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Vanguard Producer's letter to the community details what's in store for Vanguard
It's been about a month since the Vanguard development crew made the big move from Carlsbad, and they must be settling into their new lofty digs at SOE HQ in San Diego, California, as work on Phase II and III continues as scheduled. Other than that, what's Vanguard's plan? Well, cleaning up one of the worst MMOG launches in the history of the genre isn't an easy feat, and SOE has delegated Thom Terrazas to command Vanguard's development team to some sort of victory. In Vanguard's defense the game has drastically improved since launch but much more still needs to be done. Terrazas has already shown frequent communication with the playerbase on the official Vanguard forums since taking the assignment. In his recent letter to the community Terrazas details Vanguard's long term development focus and proposes a few controversial changes that some consider "WoW-ifying" the game. The two biggest changes causing a forum uproar are: implementing a faster leveling curve and removing the experience loss component from the death penalty. (More after the jump.)
Where Vanguard's Vision is headed
There's that infamous word again. Thinking about all the different "Visions" for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes cleaves my skull with a splitting headache. Thankfully, Thom Terrazas, recent inductee to the Vanguard helm, lays out some specifics on what the newly cut chopped, diced and spliced Vanguard development team has in store for the different phases in Update 3. Some highlights with my commentary include: Update 3 Phases Phase 1 had its up and downs: Performance gains are noticeable in many different game areas. Chat server hiccups fix took awhile, water wasn't working. It happens. Not enough polish and that's something the team will work on. (Dev_01 "It's not shiny enough, shine harder!" "Dev_02 "Man, that's the third lens flare I used on that tree!") Phase II what's coming: Overland raid encounters and Khal optimizations. Lots of new art is getting added to make it easy-on-the-eyes and help to keep your computer from melting. Phase III is in the not so distant future: Ancient Port Warehouse is being combed over, battered, and prodded to iron out all the bugs and to make it suitable for playing. Expect this to go live one or two weeks after Phase II. Check your local patch listing for Revenge of the Vanguard Phases show times. Fine, I'm putting the popcorn away. Vanguard isn't dead, it's there, it's alive, it's still being updated and played. This is great news considering the troubling layoffs (a rumored 18 devs) it remains to be seen if they can get the rest of these updates out so soon but at least the man in charge is communicating with the players, and that's always a good thing. Phase II is planned to go live in less than two weeks.
