single target tank healing wasn't as great as a cleric or blood mage, but they had aoe passive healing in abundance and made great secondary healers in a group because you had great support and feign death.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 18, 2021 18:15
|
|
|
Harrow posted:Isn't there a Vanguard private server out there? Or is that still in development and hasn't materialized yet? See below, but also it's still in development because of a combination of A) it's volunteer run and the admins still work day jobs and B) They are having to re-create systems and mechanics wholecloth from scratch because the datamining on certain aspects of the game was incomplete. It's playable (kind of) but it certainly isn't feature complete.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2021 23:43
|
|
|
30.5 Days posted:This is kind of a stupid question, but why does everyone in MMO HMO talk about how it was done dirty and the best MMO ever if they themselves weren't playing it. Did something change from launch that made it worse like with SWG? A combination of McQuaid mismanagement and publisher fuckery because of McQuaid's mismanagement. Vanguard was originally being carried by Microsoft Games Studio, but they got sick of McQuaid loving off and making weird decisions and constant delays. This was the point at which McQuaid was allegedly stealing benzos and painkillers from his employees desks, for reference. Microsoft were originally just going to drop backing outright, but then they decided to recoup some costs and sold the rights off to Sony Online Entertainment for pennies on the dollar. SOE basically bought it so they could can it since they were a direct competitor. They forced the team to release what they had and scramble to hammer out what hit at launch, and then after that it went into back burner mode because SOE assumed they could just move all the talent off to other projects and collect subs from the dedicated fan base. The programming team after launch pretty rapidly got moved off after launch to the point where for most of the games live life cycle the entire patch team was like, literally just one guy.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 26, 2021 21:10
|
|
|
Yeah that's the thing, there was so much good stuff about Vanguard. The highs were incredibly high (class design, world design, tradeskills, diplomacy) but the lows were incredibly deep and persistent (bad framerate even on good machines, memory leaks, glacial patch cycle). The game at launch was extremely solo unfriendly almost to the point of old school EQ. That eased up on one of the early patches and got a bit more solo friendly, but rogues and warriors still had a bear of a time. People leaving exacerbated the problem. Turns out when you make a party focused game its hard to do stuff when nobody is around at your level. Edit : I fully believe that had the SOE had the money and patience for it, they probably could have FFXIV-ed it. It was quite honestly a better Everquest 2 than Everquest 2 actually was In terms of atmosphere and game play. DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Oct 27, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2021 17:17
|
|
|
Frog Act posted:EQ had race restrictions for class. EQ had some of the most profound gameplay impacting racial characteristics of any MMO, really, when you consider the good/evil system and racial cities. An Ogre Shaman would have a very different experience - and less access to certain important places absent disguise spells or a crazy grind - than a Barbarian. Even if you picked the right race, you could still get got it you picked an odd religion. Or you run into situations like how certain gnome class religion combos were more or less tolerated basically in all cities. Off the top of my head, I think Veeshan worshiping bards got a big leg up with skyshrine faction in Velious.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 1, 2022 10:23
|
|
|
Node posted:Wow, really? I thought the state of the emulation was very minimal at this point. Can you give us a trip report on it when you have the time? I reserve a special place in my heart for Vanguard. I check in every 6 months or so. Development is slow and prodding, but it is still moving along. The big thing slowing it down is that 1) it's a passion project of a small team of unpaid part time volunteers 2) trying to recreate a whole bunch of systems wholecloth because the core database for things like skills and quests and equipment that were never really datamined before its shutdown to the degree of most bigger MMOs did. Between the original SOE shutdown and multiple sell-offs of the IP and computers/hardware to several other companies, I bet most of the original design documents, patch notes, and source assets are lost to time. I don't think it's ever going to be done, but it could be good to gently caress around in with goons for a couple weeks living through nostalgia. DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Jul 4, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Jul 4, 2023 04:18
|
|
|
Oh hey I've not checked into the pantheon thread in a while... *5 pages later* I never thought I would say this, but this had a better shot when Brad McQuaid was still alive. Say what you will about The Vision (tm), I don't think Brad would of debased himself enough to try to turn the game into Tarkov. Man the Vanguard nostalgia is kicking back in again, so I did the once every other year lol at the emulator project and seen 5 people were logged in and the forums have been dead silent since 2022
|
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2024 19:41
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 20:41 |
|
|
PrinnySquad posted:The vision tm seems to be much more alive with M&M. Which will be absolutely hilarious/depressing if that launches before Pantheon, in like 1/4 the dev time for 1/10th the budget (at least). I had to do a double take when I started looking at this because it's ran by a former EQ developer that ran a series of EQ classic interviews with other former staff members. I watched one of his gameplay streams and it seems like he maybe learned some of the correct lessons from his time in the space. I'm digging the art style in the streams for this and they seem pretty responsive to the community. They are also avoiding VC and investor money and it's basically being developed as a passion project. It also sounds like they are skewing towards being more limited in scope and complexity and focusing in on that. Like McQuaid's "The Vision" but in the best possible way - like having a very solid idea of the a thing that is in your wheelhouse and (more importantly IMO) in your capability of making happen. The guy at the top seems extremely chill based on his streams but also extremely grounded. He knows what he wants but he also seems willing to listen to the people in his orbit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gGnWkKx3gg I'm interested, and here's hoping they have enough steam to make it to early access. I may try to get in on one of the weekend events and see what I can do with it. Edit: they also look like they are pretty good at streaming themselves working on the game and giving the community an idea of whats going on behind the scenes: https://www.youtube.com/@monstersmemories/featured DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 20:57 on May 4, 2024 |
|
#
¿
May 4, 2024 16:30
|
|
