Ancient Port
Warehouse: An Interview with Avarem

By Machail

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.