The Safehouse

Fanguard Beta: An Industry noob's tale

It was a rough flight, Southwest economy, pleather seats and a flight attendant who thought the passengers were his private audience. It had little affect on my mood though, it was my first fan-faire for any game in the six years I had been playing them, and I was more psyched then Paul Luna talking about Vanguard (alright maybe not that psyched). I hopped on-board my shuttle to the Emerald Suites and thus began what was arguably the most expensive and undeniably one of the most fun two days of my life.

Upon entering the lobby of the Emerald Suites I immediately recognized Cindy Bowens and Travis Williams from pictures I had seen in the PoTD archive. I snagged my registration pack and went to sit on a staircase to check it out. Soon afterwards Cindy came over to talk to me, perhaps observing my solo presence at the event, and my very apparent lack of knowing what to do for the next seven hours until Planet Hollywood was scheduled to start.

I decided to go change and find my guts, so I could strike up some conversations with some of the development team. When I got back to the lobby, I talked with Paul Luna about laptops and graphics cards for awhile. Eventually I found myself and a fellow aspiring designer at the local mall with Jeff – The ATI guy (apparently, buying him drinks will get you product) and Travis.

Travis Williams is a truly diverse and rich individual not too mention extremely funny. He is an individual with a supreme understanding of quality MMO and an equally solid grasp on keeping a development team together and steaming along. Exactly one of the people you want “filling in the gaps” to quote Glip (Nick Parkinson). Travis has a peculiar obsession with his phone, but an impeccable fashion sense. In fact, he helped me equip myself with some nice club-wear for later that night.
Jeff – The ATI guy, when referred to as Jeff, is always confused with Jeff Butler, thus we know him as Jeff – The ATI guy. His job consists in a large part of drinking with associates, but nonetheless he knows the gaming industry well….very well. We talked at length over many Coronas about Cost-Benefit Analysis in the gaming industry and I certainly learned a thing or two.

In my college fraternity we have a title we give to someone at events. We call him the “Jaba” as in “Jaba the Hut” because that person has the ability to be the center of everyone around him. This focus is akin to the focus the real “Jaba the Hut” has because of his status. Watching Paul Luna talk about Vanguard at Planet Hollywood made him my Jaba of Fanguard. He had at least everyone within a 10 foot radius listening to him, and when he was done he went off to create a new point of origin. My first impression was he was drunk, and then I realized that it was me that was drunk and he was simply passionate about the arguably revolutionary systems that Vanguard has in place.

Saturday was demo day and interview day. The lovely Emeralds Suites ended up booking the interview rooms and this caused some lag in the interviews and headaches for Cindy and the interviewers (Travis Williams, Darrin McPherson and Bill Fisher). Gameworks was scheduled for 8:00 pm that night for the ever so anticipated drawings.

I spent the morning before and after my interview talking with Fricka about her business endeavors, her technology (nice phone!), and her experience with SGO. As I am sure many of you know she is a wonderfully nice person. It’s really hard to find such friendly people these days but she certainly fits the bill. Around four o’clock when Fricka was closing up shop she mentioned getting over to the Demo room to catch a quick play of the game. Since I myself had not gotten a good look of the game between showing up 15 minutes after the demo started (all good seats were taken), interviewing for Associate Game Designer, and catching breakfast, I asked if I could tag along in the hopes we could catch them before they closed down. We got there when everyone was being kicked out. Fricka talked to one of the designers and they agreed to give her a short private play of the game (apparently, you cannot say no to Fricka). Myself being nobody I assumed I was going to be asked to leave, but just as I was turning around Fricka made me her honorary photographer to take pictures of her playing, so in my extreme luck I got a good close up look at the game.

This game looks amazing. The colors are much more vibrant then EQ2. The combat is not overly difficult but it is complex enough to keep you thinking. Fricka within 5 minutes had already owned a chicken and a sheep (Go Fricka!). Within 10 minutes she had hit level 2 and gone and trained her first opener. The variety of avenues that a single fight can go through is tremendous. Seeing everything that your group is doing and being able to choose what your reaction will be truly does allow for skill-based game play previously unseen. Combat is slow. This will be loved by some and annoying for some I am sure. But in order to allow for action-reaction it appears necessary. Animations were not fully in yet, but one of the most notable animations that grabbed my attention was harvesting a tree. It is a full grown tree and cutting it down will result in it actually falling over onto the ground. Some of the textures that were in game already were amazingly crisp and crystal clear and just looked wonderful, even up close. The crafting is not going to be like EQ2, despite some speculation on the Vanguard boards. The only similarity you will find is action-reaction. I will point out though that while in EQ2 you can successfully make a high-quality item by spamming a single durability or progress skill, in Vanguard this will not be the case. Macro play can never be eliminated but it can certainly be made difficult. EQ2 is ridiculously easy to macro, and this, in my opinion, reflects a poorly designed system. Vanguard on the other hand does not appear so easy to macro from what I can foresee and as such I feel it will be a highly regarded system.

The rest of the day was spent at Gameworks and on the strip. The lottery saw no prizes for myself, but I did get to play a lot of games against Glip the Gnome (Nick Parkinson) of which he beat me at just about all of them including my forte – basketball shooting. After being fully demoralized in any arcade ability I thought I might have, we headed to find some food with Fricka (I did beat Fricka at Virtual Arena though!, it wasn’t totally fair though, her arms were being registered as her legs by the camera). I spent the next six hours between an Al a carte restaurant in Paris and Glip’s suite talking about everything from fencing to SGO’s customer service to air-soft gun stories to Justin Deeb’s P&P RPG, to just darn everything.

For not being of legal age to drink, Nick is incredibly well versed on gaming in general including the MMO genre. His philosophies are right along the line of Paul and Travis and everyone else I met on the team. Most importantly for myself, I found that I am not the only one who gets the strange urge to write around the time I put head to pillow at night. A sign of genius? I sure hope so.

Fanguard cost me (including travel, room, shopping, and boos) close to 1000$. Hefty I know, but I had the absolute best time. I simply cannot wait for the next fan faire. I cannot wait for the game to release. I cannot wait for tomorrow when I might learn something new about the game. I hope those that read this article may perhaps get some insight into the wonder that is the Vanguard development team and ultimately the wonder that Vanguard will be. Lastly, I hope you take away with you an idea of the huge amount of fun that a fan-faire event can be and what a learning experience they can be as well.

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