vanguard potential for roleplaying

Volkmar

Premise: I'm not playing this game now and I'm fully aware of the state the game is right now, I'm considering giving it a try in 3-6 months when most bugs should have been resolved and hopefully the performance situation has become better. So if you want to convince me to buy this game NOW, save your breath. Also if you want to convince me of how crappy this game is, save your breath.

Greetings.

I write this thread to inquire vanguard's player on the game Roleplaying potential, ie: how much freedom there is in organizing events, creating props that can be placed in the environment and how good immersion there is.

In details, i want to know:

1) the game is seamless right? no zone loading ever?

2) are there chat channels? if yes, how many and what they span? if not, what yell options you have and how far do they go?

3) I know there is housing, but how extensive is it? is it in the wilderness only? is there a risk to have a "metropolitan wilderness" like UO? can you create furniture and other house ornaments or you get those only from NPC/quests/others? can you place furniture in the wild or just in houses? in case you can do it only in houses, can you create "teporary" houses, like tents?

4) how limited/extended is the economy? is there some market system to sell/buy things? how local/worldwide is it? can you set up shops anywhere or in your houses or nowhere?

5) are there Rp servers? if yes how they differ from normal?

I think that is all, feel free to also offer your comments on why you think vanguard is a good or bad game for Roleplaying.

thanks.

Volkmar

sepher

1. Short answer, yeah it's seamless. Long answer, the world is divided up into perfectly adjacent square 'chunks', pretty much a grid if you laid the map out flat. When you cross a grid line, you load up a lot of assets from the next square. Depending on your system, in particular your RAM, this can take either 2 minutes or 2 seconds.



2. There's regional channels, i.e. Eastern Thestra, Central Thestra, Western Thestra. There's also 'shout' which is pretty much yelling, it extends across an entire chunk, or maybe further. You're also able to create your own chat channels as usual, and there's an /ooc channel as well and so much. Pretty much the chat server you've come to expect from MMOs.



3. It's wilderness only akin to UO. You don't simply find an open enough space like UO though and plop a deed. There's available plots all around the world though, thousands of them, and once you purchase a plot of land you go through construction from the skeleton of the house to finished product.



I'm not sure if the Artificer - Carpenter route can create furniture, but I imagine they can.



As to whether or not your house will have serpents and lizardmen swarming it all the time a-la WoW, probably not at this point and time. The world isn't overly dense with mobs given its really huge, so I can't say I've seen a housing area with any PvE content, or even resources nearby for gathering. But there probably is some of the latter maybe.



4. There are exchange brokers, i.e. auctioneers. I think theres one per continent, i.e. a Thestran Exchange Broker, Kojani Exchange Broker, so on. Usually one in every major city.



You can have NPC player vendors at your home, who'll sell items for you and so on even while you're offline. But if you've ever seen the way Dark Age of Camelot does it, with a searchable consignment merchant to let you know which house you might want to visit; no such thing in Vanguard. Only way to know what a player vendor has is to cross it for some reason and click it.



5. All servers 'encourage' roleplay, through the existence of things like the /ooc channel and all. But that enforcement is as idle as it is in other MMOs. But there is a 'RP Preferred' server, Florendyl. So far, its pretty good. People attempt roleplaying more often than not, and most of the guilds I've seen strictly enforce roleplay in spatial areas on that server, even in guild chat, with channels created denoting different roleplayed areas and such.



So even in the absence of a new type of policy in these games to enforce roleplaying, I have to say the guild leaders are being a lot more strict about it than any other game I've seen.





Few reasons why I think roleplaying on Vanguard is working out more than it will/has in other MMOs.



--No PvP on normal servers, this lessens competition and mechanical divisions between players.

--No hardlined raid-only content, i.e. nothing obviously looming in the horizon like Onyxia or Ragnaros of WoW, with no promised divisions in the community via instances, so guilds haven't formed yet over the expressed intent over a single piece of content, and to race and complete it before another guild.

--Vanguard pretty much attempts to permeate all of it's content throughout every level, so you'll see raid mobs, group content, solo content, quite a few towns and outposts for you and so on at every level. This varies your possible RP environments in a way, unlike previous MMOs I've played that start you around the corner from the main, biggest cities, and centralize content there.





There's a few other personal reasons but, in short, enjoying roleplaying is a perfect way to circumvent other annoyances in the game right now. Florendyl is shaping up to be a pretty great server for it. Just browse VGPlayers, some of the guilds and their policies to see for yourself.

redelf07

I would just like to add another feature they will implement. That is player controlled cities. The cities will be impacted by high level diplomats in the game. I figure this will add another large role playing element. ex. Mayors, bankers, treasurers, etc..

Volkmar

thanks for the answers, they were very informative and the idea of player cities is quite good.

I forgot to ask about Guilds: what options there are for guilds? any special features for them or the usual? can they have a Guild hall like in SWG or just normal houses? Do they have any impact in the world?

