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Fan Faire 2008

August 18th, 2008 - By
Dalmarus

After attending Fan Faire 2008
this year, one thing has been made
crystal clear - the Vanguard:
Saga of Heroes team is even more passionate
about their game than I had guessed. Fan Faire 2008 may
have only taken place over a few days, but those days were jam packed
with running around trying to see and absorb everything. As such,
thanks for the patience with this week's newsletter being a day late!



The first thing I want to do is give the Vanguard team at Fan Faire a
huge round of applause. Even though there were only 4 or 5 official
panels on the schedule, the team spent more hours than you can count
talking with all of us. Whether it was morning, noon, or night, the
Vanguard team was always there, answering more questions than
you can imagine, some of which really
were a bit out there. Everyone on that team went out of their way to
make sure we all knew they were approachable and honestly looking
forward to answering any question we could throw at them.



To put things in
perspective, take a listen to href="http://voyagesofvanguard.wordpress.com/2008/08/06/vov-episode-51-featuring-ichie-and-tons-about-lore/">Beau
and Luper's latest podcast, when they
had Vanguard Developer, Ichie on the show with them talking about lore
and answering questions for over 60 minutes. Got it in your head?
Excellent. Now gather that bit of information in your noggin, multiple
it by 72, and you're getting to close to the amount of interaction we
all had with the Vanguard team. If they were out and about
(whether it be at a panel, in the hallway,
at a party, trying to get something to eat), they were always happy to
talk with us and that level of
passion for a project just can't be faked.



href="http://media.tentonhammer.com/vanguard/gallery/albums/Vanguard-Item-Pics/Crowd.jpg"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 200px; height: 109px; float: left;"
alt="Crowd thumb"
src="http://media.tentonhammer.com/vanguard/gallery/albums/Vanguard-Item-Pics/Crowd_thumb.jpg"
hspace="10" vspace="5">Over the course of
the next
week, I'll be posting various tidbits of
information, along with a set of pictures from the Fan Faire. Some of
those pictures are from our first look at the upcoming new character
models. While I can't in all honesty say that I love all the new
models, I can say the majority of them are absolutely awesome. There
are a few models I'm not really fond of, but I'll reserve judgement
until I see them in action a bit more. Considering the fact that
they're also races that I have never played (nor planned on playing),
it's entirely possible I'm just biased against them.
I'll let
you decide for yourselves.



To avoid having the masses up in arms and ready to riot since they're
foaming at the mouth for information, let me get a few tidbits out
there to tease you.

• href="http://media.tentonhammer.com/vanguard/gallery/albums/Vanguard-Item-Pics/Goblin.jpg"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 93px; height: 200px; float: right;"
  alt="goblin thumb"
  src="http://media.tentonhammer.com/vanguard/gallery/albums/Vanguard-Item-Pics/goblin_thumb.jpg"
  hspace="10" vspace="5">Pantheon of the
  Ancients will have overland 6-man group content, and
  24-man raid content. Silius stated in the first Vanguard panel that all
  future raid content (excluding overland raid mobs) will be 24-man. The
  preview video will be up on Youtube soon.
• Pankor Zhi was originally
  intended to be a diplomacy dungeon! Whether
  that will ever come to see the light of day remains to be seen, but to
  think of it as a possibility is pretty exciting. Pankor will not be
  turned into a normal dungeon, due to the size of the hallways and
  layout of the city. For now, the city will remain as is.
• The new character models will bring back the
  massive
  amounts of
  lost customization that was lost when helmets were initially
  implemented. Silius states that approximately 90% of the customization
  will be back. The remaining 10% were sliders that had trivial
  (if
  any) effects on the characters.
• To settle a rumor going through the community - If the card
  your Buddy
  Key (or Keys) is printed on does not have an expiration date anywhere
  on it, then
  that key can be used at any time in the future. If you have a Buddy Key
  with a printed expiration date (such as from an old Collector's Edition
  I recently picked up), then the key will indeed expire on that date.
  Using the Collector's Edition as an example, that would be December
  31st, 2008 for the keys I have. As such, I'd advise getting those
  editions as soon as you can if you want to pass those keys out.

href="http://media.tentonhammer.com/vanguard/gallery/albums/Vanguard-Item-Pics/Beau_and_Luper.jpg"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 200px; height: 150px; float: left;"
alt="Beau and Luper thumb"
src="http://media.tentonhammer.com/vanguard/gallery/albums/Vanguard-Item-Pics/Beau_and_Luper_thumb.jpg"
hspace="10" vspace="5">I'll post more news
from the
event as I continue to recover from the
Las Vegas weekend and have a chance to go through my notes. There was
more information to be had than you could shake a stick at and
personally, I can't wait to do it all over again next year.



Before I sign off for today, I'd like to take a moment to give a
special thanks to all those that came up and talked to me about the
content here on Vanguard
at Ten Ton Hammer. Some was praise, some was not, but to each
and every
last one you, "Thank you". Without you coming here and
supporting us, we wouldn't be here, so if you're a fan of the site,
please let your friends know about us, especially with the Isle of Dawn
trial continually getting closer to release!





What do you think? Leave a comment href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=32769"
target="_blank">here!




Have you missed any of Dalmarus' Vanguard Chronicles? Check out href="http://vanguard.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=969"
target="_blank">The
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