Time to Celebrate

When writing yesterday’s article I noticed a tendency to write about Vanguard in the past tense, as something that’s already gone. But it isn’t, yet. Since launch there have been people predicting Vanguard’s death within six months, and here we are, just under seven years later. And we have six more months. Some MMOs have lived and died in less time. This kind of game lives fast; the oldest one still around is 17 and is now a dinosaur. Six months is a long time in MMO years… itself more time than Vanguard would have had without SOE stepping in to take over the game.

Vanguard isn’t gone yet. Some MMOs are born and die in a period shorter than that. Six months to log some quality time in a game still rich with possibilities for progression and exploration. I’ve had relatively little time to game lately, but what I have I’ll be spending in Vanguard. As much as I’ve played it there are sights yet unseen and deeds left undone, a great world to explore and some of the best dungeons ever to delve.

There will be a time to mourn. But not yet, not yet.

A Requiem for Vanguard… But Not Yet the End

At one time it seemed plausible that MMORPGs that weathered the perils of development and the initial storm of launch would stick around for a while. Perhaps even indefinitely; on the subscription model even a meager few thousand players seemed sufficient to support server costs and an administrator or two, even if it wasn’t pulling in enough to fund a development team. A lot of games eked on like that for years; a few still do. Once MMORPGs became big business and the creatives became subservient to the accountants this idea was revealed as naïve. It’s not even sufficient for a product to be profitable in an absolute sense; in the business’ view it must be the most profitable employment of the resources allocated to it, or it’s a bad use of capital. This is why MMORPGs get shut down… sometimes even ones that are making money, like City of Heroes.

I believe Smed when he says that SOE had been losing money on Vanguard for a while now; back when there was no development that would have seemed questionable, but there’s an actual team that’s been working on the game for a while now, with a new raid launched mere weeks ago. The player base seems too small to support this. But it doesn’t even matter; if those developers would be better used on EQN or SOE’s mystery successor to SWG, that’s where they should be. The principles of good business demand it.

That I can see the business case for closing Vanguard and four other games doesn’t mean I am ambivalent about its impending sunset. It does, however, make it easier to blame the environment in which MMOs operate rather than the people who made the decision. This environment is simply not one that’s advantageous to the game playing public; business policy mandates that Vanguard be taken away, even though there is no technical reason that it couldn’t continue to operate in perpetuity. I’m guessing that if the opportunity were offered someone in the community would step up to be support for the game.

Many MMORPG development decisions seemed to make good business sense but turned out to be bad for the virtual world… and perhaps even bad for business. Witness the erosion of what was once a very robust virtual space in World of Warcraft and the attendant decline in that game’s subscription numbers as it changed from a game about exploring and leveling in a shared persistent environment to a game about running the same instanced content over and over at the level cap. Correlation isn’t causation, of course, but I’m not ready to write this off as mere coincidence.

I think virtual worlds need to break away from corporate control altogether and become open platforms that can be customized by players and run independently. Worlds that can’t be taken away by arbitrary business decisions. I don’t know if this will ever happen, but I’d like it to. Bad creative decisions will still happen, but in an open environment they could also be undone.

I think that the closure of Vanguard will be a loss for virtual worlds. For all its failures and problems it is a beautiful and ambitious game with love evident in every leaf and tree. It’s the only MMO that makes me feel like I am visiting a world rather than playing a game, every time I log in. Maybe that worked against it in the long run. Seven years is a pretty good run, though, and SOE is giving us six more months, more than I think we had reason to expect.

The wonderful video is from Kaozz, hopefully not her last. Set to Vanguard’s wonderful music, it’s a collage of the sights of Telon. These will live on in the memories of the gamers who loved it, and for me in thousands of screenshots, 130+ tracks of Todd Masten’s music and a fair bit of video. And I am not quite done with Vanguard yet.

Wushu, Trek and Heroes and Commitment

With the semester winding down I played a chunk of Age of Wushu the Martial Arts MMO that released on April 10. It has a lot to recommend it, including what appears to be significant depth, a big world, very nice graphics and some significant sandbox elements. Its learning curve is very steep, and understanding the game is additionally hindered by sometimes dodgy translation, a lack of (English) online resources and a UI that is both complicated and not always intuitive (but well above the average for Asian MMOs.)

