Third time's the charm. Here we go.
Skill and Ability Acquisition-
Skills and abilities fit into one of three categories. The first are your core class skills. These are skills which every class needs to effectively perform their job. Everyone will need these core skills to play their class, and they will be readily accessible to players. Either these skills and abilities are acquired automatically through the process of leveling, or they are granted from sources like guild masters.
The second group of skills are a little harder to find. These skills are gained through quests, or some mechanic other than simply going to your guild master for training. You may be forced to battle a true master for the right to learn what they have to teach. You may need to observe a specific NPC executing the skill or ability (and your capacity to understand and learn the skill would be based on your perception). The point to this group of skills is that they are above and beyond the core class skills. You don’t need them per se to play your class effectively…but they sure help. Only those players who actively seek out quests and opportunities will find these quests, and their benefits. Gone are the days where someone can raise to the highest levels of performance in their class simply by slaying mobs and grinding experience levels. To gain the premiere skills of your class, you’re going to have to demonstrate you can do more…and it would be safe to assume that these skill quests will require you to demonstrate proficiency in your chosen profession.
The third group of skills are those that can only be learned from having them used on you by NPCs. Whether or not you can learn these skills is contingent upon your perception abilities, and the applicable skill level you currently possess. Here is the example I was given. Let’s say you have a skill of 250 in Shield use. Once you hit 250, when an NPC uses Shield Bash on you, your character makes a perception check. Success means you have seen the ability, understood it, and can duplicate it. Failure means your face hurts a lot and you don’t know anything more than you already did. This applies to both melees, and spell casters. So again, there is no simple process of maxing out a class quickly and advancing to the highest rungs of play and prowess. Those who want to be the best in their class, with the best abilities, will have to put out the effort. They will have to hunt down the mobs that have the knowledge they require…and they will have to risk life, limb (or face) to acquire these skills.
Skill Pools, Attributes, and Leveling-So how will you be able to make your character unique among the hundreds of your class? By how you spec your skills. There will be various skills for classes. In fact, each sphere has its own set of skills that apply to its specific form of game play. Adventurers have sword and shield skill, tactical and arcane recognition, shield bash and the like. Crafters have their herbalism, their forging skill, etc… As you level, each of these stats receives a small boost in value to keep concurrent with your playing level. In addition, you receive discretionary spending points to distribute them as you want. Skills increase with use as well. For example I watched the Perception skill of one dev in the Nusibe Necropolis constantly increase as the player detected spell casting, aggressive attitudes, the actions of other players, etc….
But, Vanguard goes a step further with re-specing. Now, in some games, you can respec (redistribute) skill points on the fly, totally changing your character’s load out to fit the situation or current fad of play. Vanguard takes a more limited approach, by using a limited skill pool. Here’s how it works. Let’s say you’re level 10, and you’ve put 100 points into Two-handed Sword. But, you decide to use axe instead. You can draw 20 points (or some other arbitrary but limited value) out of Two-handed sword, and put them into Axe skill. You can’t do this very often (didn’t get clear confirmation on how often, whether it’s once per level, once ever, or what), but what it does is allow you to re-use some of those “useless” skill points to give you a head start in working into a new skill pool. Perhaps (because I don’t know) you can do the same thing with the skill level in your abilities too (Abilities like Shield Bash and Sneak Attack also have associated values indicating how well you perform said action).
Attributes. The buck-toothed child of MMOs that everyone locks up in a closet after they are dealt with. In Vanguard, one thing that the devs were constantly including in their descriptions of your chances to “do” stuff was attributes. When you are using the shield bash skill, not only is your character making a “contested roll” against the NPC using their skill value, and their level value, but also their attributes. I mean, shouldn’t someone that is stronger than another in Shield Bash not only hit harder, but also better? To this end, after stat tweaking at creation, attributes increase in value as you level gradually, keeping pace with the increasing difficulty of game play. Your stat values and the choices you made in assigning them continue to make a difference and distinguish you from others through out the game.
Character Customization. The character creation screen wasn’t part of the E3 showing, but I describe character customization in two words: %#*@!$& awesome. My first day at E3, I watched John Capozzi playing the demo, and I asked him to run me through some of the new player races I had just heard about (Go Wood Elf!). As he started morphing characters I noticed something odd. Some of the character skins that were of the same race looked different. But yet they looked the same. Sound weird? I thought so too, until I looked closer. As the characters changed, I noticed subtle differences in composition. Neck length. Ear length. The cast of the eyes, the size of the chin. Little details started popping out at me.
Jeff Butler later described Character Customization to me during the closed demo. ..
"Some of the notable things about facial customization, is our ability to move around the individual facial elements and scale them apart from one another. So stuff that you haven’t seen in other games....this guy standing next to a person who chose the Kojan male, no matter what changes they made to this face, they look like brothers. Not only is the texture map on the face the same between the two characters...the facial features are equi-distant from each other. And that's what makes YOU look like your brother....the fact that your facial features, where they fall on your face, are very to similar to how they would on your brother's face. And so what makes people dramatically different is the distance their eyes are apart, their nose, their lips so on and so forth. We can independently move those objects around on the face, including move the head up higher on the neck, change the size the face, like hands, broaden shoulders, deepen the chest, give ya a big fat gut, you name it."Did you get all that? What they’ve done is make player models in game based on one single, or a small handful of generic starting models. When you choose a race, the game defines a few basic conditions, like over all body mass size and how extreme your sliders will be, and then cuts you loose to pull and tug on the vertices of the model itself. Each member of the race resembles another standing next to them, except that their features can differ from one another in wide range of values. The added benefit is that they save a ton in the memory budgeting for models, allowing them to create rich armor sets packed with detail to please the eye. That wasn’t even very propeller head, and I’m pretty sure I still don’t get it. But it sounds damn cool.
Sorcerer Memorization and Spell System: A little generic tidbit. Sorcerers are elemental spell casters and have no need of puny, small minded tricks to help a caster call up magic! They command the very elements!!!…or something. Anyways, sorcerer’s magic is divided up into elemental groups (if you don’t know the 4 basic ones you have no right to call yourself a gamer). Each elemental group has a general theme, i.e. offensive or defensive. So while the Fire group might contain Fireball and Greater Fireball (most groups I saw had 3 spells or so), the Earth group might have (and these names are not actual game ones) Stone skin or Earth Wall. Then you have the quasi elemental groups, which occupy spaces between the core elements. Fire + Water = Smoke. Water + Earth = Mud. Earth + Air = …Dust? I don’t know about the rest, but you get the picture. Each of those elemental groups have their own spell lines, which means lots of room for growth within each element.
So what’s the catch? Switching between elemental aspects costs you, the Sorcerer, personal energy. Master of 1000 spells you are, but not all at the same time. While switching between two potent spells in two different elemental groups might have devastating power, you could short change yourself later on…
Counter Spelling: By now you’re probably all aware of counter spelling, but I wouldn’t be thorough if I didn’t talk about it. Spell casters use their perception skills to detect enemy magic being cast, and depending on the success of their detection, they have one of three options. A simple success means a chance to counter-spell and negate the effect (provided you click on the reaction). A good success means you can turn the spell back on it’s caster. It’s worth noting this isn’t always a good idea. A great success means that the entire nature of the spell can be altered against it’s will. The common example given was the fireball being turned into a heal. Casters can expect to have magical duels either in routine combat, or as part of special circumstances (like a quest).
Phew, that’s a lot of writing, I’m glad to…wait, what am I saying? I’m not done yet! Read Part 4
HERERead the consolidated French version
HEREJustin “Nenjin” Wheeler
Safehouse Staff Writer
