In the end, there was really only one true reason why I came to E3 this year, and that was Vanguard. I've been through a lot in the last few days. First time in California, the first time at E3, 3 days of non-stop of Aidden. But seeing the game in action, and getting to really talk with the guys that are making it was totally worth it. I can say it now, I'm a fanboi. Not a last Fanboi, or the only Fanboi, but just a complete and utter supporter of the game. I remember when Sigil was in the first stages of an alpha, and a few people had quietly met with them and looked at the progress. Someone said of the meeting "When these guys talk about their game, they suck you in. It's very easy to be on board when you talk to them about it because they are so passionate about the game, and their excitement gets you excited."
You feel it when you talk to them, they aren't just plugging their product or mildly boasting about some feature they are proud of. They are genuinely excited about the potential of what they've created. In showing what they have, they are showing only a small part of what their game could be capable of in terms of game play, because they themselves have only scratched the surface. And after looking at the game, and finally hearing about the architecture of the game systems, I'm pretty damn excited too.
The Safehouse got to talk to the developers quite a bit during E3, both in and outside of the show. We sat down to dinner with a few people from the design team, Cindy Bowens, and Glippo the first night. Then Sigil hosted a dinner for the Affiliate Fan sites (which was snazzy as hell, at Morton's Steak House) and they treated us famously. The last day of the Expo Fricka and I got to sit down with Jeff Butler (Vice President SGO and Co-Producer) and Darrin McPherson (Game Designer) for a solid hour where we chugged through a ton of information. The demo consisted of one box where Jeff Butler was running a crafting character while Darrin McPherson was doing combat with the people in the Nusibe Necropolis.
Because we've had very little real game information for the last few years, the splurge of information has kind of overwhelmed me. Man, desert, freak monsoon, that bit. Trying to take notes like I was all professional was hard as hell. It was like juggling. Trying to take notes, and pay attention enough to really follow some of the concepts they were laying out, and trying to watch the game screen and pick out the numerous details and information. Watching actual game play like crafting, I was sometimes lost, even after having it explained to me, as to what was going on. All of the game play I saw took place with level 25 characters, so the game play everyone was seeing was fairly advanced. The player screens are full of multiple miniature icons that appeared and disappeared, windows with more clickable icons, plus some UI features that I wasn't entirely sure on what they were. At a casual glance, it was very easy to feel overwhelmed, and that was before the devs started talking. :) The game looks and sounds complex across the board, even though I was assured it really wasn't. When my brother first introduced me to the concept of online RPGs with EQ in 1999, I was similarly unable to really visualize it all in my head at one time. I think that's a good sign. So to make sense of it all, I'll break it down, bit by bit. It's as much for me as it is for you guys. :P
Jeff Butler on it all looking complicated as hell: The whole thing about combat, crafting, diplomacy and harvesting is that it's about action and reaction, and sympathy with your group. Cooperation, coordination, player knowledge, we're going to give you the information via the UI, we are going to introduce the information to you in bite sizes pieces so you can wrap your head around it, so that on day one you're not "holy crap there's 500 icons flying at me".
Graphics:There was a bit of disappointment with the first incoming screen shots of Vanguard at E3. The demos on the floor were playing on 37" inch plasma screens running at 1024 x 768 (Brad McQuaid: really, they were TVs more than monitors), and the graphics suffered for it, which the Sigil Devs were quick to point out. I noticed, but as someone who plays most games at 1024 x 768, I thought it still looked pretty good. Later I saw the demos on real monitors running at 1900X1200 and was suitably floored. It's clean and already polished more than a lot of games you see in Beta now. Even though the environment shadows aren't in yet, I failed to miss them when I watched the game in motion. The environmental and interior lighting is in place which the devs toggled on an off for me in the Nusibe Necropolis and it really ties the dungeon in. The armor detail is absolutely STUNNING. The plate mail we saw came in 3 different versions, silver on silver, black with silver trim, and another different set of armor that was deep blue. I just couldn't get over how cool it looked. Kinda like Lineage cool, without the anime and gratuitous tail. Because Vanguard innovated when budgeting themselves for models and animations (i will get to that later), they've been able to create these intricate armor sets that are over flowing with detail in large number. This is probably the part where I should tell you that I suck at taking photos (die in the face, Aidden). So I really apologize to you guys that I didn't get a good quality on them. Fricka shot some decent video, and we'll have those for you soon.