Westerners, at least the old, grumpy kind who are set in the ways they’ve been doing things forever and hate having to learn new stuff, may find they have a hard time with Age of Wushu — it is very significantly different from the western MMO play experience, both because it is an unconventional sandbox and because it’s from offshore. Nevertheless, I judge that while its appearance of great depth may be fooling me, it may also be worth the effort. I have already given it more time than I have any other Korean or Chinese MMO, and I haven’t written it off yet.

Weirdly, though, Age of Wushu reminds me of a game designed in North America but recently bought by the Chinese — Star Trek Online. Which is not a sandbox in any sense but is so complex that it sometimes looks like one in the right light. Both games are well above the MMO average in terms of complexity. STO is easier to get into by quite a bit, but that’s largely because it’s been out for a while and there are plenty of English-language guides out there if you get stuck or confused. Both have a baroque quest setup with different kinds of missions and objectives, some of them delivered like traditional quests and some of them not. Both are also rich in minigames, although AoW’s are, as far as I can see, better integrated into the virtual world.

Playing Age of Wushu made me want to play Star Trek Online, when I got a little frustrated with it. But Age of Wushu, while it does have crutches like fast travel on short cooldowns, does have the stronger and more atmospheric virtual world. Which in turn made me think, again, of Vanguard.

I haven’t been playing much of anything at all, but I currently have twelve MMOs — true MMOs, not stuff like World of Tanks — installed on my PC. Which to be honest is way too many, but I’m fickle. The issue that arises is when a game like Age of Wushu or EVE Online or Star Trek Online or Vanguard makes and appearance in my personal Weltanschauung, one that really demands, if one’s to even approach the game’s potential, greater dedication over an extended period than I have put into any single game for any length of time. With maybe one exeption for World of Warcraft, but that’s one of the (now) many MMOs that doesn’t require any dedication.

This is frustrating for me personally, and my life as it stands won’t let that change anytime soon. So I rejoice that there is such a deep-looking game as Age of Wushu, but I’m sad that I’ll never get as much out of it as those happy few who can commit themselves to it will.

Repurposed Vanguard Content

A while back, as part of the drive to take the free to play, Vanguard’s many starting areas were consolidated into just four. Now, I have my issues with that, but the idea that you only need a few starting areas appears to be institutional at SOE, and in any case I did see the point of concentrating the limited developer hours available. At the time, though, all of those old starting areas just sat idle — you could even still do the content there if you were inclined to travel, but most of them were rather off the riftway network.

In what may be a sign of the eventual fate of all of those areas, the old Varanthari starter area of Lomshir has been retuned to the level 10-15 range. The quests are mostly the same, and there’s now a riftstone that drops you right where new Varanthari characters used to enter Telon for the first time. It’s probably not such a bad way to handle it, actually — other currently-idle starting areas could be targeted at other level ranges, and this way the lore and other neat racial stuff that’s in those old starter areas stays in the game and visible.

My own Mordebi Psionicist is right in that level range, so I sent him down there and it appears to be a comprehensive job, with the quests hitting that range in all three spheres and with the Serpent of Sihari, one of my own favorite lowbie open-world dungeons, kicked up a couple of levels as well. For a game that’s spent much of the last five years apparently at death’s door there’s still a great deal of vitality left in the old girl.

Back From Break While I’m On Break

Over the last several weeks the stress has been grinding on me to the point where I’ve been incredibly on edge and have not held it together 100% of the time. There are about a dozen sources of this stress that I won’t go into, but one of the big ones — the mounting pressure as finals loom — is now over with, and I have a couple of weeks of only full time plus work in which to unwind. It’ll feel like a vacation in Hawaii.

That’s more or less the reason there’s been so little in this space for the last two months; I have gotten a little writing done but almost no gaming, and thus just haven’t had much to talk about on what is still predominantly a blog about MMOs.

Traditionally my main game during any extended break has been EverQuest II. This time around I’ve been fooling with Guild Wars 2 and Vanguard, plus I may hit the Age of Wushu Beta that opens up to basically everybody on the 20th. And more Planetside 2 is always a possibility.

I was tempted by the shocking news that Turbine has resurrected Asheron’s Call 2 on a single server, but trying that would be subbing to AC1, and watching a couple of videos of the revived game cured me of the impulse. It’s an interesting artifact and I wish it well (and wonder about Turbine’s motives) but I can do without it.

