Weekly Newsletter 12_03_07: The Here and Now

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Updated Fri, Jan 02, 2009 by Dalmarus

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The Here and Now

December 3rd, 2007 - By Dalmarus

Last week as I sat in front of my television screen to enjoy some mindless entertainment while eating my dinner, I came to a realization. It seems that people can't just enjoy the time of year they're currently in. I sat there and watched my all-time favorite Christmas special, "How the Grinch Stole Christmas"... in November. This was followed by a new Shrek special... in November. Maybe as time goes on, the patterns that make up our memories begin to jumble a bit, but as a kid I'm pretty sure I remember watching the Grinch and Charlie Brown during the week of Christmas vacation... in December.

My wife thinks I'm crazy for complaining about little things like this, but I think it's an indication of how we view things in general these days. We can never wait for "something". While looking to the future for good things to come or the hope for endless possibilities is a good thing, it no longer becomes so when we don't take the time to enjoy where we're at now.

I began to think the same thing while playing Vanguard this week. I've seen a lot of new players come into the game, which in and of itself is absolutely a good thing. My problem though, is that I've also been seeing a lot of discussion about which class is easiest to get to 50, where are the best hunting places to get to 50 the fastest, etc. In my humble (or perhaps not so humble) opinion, that's not the game Vanguard was intended to be.

The Spirit of Christmas Future?

I've been playing the game since the last two weeks of beta. My main character just hit 40 last night. Now I'm not saying that everyone needs to play as slowly as I do, thus driving their friends to the brink of insanity, but taking the slower route does have a certain appeal. I've explored a lot of the content in Vanguard, but there is still quite a bit I have no idea about.

On our forums this week, there have been some questions revolving around the "good" races of Telon I simply can't answer because I've never played them. Almost a year after release, that strikes me as a fairly significant statement.

People have been complaining since release that Vanguard doesn't have enough content. As far as content itself is concerned, I think there's actually quite a bit of it within the game. If you merely hit each "hot spot" as you're playing though, you won't see more than 20-35% of it on your race to hit 50.

That being said however, I can see their point when players state there isn't enough content for their character. The world itself is simply huge. Although I've explored quite a bit of land and delved into a fair amount of content in each area I've explored, I was already past the intended level for quite a bit of it. So perhaps it's not really accurate to say that Vanguard doesn't have a lot of content, it's that you'll out level the majority of the content in the game long before you ever discover it.

I'd be interested to hear what others think on the idea.

While we're talking about people looking forward to things though, there is a bright spot on the horizon. The team at SOE is really gearing up to have the Ancient Port Warehouse go live. This week they announced that the quest needed to grant access to the APW has gone live on the test server. Although the APW itself isn't open to everyone yet, the quest to get there is, so get over there and give it a shot. The more testing players can do now, the less we'll all need to hear about something being broken when it comes over to the live servers later down the road.

With the raids coming soon, I'm curious to see if we'll start to see even more people striving to hit 50 as quickly as they can, or do you think more people will take a slower approach and try to enjoy everything the game has to offer before arriving at the end-game content.

What do you think?