http://www.thesafehouse.org/gallery/E3-2005/IMG_4426 I was also really taken away by the buildings in Kojan and the ones I saw in the Thestran town of Tursh. They have this modern art quality that stems from the talent of the art department, and the final effort has it's own distinct style that is fantasy without being cheesy or over the top, but elegant and interesting to look at. The word that kept coming to mind when I looked at the final products was "mature". Everything had a very real feel to it. And it really comes across when you start looking at the faces of the PC models. Where WoW went for a very cartoony approach to facial features, and EQ2 didn't get them looking quite right, Vanguard's avatars have good blend of realism with fantasy flair (Further down I'll talk about avatar customization, and why you're going to love. LOVE IT!).
http://www.thesafehouse.org/gallery/E3-2005/IMG_4418The spell effects are also pretty snazzy too. There's no one generic format for spell effects, they vary greatly depending on what the spell in question is. Plumes of smoke, flashes of electric blue that fade to midnight, they are all different. But they are carefully managed so that there is no "light show effect during combat". There was also no meele combat eye candy(that I saw anyways) for which I'm very thankful. The effects are full of color and have a rich quality to them.
About the icons thing. I think people that are hard core immersionists are going to have a hard time with Vanguard, personally. The UI and the systems they set up work towards notifying the player of opportunities or moments to take actions, which is pretty much the crux of game play. That really doesn't fall in line with people that want a purest UI. It's going to be impossible to play Vanguard with a "no UI" set up. That being said, the icons are tastefully done, and small, so while the game looked really busy, it wasn't so much that it got in the way of seeing what was happening around you. But there are assurances that the UI will be able to be thoroughly customized.
In the end, for not even having gone into Beta, I think the graphics are already well beyond the standard. I'm not going to go so far as to say they are the best on the market, but I think the combination of the art assets and the talent of the people who brought them into game has resulted in something that already sets Vanguard far apart from the rest of the competition in the MMO market, even this far away from release.
Sound:Not something I got a lot of at either the booths or in the private demo (not that it would have mattered, you couldn't hear jack squat on the exhibit floor and the demo room was fairly noisy as well). Which is a real shame, because I was itching to hear more of Todd Masten's work, and get a feel for the 3rd generation in Vanguard's music. But I asked about it, and here was Jeff's take on it.
Jeff Butler: "We had very high ambitions for the music in the game. The music is dynamic, the music changes based on your location... as I engage in different activities, like going into the village of Tursh, the music will change, as I go into different areas within Tursh such as the tavern, or the Magistrate's office, the music will change again. When I engage in combat in any of those places, or conflict, the music changes again. And it doesn't string together beginning to end, the music fades in and out, multiple different pieces (from the same theme) that can be randomly placed together...... Our goals in all honesty were fairly lofty, we wanted music on par with that that you'd hear with Final Fantasy, and we wanted loads and loads and loads of it. And we have it. We already have over 36 hours of taped music that's in game".
Game play:This is where it's really at. Graphics, sound, theme, all of that in the end is beholden to game play, and it's the area where I will spend the majority of my time talking about what I saw of Vanguard. In order to make sense of it all, I have to break it down into specific topics, because I need it to help my recall :P. Sigil gave us these fact sheets at the demo, that try to sum up the major aspects of one the big 5 areas of game play adventuring, crafting, harvesting, diplomacy, and combat. The bullet points at the end of sections will be off of those cards.