So yeah, I’m back for the time being.

One Last, and One More

I’ve been having trouble on the video front of late; my hour-long kickoff to the Vanguard Let’s Play series failed to render more than once, and I’ve been having trouble owing to limited upload bandwidth with uploads failing after 6+ hours of wasted time. So even though I have a few vids in the can already, I’m still pushing them out.

First up this week is, I promise, the very last pre-launch Guild Wars 2 video that I’ll be doing. Headstart begins tonight some time around midnight… possibly as late as 3 AM even of everything goes smoothly. Finally, working the night shift is good for something, as I can plan to be awake for the first hours of real play. The vid is my first (filmed) and longest look at the Charr starter instance and low-level zone, the Plains of Ashford. I do have a Charr character planned, but likely won’t play him right away — I’ll be doing the Norn first.

Up next is the new Vanguard Let’s Play, continuing on the Isle of Dawn with the Crafting questline. I have one more of these ready to go and should have it posted some time next week. It is very unlikely I will make another video before next weekend, but when I do I’ll try to knock a couple of them out.

More Vanguard Gameplay

Over the last couple of days I stocked up a bit on videos. I have two more Vanguard vids in the can plus a new one from the recent Guild Wars 2 stress test; it’s just a matter of getting them uploaded, which has been problematic of late. Nevertheless, they will appear as quickly as I can get them up, and then there’s the planned weekend orgy in Guild Wars 2, so I should have more next week as well.

This time around we start in on the Isle of Dawn’s crafting questline, with an eye to completing the quests in all three spheres before leaving the Isle.

One more minor leak out of the Vanguard forums, by the way: the issue with rendering rain in Windows 7 is getting fixed soon. As someone who has only played under Vista and Win7, it’s occurred to me that I have actually never seen the rain in Vanguard, which is depressing especially in a game with dynamic weather that actually moves across the world.

Word From the Vanguard Devs and Play From the Isle of Dawn

The new episode of Ardwulf Presents is up and available: Part 2 of my Let’s Play from the Isle of Dawn. The hour-long first episode proved pretty unweildy when it came to rendering and uploading, so I’m shooting for 30 minutes or a little less for the rest; I hope to have Part 3 available by Tuesday morning and to get to either Crafting or Diplomacy in it.

In further Vanguard news, there’s an interesting thread over of the game’s forums where lead developer “Silius” Grant talks a bit about what’s planned moving forward. Right now, plans are still in flux but what’s on the table includes:

• A small content update hitting in the next couple of weeks, featuring a new overland raid and “A new system that will benefit everyone and reinforce the idea of exploration in Telon.” No clue what this latter might be.
• Work on the next big update, City of Brass, has started. As I recall some work had already been done in the past, so this is presumably a resumption.
• More items should be showing up in the marketplace.
• Initial planning on the next big dungeon after CoB is underway. This place is not Stirrhad, the Nexus or the Cave of Wonders. The first two, when they do get worked on, will be a mix of group and raid content; the last may be 100% raid.
• The general priority is to utilize parts of the world that are currently empty before adding any wholly new areas. Which is cool by me — it’s not like there isn’t plenty of space.

A F2P Addendum and an Extended Look at Early Vanguard Gameplay

First up, we have a brief (for a change) addendum to the last epsiode concerning Vangurd’s free-to-play transition, with a couple of clarifications and corrections.

For today’s more substantial second course, I keep promising a look at Vanguard’s actual gameplay, and here it is — an hour-long look at one of the four current starter areas, the Isle of Dawn, on a free account.

I plan to do at least another video or two to follow up on this last one, which hopefully will make it up by early next week. After that, expect some Guild Wars 2 vids from me after the headstart begins.

Ardwulf Presents: Vanguard is Now Free to Play

One of the things I missed while out in the woods for more than a week was SOE’s soft launch of free to play Vanguard. So one of the first gaming things (really the only one) I did upon getting back was to go in and poke around. So here’s what I found in video form.

I expect additional wrinkles to be added in the Tuesday patch/official f2p launch, but as it stands now there are some interesting departures from the standard SOE f2p implementation, some of them very good and some of them fishy or problematic. We’ll see how things shake out, but for the next couple of weeks Vanguard will likely be the main thing I play, so I’ll have more thoughts later on.