An E3 Interview with Bill Fisher
by Shayalyn
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I found Vanguard! No, it wasn't behind the sofa. While it didn't have much of a presence in SOE's demo room, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes makes an unassuming E3 appearance at Santa Monica's Barker Hangar, the tiny venue that serves as the 2007 show floor. I talked with Bill "Tagad" Fisher of SOE about some upcoming features including flying mount quests, guild hall quests, the Brotherhood System, and especially the new level 50 raid area we've just begun to hear more about, the Ancient Port Warehouse.
Fisher told me that Vanguard fans could expect game updates at a rate of one every 6 to 8 weeks or so. Things like the flying mount quests, guild halls and end game raid content should be coming down the pike soon ™, but Fisher was quick to point out that no timelines have been definitely set. "I can't promise anything time-wise," he said. "If we get it done and it goes out [onto the test servers] and it's quality then you'll see it in the game. We're not going to put something out that we don't feel strongly about."
Quality seems to be the watch word for SOE and the new Vanguard paradigm. After suffering through a bug-infested release and sluggish to game-breaking performance issues, SOE has set their sites on quality assurance, thoroughly testing each patch and update before it hits the live servers. "The big focus right now is quality," Fisher iterates. In fact, Fisher was quick to point out that the appearance of new content on the test servers doesn't necessarily mean we'll see it in the live game soon. "Even if it hits test we can always revert it back if it turns out it's not ready yet."
The flying mount quest, which Fisher explains should be challenging but worthwhile, is in the works right now. The guild hall quest line should also be coming in the near future, and will involve all three spheres: crafting, diplomacy, and adventuring. "I know a lot of guilds are looking forward to that," Fisher says.
But the big topic of the day was the Ancient Port Warehouse, a level 50 raid zone that Fisher was excited to show me. He explained that what I was seeing was coming from the test server, and that the content here was about a week behind where the dev team is currently on their internal servers. While what I saw was clearly not as populated with mobs as it will be when it releases, it was nonetheless some pretty fun stuff. The Ancient Port Warehouse, or APW as it's already come to be called, features gnomish constructs and the handiwork of what Fisher referred to as a "gnomish Leonardo de Vinci." At one point we entered the Sky Pirate room, which contained a floating gnome-crafted dirigible. It's the sort of thing that will make even the busiest raid group pause, look up, and say, "Cool…"
What's most intriguing about the APW is that the mobs there, even the garden variety ones, will have abilities to challenge players. "All the mobs here have their own special abilities," Fisher explained. "There are none that are using, say, generic warrior abilities; they're all pretty much custom made. Our goal is to build in some strategy with these guys. There are no 'trash mobs.'"
As players go into the dungeon they will learn by fighting mobs on the way to the bosses. The non-named mobs have some of the same abilities as the boss mobs so that the raiding party reaches the boss content more prepared and having developed a strategy. "You're learning what you should be doing along the way," Fisher explains, "instead of reaching the boss mob and going, 'Oh no, he's got 47,000 gimmicks; we're never gonna figure this out!'"
The APW comes complete with a good bit of lore involving the gnomes. And with this lore comes a diplomacy angle. While raiding won't rely on a deep inter-dependency between adventurers and diplomats, the diplomacy quest line will help to give adventurers clues to defeating the boss mobs.
In the original vision for Vanguard, Sigil held a hard "no instancing" stance. Looking at the APW, I was compelled to ask whether SOE was equally committed to staying away from instanced raid zones. "At this point in time the Ancient Port Warehouse will not be instanced," Fisher said. "You know, we'll talk about that down the line, but right now we're focused on getting this out there and getting other content in--the low level, the mid-level, the high-level--and optimizing the game. Future issues like instancing are something I'd rather not think about at this point."
But won't the lack of instancing make the APW a highly contested zone as guilds start flooding in to tackle the raid content that has been lacking from Vanguard since launch? For starters, Fisher explained that the majority of players aren't at the end game, and that the average player level is roughly in the mid-20s. Fisher also says the boss mobs in the APW have fairly shallow loot tables, so SOE expects a limited degree of re-playability. "The bigger guilds may come through here maybe three, four, five times and then move on," he said. "The guilds currently testing the area for us tell us they're having a great time, though."
The APW is also scaled so that multiple raid groups should be able to move through it without tripping over each other very often. Fisher used dev tools so that we could take a look at the APW in /ghost mode, which allowed us a glimpse of the many layers of the dungeon with its walls cut away. Despite the fact that the clipping plane made more distant object vanish in the haze, the APW did indeed look enormous.