Spheres:Game play can roughly be divided into 4 aspects, or spheres. First there is the Adventuring sphere, or what everyone does now adays. You pick a class, you hunt baddies, abuse woodland animals for experience, horde loot, and complete quests. The next sphere is Crafting, which can really be broken down further into 2 spheres, crafting and resource harvesting. The final sphere is Diplomacy, where players interact in social, non-combat ways to accomplish goals and ends, such as mercantile ventures or quests. To understand the sphere concept, picture a Venn Diagram, a set of circles that overlap edges. Each sphere of game play was designed to function as a rich, detailed game system all it's own. For example, if you took crafting out of vanilla EQ, and made an entire game out of it, it probably wouldn't be that entertaining. Sigil wanted each sphere of game play to be able to stand on it's own as a fun and engrossing way to play the game. So if someone chose to be a dedicated crafter or diplomat, the value of their game play in their sphere would equal to that of the adventurer. But, to the same token, as the Venn Diagram shows, each of the spheres over lap. Diplomats need Adventurers. Crafters need resource harvesters. Harvesters need diplomats. Diplomats need crafters. And all of the spheres eventually meet in the middle, where crafters, adventurers, harvesters and diplomats could all theoretically share the same group, working towards a common goal. Each sphere has it's own set of abilities, stats and skills, and level ranks, so that each sphere is essentially self contained. Switching between spheres involves equipping the gear that is pertinent to the sphere you want to enter (so your armor for adventuring class, crafting clothes for your crafting class, diplomat (nice?) clothes for your diplomat ect...
Adventuring Sphere: Not too much new information about the adventuring sphere per se. It is the sphere with clearly defined classes, split among four archetypes. When Sigil announced the basic frame work of class design, fans and followers went slightly ballistic (myself included). Many of us have seen archetype class builds in other games that ended up in multiple versions of the same classes and skill sets that amounted to the same thing. Sigil promises that even though every class is built to fit into one of the four roles, how each class works to fulfill their archetype role will vary greatly. Classes will distinguish themselves from each other in the types of skills they have and the flavor of those skills, both in combat and out of combat, but each working towards the goal of either being a tank, a melee damage dealer, a healer/support caster, or an offensive caster. For example while both the ranger and the rogue are offensive fighters and work to deal large amounts of meele damage, they go about it differently, and offer different opportunities and combinations. Rangers may have a set of long range archery skills, straight up meele combat skills and nature-based skills, while rogues focus on sneak attacks, opportunistic attacks, and utility skills such as disarming, pick locking, and recognizing enemy weaknesses. And other classes are fundamentally different as well. For example while the psionicist maintains the spells they cast (so one buff stays on and consumes 5% of your mana pool), a sorcerer blasts away in the traditional method, and their spells are elementally arranged into groups that the Sorcerer has to move between to access different types of spells (more on this from me later). So while each class in an archetype may be trying to achieve the same result, the play style behind it, the type of abilities they have, and the reactions in combat they make possible, will distinguish them clearly from each other.
Sigil Factsheet-
-Adventuring classes fall into one of four archetypes:
-Protective Fighter
-Offensive Fighter
-Healer
-Arcane Caster
-Each class has unique gameplay
-Areas exist that cater to varying gameplay intensity styles
-Encounter Routes - Hand-crafted mini adventures that exist as a layer on top of traditional (mob) population
Crafting Sphere: The crafting sphere can actually be seperated into 2 more sub-spheres (you had better get used to this). The crafters who actually produce products, and the crafters who go out and collect materials. Each of the crafting sub-spheres has it's own abilities, skills, classes, levels, and stats that are important. First is the resource gathering part of Crafting. It has 4 component classes, and functions much like an adventurer group. Every class has a role to fill in group crafting tasks. The reaper is the one who extracts resources, and is primarly concerned with quantity, and most of their skills work to improve that in the form of long term buffs. The foreman is primarily concerned with quality, in addition to managing and improving the group's stamina and morale, and crisis management (complications in harvesting). Those were the only two resource classes displayed in the demos, but there are reportedly two more, the Prospector, who focuses on identifying the best resources, and the gleaner, who focuses on extracting secondary resources from harvesting spots.
The other sub-sphere of crafting is the artisans who make something out of raw materials. This sub-sphere has it's own classes, skills, levels, and abilities. And, just to go one more, the class you choose FURTHER breaks down into specialized subsets. For example, an herbalist can eventually choose one of two subsets of the class, the Imbuer who imbues items with special properties, or alchemist who stands over beakers cackling insanely.
