10.12.06 - F: Tour of Telon - pg 2

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 href="http://vanguard.tentonhammer.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album01&id=Flower_Palace_3&op=modload&name=Gallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 150px; height: 85px; float: right;"
alt="Flower Palace" title="Flower Palace (click to enlarge)"
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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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