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Tour of Telon (Page 2)

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Mounts and Flying Mounts

Since there’s limited instant travel in Telon, and travel is designed to be a meaningful part of the adventure, mounts are integral to gameplay in Vanguard. The first horses are available to players at around level 10. As players progress, they’re able to obtain mounts that are faster and more powerful, ending with the impressive wurm (a flying dragon). As we watched, Jeff Butler buzzed a level 5-10 newbie area in Qalia, which sent beta players scattering, although a few recognized the dragon and cheered.

You’ll have to work hard to obtain a dragon, though. We were told that he was a very high level mount, and players wouldn’t be able to take the reins until somewhere around level 40-45 plus.

At this time, just like ship-to-ship combat, there’s no mounted combat in the game. While you can be attacked on horseback and knocked off your mount, or even shot down off your flying mount, you won’t actually be fighting from the saddle. Once again, mounted combat is the stuff expansions are made of. You can, however, equip your horse with armor to make it faster or help prevent knock-down.

Player Housing

Player housing is another interesting fact of life in Telon. While players can own houses, they’re not of the sort that you’ll see in games like EQ2, where all players receive access to instanced apartment-style housing. Housing in Vanguard is not instanced, and there will be a limited number of plots available.

“Won’t that create a real estate market?” asked a reporter.

“Yep!” enthused Butler.

“Ownership of a house is not an entitlement,” said McQuaid.

As we watched, Butler used his GM tools to enter the house of a beta player. “I’m breaking and entering,” he said. (He told us that once he’d done a similar demo and broken into a house only to find its startled owner sitting inside.) A vast number of items found in Vanguard--an “item-centric” game, according to McQuaid--can be placed in player housing. Butler demonstrated the ease with which items can be moved around within a house. He even redecorated the house he’d broken into by taking a mounted bear head, flipping it upside down, and sticking a loaf of bread in its mouth.

Sound Bytes

There was much explored during the Vanguard Gamers Day press event that’s not easily accounted for here, so instead of leaving out whatever doesn’t fit into the framework of this article, I’ll deliver the interesting tidbits:

• While Vanguard will launch with a “flight ceiling” for flying mounts (still “many kilometers” above Telon), the game was designed to be infinitely expandable, with the ability to grow in all directions with things like flying cities and underground cities.
• The human starting area on Kojan boasts a Ninja School as well as ornate Oriental-style temple.
• Players can sail down the river from the Qalian city of Khal to its capitol city, Ahgram.
• Vanguard will have an underwater area that is “kind of an Atlantian area.” Sound intriguing? “We’re not ready to talk about that yet,” said Brad McQuaid.
• Vanguard will have open servers, allowing for players from all over the globe to play on the same server. It will have language support for "as many languages as make sense [financially]." Sigil will push for a simultaneous release in North America and Europe, but there's no guarantee just yet.
• Sigil has developed a gameplan for dealing with secondary market gold farmers. “We have some pretty cool ideas we’re not talking about.” Sigil doesn’t want to tip their hand to the gold farmers and give them the opportunity to find a way to work around their carefully laid attempts to foil them.
• Regarding the death penalty: “We’re big believers in alternate ruleset servers.” If you want to play a more “hardcore” game, that option should be available to you.
• Wondering if Vanguard will be released on a console? Don’t buy your PS3 in the hopes of running Vanguard. “Current generation consoles simply don’t have the power to run this game,” said McQuaid.
• Make room on your hard drive. Vanguard will consume around 24 gigs.
• There will be between 3000 and 5000 players per shard (server).

Hype or Substance?

I have to admit that my first impression of Vanguard was that it's not necessarily breaking any MMO molds. Other games have mounts, and ships, and player housing. Other games have pretty graphics. In fact, as an SOE-published game (although it started off a Microsoft-published game), to me Vanguard seemed to lack some of the glitter that made games like EQ2 stand out. I’ve wondered what exactly will make Vanguard the Next Big Thing amidst a flurry of fantasy-based MMORPGs.

This weekend made the answer to my questions apparent. Vanguard doesn’t have to make use of glitter and sparkle because it has a solid foundation and a team dedicated to making its mark on the MMO landscape. Its size and scope alone grant it the status of something that's never before been done, not to mention all the various aspects of the game that, although some of them have been done before, have never before been rolled into one enormous and ambitious title. Although SOE is very likely to rev up the hype machine as Vanguard nears launch, this game is not about glitz, even though there's plenty in Vanguard that glimmers...it’s about substance.

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• View more new screenshots of Vanguard in our image gallery
• Read Shayalyn's blog about the press weekend with Sigil
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