Right about now you're probably thinking it sounds like a lot of effort to try and level 2 different classes in tandom of each other. But you don't nessecarily have to do that. Through crafting guilds and city organizations, you will be offered contracts to fill orders for crafted items, and will always be provided with the nessecary materials to complete it. You don't get the item, and you don't usually get money, but you do increase your skill, and get "crafting xp", and never have to leave the area, or engage in harvesting. I'll go into this more when I talk about the actual process of harvesting and crafting.
Diplomacy Sphere: The sphere I saw the least of during E3, and the most newly announced one. Again, like all the other spheres, it has it's own levels, abilities, skills, stats, and classes (I think). Diplomacy is a method interacting with NPCs that is non-combat (except when you say something about someone's mother, then it's on). Quests are based around the need for a player to interact in a social way with an NPC, either intimidating them, or coercing them, or cheering them up. One quest that was brought up and demonstrated was where the player had to convince a Guard Captain to raise the morale of the troops in the city (more on THAT later). The player, through a series of interactions that work like combat abilities or harvesting abilties, tries to influence the attitude of the NPC. In addition to quests that are specifically diplomatic in nature, diplomacy can used as a different way of solving a quest. Diplomacy can be used to talk down some monsters or change your faction with them.
It doesn't stop there though. Diplomacy takes on many forms, such as diplomatic relations between cities and traders. Asyou rise to higher ranks in the Diplomacy sphere, you get access to what Jeff Butler described as "abstract NPCs". The situation he described to me was this. Because you're an important diplomatic functionary, a merchant prince in this case, you get minions. So say you have a commision to deliver a wagon full of goods to a merchant in another city. You have a Captain of the Guard, 2 regular guards, and a hedge wizard. You could send only the 2 guards, and the wagon might make it there in 6 hours, and generate 60% of it's total profit. But you would have your 2 best abstract NPCs available to run other tasks. Or you could send them all, hedge wizard and everything, and the cart would arrive at it's destination in 1 hour and generate 95% profit for you.
The NPCs are abstract in the fact that they don't exist as physical objects in the world. There is no cart and no hedge wizard physically traveling towards a destination. It would be incredibly hard to generate that many new NPCs, and track them. But what it does allow for is diplomats who can form large virtual caravan networks. Your ability to carry out about diplomatic tasks is directly tied to the interplay of factions (imagine that) between races, between continents, and between regions or groups. So being a dark elf pretty much anywhere is a hard diplomatic sell to begin with. Through Diplomatic relations, players can affect cities in major ways. While you cannot affect things like the price NPC vendors sell their wares at (or player vendors) you can do things like try and lower or raise the city taxation rate (you heard me correctly. This includes player cities. A sort of economic war).
In talking about it all, Jeff had only scratched the surface before we moved on, but I know there is probably more to it than even that. You know it's funny, I can already feel my social life slipping away completely (shut up Aidden).
One big thing the diplomacy sphere does for Sigil is they can take NPCs who previously might have just imparted some text message nothing more, into venues for content. They don't have to create a whole new model and asset to make a new quest, they simply assign diplomatic tasks or conflicts to assets that previously had done nothing, meaning that eventually, every NPC serves a purpose.
Sigil Factsheet
-NPCs have wants and needs that can be acted upon by the players
-Allows the full utilization of assets created for NPC cities and villages. Cities become "diplomatic dungeons".
-Provides a new wa to solve problems without killing NPCs
-Allows "RTS"(their words, not mine...) style of command of NPCs for the management and growth of player cities.
-Integrates and is interdependent with crafting and adventuring spheres
-Adds anothe sphere of advancement, complete with item acquisitions, skill choices, and long term goals, greatly increasing replay value.
(I'll add one. Faction based diplomatic relations allow for multiple ways to play the diplomacy game more than once).
Read Part 2
HERE Read the consolidated French version
HEREJustin "Nenjin" Wheeler
Safehouse Staff Writer
