Inside the Ancient Port Warehouse

An E3 Interview with Bill Fisher

by Shayalyn

---

I found Vanguard!
No, it wasn't behind the sofa. While it didn't have much of a presence
in SOE's demo room, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes makes an unassuming E3
appearance at Santa Monica's Barker Hangar, the tiny venue that serves
as the 2007 show floor. I talked with Bill "Tagad" Fisher of SOE about
some upcoming features including flying mount quests, guild hall
quests, the Brotherhood System, and especially the new level 50 raid
area we've just begun to hear more about, the Ancient Port Warehouse.



Fisher told me that Vanguard fans could expect game updates at a rate
of one every 6 to 8 weeks or so. Things like the flying mount quests,
guild halls and end game raid content should be coming down the pike
soon ™,  but Fisher was quick to point out that no
timelines have been definitely set. "I can't promise anything
time-wise," he said. "If we get it done and it goes out [onto the test
servers] and it's quality then you'll see it in the game. We're not
going to put something out that we don't feel strongly about."



Quality seems to be the watch word for SOE and the new Vanguard
paradigm. After suffering through a bug-infested release and sluggish
to game-breaking performance issues, SOE has set their sites on quality
assurance, thoroughly testing each patch and update before it hits the
live servers. "The big focus right now is quality," Fisher iterates. In
fact, Fisher was quick to point out that the appearance of new content
on the test servers doesn't necessarily mean we'll see it in the live
game soon. "Even if it hits test we can always revert it back if it
turns out it's not ready yet."



The flying mount quest, which Fisher explains should be challenging but
worthwhile, is in the works right now. The guild hall quest line should
also be coming in the near future, and will involve all three spheres:
crafting, diplomacy, and adventuring. "I know a lot of guilds are
looking forward to that," Fisher says.



But the big topic of the day was the Ancient Port Warehouse, a level 50
raid zone that Fisher was excited to show me. He explained that what I
was seeing was coming from the test server, and that the content here
was about a week behind where the dev team is currently on their
internal servers. While what I saw was clearly not as populated with
mobs as it will be when it releases, it was nonetheless some pretty fun
stuff. The Ancient Port Warehouse, or APW as it's already come to be
called, features gnomish constructs and the handiwork of what Fisher
referred to as a "gnomish Leonardo de Vinci." At one point we entered
the Sky Pirate room, which contained a floating gnome-crafted
dirigible. It's the sort of thing that will make even the busiest raid
group pause, look up, and say, "Cool…"



What's most intriguing about the APW is that the mobs there, even the
garden variety ones, will have abilities to challenge players. "All the
mobs here have their own special abilities," Fisher explained. "There
are none that are using, say, generic warrior abilities; they're all
pretty much custom made. Our goal is to build in some strategy with
these guys. There are no 'trash mobs.'"



As players go into the dungeon they will learn by fighting mobs on the
way to the bosses. The non-named mobs have some of the same abilities
as the boss mobs so that the raiding party reaches the boss content
more prepared and having developed a strategy. "You're learning what
you should be doing along the way," Fisher explains, "instead of
reaching the boss mob and going, 'Oh no, he's got 47,000 gimmicks;
we're never gonna figure this out!'"



The APW comes complete with a good bit of lore involving the gnomes.
And with this lore comes a diplomacy angle. While raiding won't rely on
a deep inter-dependency between adventurers and diplomats, the
diplomacy quest line will help to give adventurers clues to defeating
the boss mobs.



href="http://vanguard.tentonhammer.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album04&id=Vulmane&op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php"> style="border: 0px solid ; float: left;" alt="Vulmane"
src="http://media.tentonhammer.com/vanguard/gallery/albums/album04/Vulmane.thumb.jpg"
hspace="4" vspace="2">In the original
vision for Vanguard, Sigil held a hard "no instancing" stance. Looking
at the APW, I was compelled to ask whether SOE was equally committed to
staying away from instanced raid zones. "At this point in time the
Ancient Port Warehouse will not be instanced," Fisher said. "You know,
we'll talk about that down the line, but right now we're focused on
getting this out there and getting other content in--the low level, the
mid-level, the high-level--and optimizing the game. Future issues like
instancing are something I'd rather not think about at this point."



But won't the lack of instancing make the APW a highly contested zone
as guilds start flooding in to tackle the raid content that has been
lacking from Vanguard since launch? For starters, Fisher explained that
the majority of players aren't at the end game, and that the average
player level is roughly in the mid-20s. Fisher also says the boss mobs
in the APW have fairly shallow loot tables, so SOE expects a limited
degree of re-playability.*
"The bigger guilds may come through here
maybe three, four, five times and then move on," he said. "The guilds
currently testing the area for us tell us they're having a great time,
though."



The APW is also scaled so that multiple raid groups should be able to
move through it without tripping over each other very often. Fisher
used dev tools so that we could take a look at the APW in /ghost mode,
which allowed us a glimpse of the many layers of the dungeon with its
walls cut away. Despite the fact that the clipping plane made more
distant object vanish in the haze, the APW did indeed look enormous.



"We want to make sure that the experience isn't just to slog through it
every time," said Fisher. He explained that raid groups will encounter
an entry area and then a hub area. The hub area leads off into wings.
"Each wing has its own unique experience," he says. "And once you reach
the end of the wing there's a teleporter back to the hub. So you can
play through the wing, teleport back to the hub, and then all the other
areas are available to play through. I think we're talking about an
hour and a half to two hours to play through a section."