"We want to make sure that the experience isn't just to slog through it every time," said Fisher. He explained that raid groups will encounter an entry area and then a hub area. The hub area leads off into wings. "Each wing has its own unique experience," he says. "And once you reach the end of the wing there's a teleporter back to the hub. So you can play through the wing, teleport back to the hub, and then all the other areas are available to play through. I think we're talking about an hour and a half to two hours to play through a section."
Another item on SOE's coming-soon list is the trial island. This new level 1-10 island will be offered as a free demo for folks interested in giving Vanguard: Saga of Heroes a try. To continue past level 10, players will need to purchase the game. The trial island will be a free download. Those who purchase the game outright, without a demo, won't have the trial island experience and will head straight to their respective races' newbie zones when they log in.
"Will a free trial give gold sellers easy access to Vanguard?" I asked. "I mean, players are complaining about the number of gold seller /tells they receive in game as it is."
"When people are in Trial Island they'll be locked into it and probably won't be able to send tells to the outside," Fisher said, "So we're pretty conscious of not allowing a trial person to come in and ruin everyone's day."
"But you're still going to have players who purchase the game having immediate access from level 1 to all of the players in the game…" I said.
"If they're buying the game, yeah, we're still going to have that problem, sadly." Fisher replied. "Our customer service people will try and fight that, but it's an uphill battle. When you swipe your credit card [to buy the game] we can't determine, 'Oh, you're a gold farmer!' We don't know your intentions when you log into our game, but if you're a gold farmer hopefully we're going to find you."
Another side benefit of Trial Island is that it gives SOE the ability to work on optimizing the game assets, essentially helping them figure out ways to make the game run faster and smoother. Once SOE has locked down those performance improvements, they'll retrofit the technology into the entire live game. "That's going to be an ongoing process throughout the next year and onward," Fisher said, "Making sure the game runs smoothly at the level it needs to be for the average player." He noted that there have been some significant improvements to the live game already with respect to performance, and player feedback has been positive.
We talked briefly about the Brotherhood System (formerly referred to as the Fellowship System), which was promised at launch but then hasn't actually make it into the live game yet. While I thought I'd understood that Brotherhoods would be added in the next update, Fisher continued to hold a hard make-no-promises line. "We've been in too many situations where we've promised one thing and didn't deliver," he said, "so we just don't want to get into that scenario again. We want to be much more up front with our player base on everything. We're either going to deliver or we're not going to deliver; there's just no better way to do business." So, once again, expect the new system to be added soon, with no firm timeframe.
When SOE acquired Vanguard from Sigil Games Online back in May, Brad McQuaid (then CEO of Sigil) talked of a "relaunch" of sorts. SOE used the same terminology, with David "Hasium" Gilbertson (producer) having recently talked of what a relaunch would mean to the game. But what a relaunch actually involves has remained hazy for Vanguard fans. I asked Fisher if he could clarify.
"I think the word 'relaunch' gets misunderstood by a lot of people," he said. "It's actually [in line with] what we're looking at doing with the trial island. People are wondering if we're going to shut the game down and the answer is no, absolutely not. It's more of a marketing blitz, in all reality. 'Hey, come try Vanguard out again. We've fixed some of the issues we've had in the past, we've added new features that other games don't have--come give us a shot! We think you'll like it.'"
Vanguard's high system requirements have kept many people from playing (or enjoying) the game. I asked whether Fisher thought system specs would continue to be a barrier to new players. "The only thing we can do is continue to optimize the game, and everyone's been working very hard on making it run faster and smoother," he said. "I believe the last patch or the patch before that actually added some of the new caching technology, which has helped."
Will the system spec barrier affect how long SOE waits for the next marketing blitz? Will they wait for technology to catch up, as Brad McQuaid once suggested? "We're not counting on that," Fisher said. "Our relaunch is going to be based on when what we think is the right time and when the trial island is ready to go. And hopefully we won't be up against any other games that are launching…"
"Like maybe launching Vanguard against The Burning Crusade wasn't such a good idea?" I said, smiling, making reference to the fact that Vanguard launched around the same time as Blizzard's first World of Warcraft expansion. Then I quickly added, "Although it seems you weren't given a lot of choice in that."
Bill Fisher laughed. "You do what you do," he said. "It is what it is. And I am what I am, to quote Popeye."
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Mar 17 Juil - 5:53
