Weekly Newsletter 08_18_08: Fan Faire 2008

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Updated Fri, Jan 02, 2009 by Dalmarus

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 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.

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.

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.

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 here!

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Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of the Ten Ton Hammer network or staff.