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Spring Cleaning
By AnomalousSilence

Ahh, the smell of spring: it's on the way! Wild flowers blooming, trees budding with their first new leaves, and a plethora of animals prancing about merrily are the true images of spring and the following warm months. It is the season of new life: spring begins everything anew. This not only applies to nature, but applies to homes, games, the car, and everything in between.

Still, there are two dreaded words associated with this season: Spring Cleaning. While Vanguard: Saga of Heroes isn't released yet (though we're all eagerly waiting), there are inevitably a few things that any company designing an upcoming MMORPG could do to improve the potential of the game. Only three Spring Cleaning issues come to mind for Sigil, however. These include the one significant concern and two minor concerns. The biggest issue is the current death penalty. The two minor issues are pets for all classes, and horse color.

Currently, the death system in Vanguard is designed as follows: when a player dies, they leave behind a tombstone at the location of their death. In some ways, this element of gameplay is similar to EverQuest: the player's gear and other items stay behind at the location of the tombstone. The loss of gear is not intended to be an insurmountable obstacle in Vanguard, however, since a typical player will have multiple sets of gear that can be carried by mounts and other modes of transportation.

Along with leaving behind a tombstone, the player will also incur experience debt. Not loss, debt. This current system is flawed, though, because it is too soft on the players. There is only one concept of a system that incorporates a healthy mix between experience loss and experience debt, leaning more towards loss. It is a system that would allow the game to be enjoyable, yet having the player feel the sting of death.

This method has been explained before by Brad "Aradune" McQuaid on the Official Vanguard Forums. It is one that, according to Brad, could possibly be incorporated in Vanguard sometime during Beta. In this system, the player would lose a certain amount of gained experience upon death, along with the standard penalties and corpse runs. When a player would normally lose a complete level upon dying, debt comes into play. The player would incur debt without going through the aggravation of losing a level.

This system is preferred, allowing not only for an enjoyable game, but for a death penalty that clearly keeps players focused on trying to stay safe, and less likely to treat death lightly.

The second aspect in which Sigil could do some Spring Cleaning is their pet system. By this, I mean that all classes will have some sort of a pet. In MMORPGs, pets tend to be a valuable and useful commodity to certain classes such as the Necromancer, Magician, Summoner, and Warlock. According to Sigil, all classes in Vanguard will have some sort of a pet. While the Necromancer will be the only class that heavily relies on a pet of any type, every other class will have a pet, as well.

This feature obviously will allow all players to have some sort of critter following them around everywhere, if the player wishes. This has the potential to cause serious lag, and can become distracting to the overall scene before you. If everyone has a pet, a full group battle could consist not only of six group members and the numerous MOBs, but six pets fighting alongside each character! Imagine that crowded battle scene: six players, six critters, and one to four MOBs or more. Add on top of that the spells being cast, along with bridges and finishes popping up on the screen. Unless one had a high-end computer, the lag would be pretty unbearable.

Finally, there is one last thing that the folks at Sigil could do to improve the state of the game, to the best of our knowledge. It is something quite minor: the fact that the look of horses depends on what type they are. For example, a horse that is owned by a higher level player can be easily distinguished from a horse that is owned by a mid-level player. These distinctions are made by the type of horse, and the color of the horse. One of the things I was looking forward to in Vanguard was Role Playing with a single horse. Though I would, of course, be changing horses due to speed and item storage capacity throughout my character's career, I planned on always buying a single color and Role Playing that the horse had been with me since I first started adventuring. While the horse would be speedier and, in-game, a different horse, I planned for it to look exactly, or close to the same, as horses in the past, even going so far as to name my horse. From a developer comment over a month ago, this will not be possible due to horses being available in certain colors and types based on the horse's speed and storage capacity.

In conclusion, for the routine, annual Spring Cleaning, there are only a few things that Sigil could do to improve their game. Having death sting a bit more would certainly add to the experience, as would pets being a special feature of a certain class or classes. While horse color being dependent on specific characteristics (speed, storage) of the horse is a minor issue, it is one that I would personally like to see cleaned up, or at least considered.

It's hard for anyone to rightfully comment on the stage of any game unless they have played it themselves, and the same holds true for Vanguard. There is abundant information, the famous "sekret sauce", that we don't know about. What we do know, we are sure to comment on and have an opinion about, without even testing the feature out: it's human nature. The developers at Sigil have given us no reason to believe that they will stray from the Vision, and they will ultimately do what is best for their game and the community.