Ancient Port Warehouse: An Interview with Avarem

By Machail

---

October 3, 2007

Over the past few months, Ten Ton Hammer's Machail had a chance to test out some of the upcoming raid content for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. During this time he got a chance to sit down a bit with Andrew "Avarem" Krausnick and discuss Ancient Port Warehouse, Vanguard's first raid dungeon scheduled for release in the last quarter of 2007.

Machail (Ten Ton Hammer):  Hello Avarem.  Let's start off with who you are.  What is your position at Sony Online Entertainment?

Avarem (Sony Online Entertainment): I am a game designer on the Vanguard project.

MachailTTH:  What is some of your past experience as a designer?

AvaremSOE: Professionally speaking, Vanguard is my first project. That said, some of the content I have been responsible for includes the dungeons of Karrus Hakrel and Thelaseen, as well as the Celestial Ward armor quests, and the reward and boss spawning mechanics in Rahz Inkur.

MachailTTH: What are your goals with Ancient Port Warehouse (APW)?

AvaremSOE: To give the players at level 50 something exciting, challenging, and rewarding to do.

MachailTTH: What kind of spectrum of challenge can we look for in APW? Will it only be for the hard-cores, or is there plenty of content for everyone that can muster up enough level 50s to raid?

AvaremSOE: Due to the fact that APW will be our first raid dungeon, the goal is to provide content that hopefully a wide range of players can enjoy. Our entrance wing is being tuned towards a more casual or less organized raid group. This isn’t to say that we’re going to make it easy - it will require some coordination and time spent, but before those guilds step foot in any of the other wings they may want to spend some time farming the first few bosses.

MachailTTH: What sets Vanguard raiding apart from raiding in other games?

AvaremSOE: We have a lot of classes and mechanics that I believe really define Vanguard as a whole and really haven’t been explored to their fullest potential until now. You never really know what you can do until you’re pushed to the limit, after all.

In addition we have integrated Vanguard’s other key elements – Diplomacy, Crafting, the feeling of choice. Each of these will also serve to make our raid game stand out from the rest.

MachailTTH: What is your personal favorite part about APW?

AvaremSOE: The challenge. I love seeing a guild spend time working an encounter, making progress each time, then finally beating it in the end. It’s almost better than the loot (note: almost – we’re making sure the loot is worth the time as well…).

MachailTTH: Are the raids more script-based, or more AI? (ex. Will mobs just attack with their coded attacks, or are there actions or events that will trigger “special” things?)  Can you give us an example (without a spoiler)?

AvaremSOE: Out of those two choices, the raids are more AI based. We’ve just begun to delve in to what we can do with reactionary and situational abilities. For example, in several of the fights you must use the bosses’ own allies in creative ways in order to counter certain abilities.

MachailTTH: There are several quests within APW marked as “Raid.”  What can you tell us about these quests?

AvaremSOE: They’re going to tell you a story and they’re going to grant you some loot. They’ll involve exploring every nook and cranny of the dungeon, as well as beating every challenge. And really what more can you ask from a set of raid dungeon quests?

MachailTTH: How does the riftway system within APW work?

AvaremSOE: There are certain locations (the entrance, the hub, a few wing mid-points) that have portals. Each of these portals can be ‘attuned’ to by the player, thus allowing the player to travel between each portal location that they have visited. In addition we have enabled the healer’s call spells at each portal location, so if one of your friends or guildmates missed out on last night’s portal run, you can still summon them up to you.

MachailTTH: Do you have a target amount of time you expect a raid to last?  How much wiggle room is there (can it be shorter or longer pending on the raiders preference)?

AvaremSOE:We want a meaningful experience to not take more than about 2 hours. You can play for longer if you want, but no boss should take more than 2 hours to get to (there is one notable exception, one of our wings has been designed as one that will require a bit more time to get through – you might want to plan a Saturday or Sunday for that one…)

MachailTTH: What are the mechanics in place to prevent “griefing” and “blocking?”

AvaremSOE: In an open world there’s really only so much you can do, however, we are introducing one new mechanic that is sure to excite some people and well, it might not be as popular with others. Many of the first raid bosses in our game will have ‘lockout timers’. What this means is that if you kill the boss, it may respawn much sooner than you will be able to kill it again (I’m not going to give specific numbers since those are still in flux). Right now if you’re locked out to a boss it appears as a different color and cannot be interacted with in any way until your lockout timer is up. We’re using this solution so that we can still retain our open world while still allowing as many players as possible to experience our content. This isn’t to say we’re not going to have some contested bosses, and that these bosses won’t be worth fighting over, just that we’re going to have a balance between the two that is intended to keep all of our high end players who want to play this content busy with something to do.

MachailTTH: Raids have recently been increased to 18-person raiding.  Why the change?  Can we expect larger raids in the future?

AvaremSOE: 18 people gives much more tactical flexibility as well as the opportunity to invite a wider range of classes while still being a relatively small and manageable number. We want to make sure all raiders feel as though they are contributing directly to the success of the raid while still requiring a certain bare minimum of organization and group tactics. Our target raid size is 24, and it is a number we’ll be trying to push for as we continue to increase our performance across the board.

MachailTTH: It was touched on that some of the fabled loot from various bosses will be required later on in the dungeon. Can you tell us any more about this or other kinds of progression?

AvaremSOE: Actually we’re pretty loose with how much loot is required. The only hard requirement is that you’ll need to get a certain quested amulet in order to face the dragon, but other than that it’s up to the players about when they want to tackle any given challenge. The loot may help, but it certainly isn’t necessary.

MachailTTH: So, what’s in store after APW?

AvaremSOE: An excellent question (hint: this is a response that means I don’t have a real answer). Right now we’re focused on making an excellent game world that not only are our current players excited to be a part of, but one that new players will want to join as well. What this means is that it may make sense for the team that worked on APW to go put some time working on a dungeon for our newbie progression track in order to teach players how to later tackle the high end content. Or it may mean that we put in more contested overland bosses, or start on another dungeon. It all depends on the state of the game, who is playing, and what we need to do to keep making Vanguard the best game we possibly can.

---