Another item on SOE's coming-soon list is the trial island. This new
level 1-10 island will be offered as a free demo for folks interested
in giving Vanguard: Saga of Heroes a try. To continue past level 10,
players will need to purchase the game. The trial island will be a free
download. Those who purchase the game outright, without a demo, won't
have the trial island experience and will head straight to their
respective races' newbie zones when they log in.



"Will a free trial give gold sellers easy access to Vanguard?" I asked.
"I mean, players are complaining about the number of gold seller /tells
they receive in game as it is."



"When people are in Trial Island they'll be locked into it and probably
won't be able to send tells to the outside," Fisher said, "So we're
pretty conscious of not allowing a trial person to come in and ruin
everyone's day."



"But you're still going to have players who purchase the game having
immediate access from level 1 to all of the players in the
game…" I said.



"If they're buying the game, yeah, we're still going to have that
problem, sadly." Fisher replied. "Our customer href="http://vanguard.tentonhammer.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album04&id=Screenshot_by_JKata&op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php"> style="border: 0px solid ; float: right;"
alt="Vanguard screenshot"
src="http://media.tentonhammer.com/vanguard/gallery/albums/album04/Screenshot_by_JKata.thumb.jpg"
hspace="4" vspace="2"> service people will
try and fight that, but it's an uphill battle. When you swipe your
credit card [to buy the game] we can't determine, 'Oh, you're a gold
farmer!' We don't know your intentions when you log into our game, but
if you're a gold farmer hopefully we're going to find you."



Another side benefit of Trial Island is that it gives SOE the ability
to work on optimizing the game assets, essentially helping them figure
out ways to make the game run faster and smoother. Once SOE has locked
down those performance improvements, they'll retrofit the technology
into the entire live game. "That's going to be an ongoing process
throughout the next year and onward," Fisher said, "Making sure the
game runs smoothly at the level it needs to be for the average player."
He noted that there have been some significant improvements to the live
game already with respect to performance, and player feedback has been
positive.



We talked briefly about the Brotherhood System (formerly referred to as
the Fellowship System), which was promised at launch but then hasn't
actually make it into the live game yet. While I thought I'd understood
that Brotherhoods would be added in the next update, Fisher continued
to hold a hard make-no-promises line. "We've been in too many
situations where we've promised one thing and didn't deliver," he said,
"so we just don't want to get into that scenario again. We want to be
much more up front with our player base on everything. We're either
going to deliver or we're not going to deliver; there's just no better
way to do business." So, once again, expect the new system to be added
soon, with no firm timeframe.



When SOE acquired Vanguard from Sigil Games Online back in May, Brad
McQuaid (then CEO of Sigil) talked of a "relaunch" of sorts. SOE used
the same terminology, with David "Hasium" Gilbertson (producer) having
recently talked of what a relaunch would mean to the game. But what a
relaunch actually involves has remained hazy for Vanguard fans. I asked
Fisher if he could clarify.



"I think the word 'relaunch' gets misunderstood by a lot of people," he
said. "It's actually [in line with] what we're looking at doing with
the trial island. People are wondering if we're going to shut the game
down and the answer is no, absolutely not. It's more of a marketing
blitz, in all reality. 'Hey, come try Vanguard out again. We've fixed
some of the issues we've had in the past, we've added new features that
other games don't have--come give us a shot! We think you'll like it.'"



Vanguard's high system requirements have kept many people from playing
(or enjoying) the game. I asked whether Fisher thought system specs
would continue to be a barrier to new players. "The only thing we can
do is continue to optimize the game, and everyone's been working very
hard on making it run faster and smoother," he said. "I believe the
last patch or the patch before that actually added some of the new
caching technology, which has helped."



Will the system spec barrier affect how long SOE waits for the next
marketing blitz? Will they wait for technology to catch up, as Brad
McQuaid once suggested? "We're not counting on that," Fisher said. "Our
relaunch is going to be based on when what we think is the right time
and when the trial island is ready to go. And hopefully we won't be up
against any other games that are launching…"



"Like maybe launching Vanguard against The Burning Crusade wasn't such
a good idea?" I said, smiling, making reference to the fact that
Vanguard launched around the same time as Blizzard's first World of
Warcraft expansion. Then I quickly added, "Although it seems you
weren't given a lot of choice in that."



Bill Fisher laughed. "You do what you do," he said. "It is what it is.
And I am what I am, to quote Popeye."

---

*Andrew
"Avarem" Krausnick, Game Designer for SOE, offered the following
clarification after this interview was published:



It's worth mentioning that only some, not all, of the bosses within the
APW will have shallow loot tables. We've basically separated bosses into contested and non-contested.
Granted, right when people start hitting the APW, even the
non-contested bosses will be fought over, but over time due to shallow
loot tables and the ability to bypass their locations altogether, these
bosses should be left alone by the higher end guilds who will be far
more interested in the bosses we've designated as 'contested'.



Also, we're ensuring that these contested bosses aren't simply valuable
because of deeper loot tables (something which can result in redundant
loot if your random numbers aren't evenly distributed), but also by
placing highly valuable crafting components on their loot tables,
components which are required in order to craft some of the highest
tier items coming out of APW.

---

Check out these
resources for more Vanguard information:

• Community
  site
• href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/forumdisplay.php?f=38">Forums
• href="http://vanguard.tentonhammer.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=index&meid=9">News