An Inroduction to Vanguard: Saga of Heroes - Official Vanguard Forums ************* (Aradune Mithara)

Hello Everyone!

• Been having fun in WoW or another MMOG, but looking for something new, something deeper?
• Are you an old school MMOG player looking for a game that will wrap yesterday’s magic into a next-gen package?
• Might you be new to massively multiplayer gaming (or online interactive entertainment as it’s beginning to be called) and looking for the game that will be right for you?
• If any of these descriptions sound like you, I’d like to cordially invite you to check out the next big massively multiplayer game coming your way the first quarter of 2007…

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes


To many MMOG players, you may already know about Vanguard and are either looking forward to it, or at least looking forward to getting into beta or checking out the game being played by someone else in beta, or perhaps even waiting to see how launch goes. To many other MMOG gamers, especially long time gamers, you're already active on our boards and avidly looking forward to the game. But then for many other MMOG gamers, there's a lot of about Vanguard you might not know about. Or, worse yet, you might have heard some rumors floating about that simply aren’t true. Perhaps you might have heard that it's yesterday’s game with nothing revolutionary or exciting, or only for hard core players with no lives, or that it's more about challenge and tedium than fun. Or, on the other hand, you may be playing in one of the current MMOGs and are looking for something new on the horizon. Well, if any of that’s true, our message and our efforts, whether interacting with people on our message boards, or releasing a series of screenshots or in-game videos, or doing interviews in magazines or on the web, may come as a bit of a surprise: yep, that’s right, this game was likely made for someone just like you.

No, no, of course you can’t make a game that’s everything for everybody (and, really, who’d want to?). And neither do we want to make a game that’s a copy or clone of a popular game that’s already out there – players want choices, and meaningful ones at that. But with our experience and the efforts and design we’ve put into the game, I bet there’s a very good chance Vanguard has something in it for you. Yep. Even if you’ve never heard of it, and especially if you have heard about it but the rumors sounded, well, ‘un-fun’. And so while we love the Internet and would hate to see rumors and stories and conspiracy theories go away completely, it is our job, especially with release closing in on us fast, to get the right messaging out… to let you know about this game, why it’s the next big thing, and just as importantly, to dispel some of those rumors so you can make an informed choice about what massively multiplayer game you’ll be spending your time playing early next year. Because spending your time is important, especially in a virtual world. You’re not just spending time, you’re investing time, both in your characters and in the relationships you form in these games. Some people may not understand online interactive entertainment yet and still think of them as just games, but while those guys play catch-up, we know they’re really so much more – they’re online communities – these people are real whether they live across the street or in another country and they’re our friends. And these ‘games’, the good ones anyway, aren’t just games, they’re homes.

So no matter who you are, we want to reach out to you and pique your interest in Vanguard because we are confident it's going to change the face of massively multiplayer online gaming next year, and the year after that, and… well, you get the picture – we’re in this for the long haul. A huge marketing and PR campaign has just begun with our co-publishers, Sony Online Entertainment. But the unique thing about Vanguard is that Sigil, a company founded by many of the original makers of EverQuest and other older MMOGs is that we are working together with SOE and have retained creative control over the project. Our aim, quite simply, is to offer an alternative to an online gaming genre that is dominated by a few very large and quite excellent games right now (Final Fantasy XI and World of Warcraft come to mind). Why? Because life, especially entertainment, is about choices. And, really, so is Vanguard itself. It’s about freedom of choice. It contains content and quests and adventures for all sorts of people -- casual players, 'core' players, and even those who spend a lot of time in these games raiding in large groups -- we're all about making a world that is inclusive, *not* exclusive. Vanguard offers a freedom that players have never before experienced -- you have a wide variety of races and classes to choose from, unparalleled capability to customize your character, multiple ways of advancing your character, be it traditional adventuring, to an exciting system of harvesting and crafting, to a brand new spin on gameplay called Diplomacy where you use your wits and not your sword to decide the outcome of events and make your mark on the world…

And on top of all of this, the world itself is simply so immersive it’s mind-blowing – Telon, the world in which Vanguard takes place, awaits all sorts of people who want to be part of a living, breathing, virtual environment, in which you can own your own house, ride or sail a ship anywhere as far as you can see, and even one day fly through the clouds on the back of a dragon, pegasus, or any number of mythical creatures to the destination of your choice. There are virtually no limitations in Vanguard -- you get what you put into it and so much more. The world of Telon takes the ‘massive’ in MMOG and turns it up to eleven -- but it's not just big for the sake of being big, no it's full of variety and laid out in a seamless environment where if you can see an interesting location miles away into the distance, a dungeon or a castle, or really anything interesting at all, you can always get there – exploration has been missing in these games as of late, but travel in Vanguard has meaning.

But we didn’t stop there either -- we expanded upon the traditional High Fantasy we all love and included not just one continent with familiar Western European, Tolkien-esque and Arthurian settings, but also another continent that draws from the tales of Arabian Nights, full of pyramids, hanging gardens, hidden jungles filled with exotic intrigue -- virtually the entirety of Persian, Egyptian, and other middle eastern mythology. And then we went nuts and didn't stop there either – there’s a third continent, this time with an Oriental twist, that forms a vast archipelago of islands. Picture yourself as a thief or a ninja, or a merchant or pirate, sailing from one isle to the next, discovering new lands and even lost empires swallowed whole long ago by the sea.

I’ll make a promise to you right now: I've given you but a taste of what’s in store for you the first quarter of 2007 -- there's simply *so* much more -- far, far too much to cover here. I’d have to write thousands of pages of history and lore and background and settings. I’d have to design detailed game mechanics and systems that build upon every bit of our experience making these games and then goes even farther into the next generation of online gaming. Ah, but wait! Our team of over 100 people have already done just that and built all of it into this game, and they’ve been pouring their hearts and souls into this for over four years (not to mention those who worked on games like EverQuest, who have been dreaming about a virtual world like this for over a decade)! In fact, we’ve planned so much that you’re not only going to have all of this to experience soon, but after the game launches we have both live and expansion teams ready to add new content to the game – content that has to a great degree already been planned out so we know what Vanguard will look like and offer not just in 2007, but for more than seven years after that!

So how do you find out more? The heck with design documents and quest scripts and all of the art and data that makes an MMOG tick – that’s what we work with in-house at Sigil. Instead, check out our web sites and other resources, with more and more information being revealed virtually every day. Head to joinvanguard.com to find out more about the game as well as vanguardsoh.com where again there are movies, screenshots, a detailed FAQ to answer your many questions about the game, as well as a very active message board already with well over 100,000 members. Find out what opportunities there will be to get into beta at some point. Read what people are saying about the game. Check out the screenshots and the videos. And don’t just read the boards -- participate and ask us questions – yeah, we’re really there, using one screen to work on the game and another to interact with YOU to make sure we’re making the game YOU want to play.

So what are you waiting for? http://www.vanguardsoh.com/forums/im...lies/smile.gif

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For a great thread to start you off if you are new to Vanguard, there are many, but this is probably the most comprehensive and full of links to just about everything Vanguard related you could come up or might be curious about: New to Vanguard? How to find out about the game...


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