Interview

[x-kaiser]

ich hab hier grad was nettes gefunden, wie es mit VG weiter laufen soll hier der auszug:









Vanguard Vault: What was the biggest hurdle you had to address to be happy to launch the game?

Jeff Butler: The fun-factor. Adventuring, that offered something more than games with other play styles that came before; Crafting, that was a mini-game; Diplomacy that has never been done in any game; Non combat-based conflict such as you see in novels -- integrating all of those things in one game world and being able to experience those things and walk away and say "Damn that was fun". We redid diplomacy more than five times, and crafting went through a similar number of iterations. We worked diligently on all those systems, because we wanted to say as gamers, "that's fun, its rock-solid". Something we can point back to years from now that there was depth in there that even we didn't expect when we engineered it.

I'm very proud of the people on the team who were charged with extracting genius from the ideas of a couple guys that effectively sat around a room like this and said, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool...". To take the words from a piece of paper and inject it into a game as complex as Vanguard. There was nothing as difficult as that, not even remotely.


Vanguard Vault: What can we expect to see content-wise within the first few months of launch?

Jeff Butler: Guild housing, Guild Manors and Guild Keeps, they are partially done already. They're kind of an expansion of the idea of how large guild structures were presented in Star Wars Galaxies.

You can expect to see high-level dungeons come online. The raid experience--starting from level 35 going forward. Raids will be a maximum of 24 people. We know statistically that's the largest force that can easily be fielded on a dedicated basis. So 24 will be the largest raid--to begin with, at least. Maybe at a later point in time we'll consider putting in larger raids against some horrific outdoor dragons or something like that, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Live content will be new dungeons, which we'll continue to do fairly quickly. I'd expect you'll see a lot of this in the next three to six months including dungeons and mini-expansions to the world, additional player housing islands...things of that nature. There are three thousand player housing lots in the world today. That's a pretty good number, but its not an entitlement. Players who advance more casually may find the world run has out of houses, but we have the ability to make player housing expansions quickly depending on server populations.



Vanguard Vault: Are there any plans for PvP mechanics such as arenas, duels, battlegrounds, guild vs guild, etc for the PvE servers?

Jeff Butler: Yes. Because we built a big world, we want to explore not only mounted combat, flying mounted combat, ship-to-ship combat. Thinking about a big, expansive world--I must in Vanguard, some day in the future, be standing on the crest of a hill with an army of horsemen and infantry, looking across the field at another army and call the charge. We WILL see that stuff in Vanguard, its got to happen. Its the sort of play experience that the game was intended to deliver from its conception... being able to sail up alongside an enemy guild vessel and fire the cannons and sink them... that's the sort of thing that we really want to see. Its hard to say with today's technology how many horsemen and infantry can be seen on the screen at the same time, but even if its just my guild versus yours, it should be really fun.

We'll try explore the use of some of the islands out in the ocean for some sort of ongoing PVP struggle that involves control of territory. If you're familiar with Warsong Gulch, that sort of style of PvP. Not instanced, but find a way to reset it on a regular basis. I think we've got some pretty good ideas how to bridge that gap and come up with a pretty engaging PvP experience. You should expect to see, I would say arenas right off the bat, but you should expect to see certainly some Battlegrounds-style PvP plans in the works in the near future.

We have the ability in terms of the structure of our game to instance a zone. We decided that's not how we were going to approach the game. We acknowledged we may have to move to instancing so we allowed for it in our engineering just in case that's how it shook out. It turned out not to shake that way, we ended up with more than 5000 players on one server during Beta and we were able to run successfully. But instancing on things like islands in the middle of the Ocean, a la Battlegrounds, is a possibility, it could be the easiest way to do it. We'll see--its not going to be our default, I think we're going to try and figure out a way to do it with a shared experience first.

Oh, and PvP Diplomacy is on the way as well...



Vanguard Vault: Within the first day of the head start we saw Florendyl fill with lots players. It was actually one of the first to reach medium population. Why do you think Vanguard is attractive to roleplayers? Can we expect another roleplaying server should this one become too crowded?