Mmmh.... so if there is some sort of continental action house, what is the good of having a personal shop? especially if i cannot advertise it and people cannot search for it (SWG had such a system to place your shop on the planetey map for example and you could program droids to be advertisement machines in cities)? Is there some substantial limit to how the AH works? like... only a certain sum or limited to 10 items at a time or the like?

Finally... I heard the crafting system is very interdependent, so can a crafter actually create dozens of items or he is limited to do a few items? (SWG had mass productions and in UO it was extremely easy to make items so you could mass produce stuff for example).

thanks again.

EDIT: no pvp at all. i knew about this, it is a bit unsettling for RPG as it means no conflict between guilds... or is there a possibility to have guild conflicts or at least duels?

redelf07

There are pvp servers, but no PVP-RP as of yet.  There are guild halls that can be built, but they are extremely expensive. I'm sure a guild with the proper funding would be able to buy one though. I'm sure once player shops and cities are more mainstream, they will implement something to tally up all items that are being sold and give you a direction of where you may be able to find the person's home. The crafting system is very indepth. You can create hundreds of items from each profession.(maybe thousands) Its more interactive than most where you can end up with different quality items.(ranging from D quality to A quality) So I could imagine RPers being known for having certain quality of this and others certain quality of that. The game leaves a lot of room for you to make your own decisions, especially once everything is implemented. I know there will be people that say "well, when will that be, " but I have faith in the Developers at Sigil and their dedication towards Vanguard. I really will turn out to be an all around spectacular game. Just give it some time.

xxpigxx

Good info guys.



I appreciate it as well.  Thank you.

sepher

Originally posted by Volkmar


thanks for the answers, they were very informative and the idea of player cities is quite good.
I forgot to ask about Guilds: what options there are for guilds? any special features for them or the usual? can they have a Guild hall like in SWG or just normal houses? Do they have any impact in the world?
Mmmh.... so if there is some sort of continental action house, what is the good of having a personal shop? especially if i cannot advertise it and people cannot search for it (SWG had such a system to place your shop on the planetey map for example and you could program droids to be advertisement machines in cities)? Is there some substantial limit to how the AH works? like... only a certain sum or limited to 10 items at a time or the like?
Finally... I heard the crafting system is very interdependent, so can a crafter actually create dozens of items or he is limited to do a few items? (SWG had mass productions and in UO it was extremely easy to make items so you could mass produce stuff for example).
thanks again.
EDIT: no pvp at all. i knew about this, it is a bit unsettling for RPG as it means no conflict between guilds... or is there a possibility to have guild conflicts or at least duels?

Guilds can pool together and buy guild houses, yeah. There are plots so expensive that you're going to see guilds wanting to propose guild dues and such to fully deck out one.



As for any other Vanguard-unique features for guilds...not really, out of game there's more support for guilds like webhosting provided through VGPlayers to have a guild site and such, and tracking of your guild and its members achievements. I expect that to be pretty awesome, even more so than Mythic's XML support with DAoC. So inadvertently that aids the community in a way.



As far as how much can guilds impact the world. I'm not sure, not very many people are of high levels and such right now, all I can answer is that theres every reason to believe some guilds can be renowned for their different specialties depending on how they're organized.



Example, on Florendyl there exists a guild called The Kojani Trade Company or somesuch, if you were to look through VGPlayers, you'd see that most of the crafting related achievements are accomplished by them. Naturally they might be the ones later on pumping out houses and boats and so on and be the go-to guild. While another guild might be the typical adventuring heavy, and another called upon for it's diplomacy heavy members to form a group effort in a city and pull all the right levers.



So I expect guilds to become pretty malleable, or pretty specific about what they do, and have more room in Vanguard to put emphasis on their purposes, more so than any previous game I've played.



As for your question about auction houses and their effect on player vendors, that kind of remains to be seen. On VGPlayers, it's supposed to display your house, I'm not sure if it'll display the contents of your vendor.



It's also worth keeping in mind that the servers one day might be full of players with flying mounts, and players more knowledgeable of the world's size and less intimidated by it to be able to visit house to house without much of a problem. Still, I'm guessing there's going to be a bit of fansite forum hopping to promote shops probably.



Anyway, you have to pay to list your items on the auction, depending on how much it's worth. Auctions are also limited to their country of origin too I think. But neither of those might entirely sway a wouldbe seller to using a player vendor instead of the auction. There's other factors too though, like how slow mail is...maybe someone can elaborate more clearly on what other limiting or discouraging factors there may be to poise player vendors above auctioneers.



As for crafting, there's no button you can press to crank out a batch of items. Each item is made individually, and often involves several components. Crafting is pretty extensive...very. It'd surprise you. Each item you create of significant worth is going to come with its own set of 'complications' and possible tools you'll need to switch around in your toolbelt to resolve them with, or special components you need on your table to deal with them...like stiff joints while sewing requiring bandaging, rigging tools used to repair billows. etc.



Guilds can duel, yeah.