Jeff Butler: Because roleplayers are a core element of MMO audiences. [Because of the wide variety of character races and classes in Vanguard,] they can be unique in the world, recognizable by their appearance and not their name. That kind of stuff is pretty huge. I'll never forget, playing Ultima Online, there was a guy on my server by the name of Jack Napier--obviously taken from DC Comics' Batman, The Joker. He ALWAYS had a purple cloak and a jester's cap on, no matter what armor he was wearing. He'd sacrifice the helm for the jesters cap and he always had that cloak on...

Roleplaying IS core; providing people the canvas to paint out their avatar, to paint out the personality they want to represent online, its part of our job. Diplomacy and city building has also got to be interesting to roleplayers.


Vanguard Vault: Speaking of the variety of race/class combinations, we count 148 possible combinations--by comparison, WoW has less than 50. With this variety, what is your approach to "class balance"?

Jeff Butler: Well, there's a small grain of salt to be taken with the concept of class balance. Class balance is partially a matter of opinion, knowledge of gameplay and game acumen in general. I'm willing as a game developer to accept a factor of imbalance between classes, not just situationally but even potentially globally. I take that approach not as a cop-out, but to embrace the fact in the quest for truly different and dynamic character classes, else we take the foolish step of homogenizing races and classes.

When we first began our playtest, we started with the most basic setup -- warrior, healer, melee DPS, caster -- four classes. Drawing from those four archetypes--making sure they were differentiated--we knew we were going to come up with imbalances in certain situations, kind of embraced that. Situationally we're always OK with that. Some class is better with undead, or against creatures of nature than another, that becomes strategy--situational balance.

So we're OK with a certain factor. But we'll continue to work on class balance until the game shuts its doors many years in the future. We take it very seriously. Right now the sorcerer is unbalanced in PvP. We take it very seriously, I've got a notepad covered in notes... Its desired there be perceptions that one class is more powerful than another, and that those things change over time as the game continues to evolve. The truth of the matter is, we won't be perfect but we'll continue to strive. That's your job as the quote-unquote Dungeon Master.



Vanguard Vault: We've recently learned that there are eight character slots per account. What was the thinking behind this decision? Can we expect an increase in the future?

Jeff Butler: The thinking was largely, out of the gate, the availability of names. In many of today's large MMOs, players have trouble finding good names on mature servers-- they're taken up because with eight or ten slots per server, players have been known to go make characters with eight of their favorite names on each server. Its not like you can play a hundred characters. There is the option of buying additional character slots by through Station Players and other services. And we'll continue to make additional character slots available through additional purchases or expansions.

That's one thing. The other thing is sheer data size. A Vanguard character includes your house, everything in it, quite a bit of data. There are three-plus times the number of items that could be on a Vanguard player versus a World of Warcraft player because you have multiple sets of items. You have your adventuring gear, your crafting gear, your Diplomacy gear...what your horse is wearing, what you can put on your ship and what's in your house. Its just a quantum factor of data beyond what a current MMO allows.




Vanguard Vault: Do you like the game being known as the "hardcore MMO"?

Jeff Butler: I don't like it at all. If we were a hardcore MMO we wouldn't be getting my $14.95. OK, that's a simple thing--I'll say this to everyone: I do not have time to make one of every character class, I do not have the time to invest. I would love to but I don't. I have level-sixties in World of Warcraft, I have a Jedi in Star Wars Galaxies. I was able to play these games and reach a level I was proud of. But come on, I'm not going to beat my head against a wall. I don't want to cause people to lose their jobs or bomb out of school. I want them to have a lot of fun--with replayability and a strong feeling of achievement, but that's got to be graspable. You have to feel that you can see the end game, even if its going to be some work to get there.

Core, not hardcore. For sure. If there are hardcore elements in the game, then we want to get past them. Those are design imbalances right now. We want everyone to have fun. We want people to really sink their teeth into the game, and after they reach the pinnacle of their career, they can say they have more memories playing Vanguard, more amazingly fun times, than any other MMO they played.