 Sigil Developer Tracker
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The dev tracker is no longer actively scanning, however you may continue to browse the archives collected over the past several years here.
Please remember that these developer posts
are taken out of context, so beware of any silky venom being spewed forth.
Color Key:
Green - Sigil Games Online Employee
Pink - Sony Online Entertainment
Gray - Microsoft Game Studios Employee
Orange - Community Member
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ayana
I'm not in-the-know on how the corpse recovery trail looks (as I'm not one of the lucky ones  ) but if it's a glowy trail to me it's too 'obvious'. I think a more subtle method (like a compass arrow + loc listed in journal) would reconcile both sides better.
I've had my share of frustrating corpse searches (those walls in Cazic sure loved snatching up my squished wizard corpses!) but to me it was one of the gameplay elements that taught me some responsability in being aware of where I am, where I am heading. Not to mention it taught me to use /loc and my first taste of class interdependence with my local necro/bards.
Right now it's a simple bar in your compass. It doesn't have to be some nifty swirly particle effect. The only problem is that the world isn't just about the x and y axis -- it's about the z as well. Right now if you die in the depths of your dungeon you may have followed the compass to the right x and y location, but it could still be 3 level below you. So we need something more.
The coders are working on it, along with a lot of other things. I'm sure we'll come up with something useful but not imerrsion breaking, at least for most.
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reply to this post
Find all posts by Aradune Mithara.
Find all posts in "I hate to bring up another gross part of Vanguard.....".
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Couple of things here, although I've already posted on this previously quite a bit.
1. You don't have to use the travel journal to find your corpse.
2. The world is big, so big that I'm convinced a travel journal to help with CRs as well with other navigational issues is necessary.
3. The key part of CRs, to me, is that they allow for a dynamic death penalty. The deeper in a dungeon you die, the harder it is to get back to your corpse. It's more than just exp loss/debt no matter where you die. But I don't think having no clue WHERE you corpse is is part of that. Losing your corpse is just frustrating. I want you to have to fight back to your corpse, find people to help you. I want you encouraged to use the various mobile bank mechanics we have to make sure you keep around enough gear so that you can fight back with a good chance of making it. That's fun, I think, and helps make it so we can have regions of the world with differing amounts of risk and therefore reward. I don't think we lose any of that if we let you know where that corpse is. It certainly doesn't make it any easier to get back to it -- it just makes it a lot less frustrating by romoving the need to first locate it.
4. I hear people say, well, if the world is big but you've also made it interesting and full of points of interest, shouldn't we be able to remember where we died? Well, I think we've made a varied world with a lot of points of interest, areas that are memorable, and variety. But it's still not has hand crafted in all cases as a smaller, zoned world. Reallly, neither is the real world. Lots of things look the same, and we use maps, GPS systems, etc.
Going seamless but then ending up with a boring world isn't acceptable, IMHO. We set ourselves a very ambitious goal, and I think we're pulling it off. It reminds me of Raph Koster telling me before I launched EQ that a PvE MMOG just wouldn't work -- that you had to have PvP because enough content simply couldn't be created. PvE would only work in a small MUD - not in a 3d world.
Well, enough content was created. More than enough? No. Was there still crowding? Yes. Could the world have had a lot more detail, quests, story, and immersion? In theory, yes, given enough time and money.
My point here, though, is that it launched with enough and then we kept building on it. Criticisms were still made, often valid, but there was still more content than the competitors, by far, whether they were zone based, tile based, seamless, or whatever.
Vanguard's seamless world is the same. I'm confident we can create the content and variety. We're doing it. Seamless doesn't mean you have to abandon detail and that hand crafted feel. It makes it harder. It makes it so you have to do a lot more work. It means that some areas will have more attention to detail than others. But, while not perfect, enough content can be made, just like enough content was made in EQ for PvE.
But it also takes a lot more effort (although I think that extra immersion is worth it). The world is a blast to explore, but no, it's not so detailed and unique everwhere that nothing ever looks the same. You will notice repetition... trees being resued, sections of dungeons that have a variant modular peice also used elsewhere. And neither is there some crazy, unforgettable, elven artifact every 10 feet. At some point you have to balance quantity and quality. Go too much quantity and you get a boring, repetitive world. Go completely hand crafted, unique, completely memorable everywhere and then you end up with a pretty small world. Our goal is a balance between the two.
So exploration is fun, there's lots to see, but you can also get pretty lost. What I've posted about maps will be important -- maps that help you navigate, but don't ruin exploration and discovery. The travel journal is also key, whether it's leading you to your corpse, or to some area revaled to you by an NPC as a quest reward. Likewise, tools to find your party members are there because we need to keep you together. LFG tools are all the more important. Offline travel is all the more important as well. Some of this stuff, until you're in-game, may seem baby-ish or dumbing down or something. I can understand that, but it's really not.
In the end, you'll be the judge, not me. Is seamless, considering all of its plusses and minuses, worth it? And, in particular, did Sigil make it worth it? What I'm just letting you know up front is that to minimize some of the negatives that simply aren't avoidable at this point, we've put in tools like Travel Journals, to help players navigate, and that players are finding it both helpful and not immersion breaking. The world has a lot of interesting points of interest, locals, memorable locations, but at the same time, much like the RL, there's repetition too. One section of a forest may very well end up looking so much like another section that you can't tell the difference. Being able to go anywhere, not being confined to zones or a set of attached rectangles you can navigate through by just following the zone border... that's cool, but it also makes navigation and orienting yourself a lot more challenging.
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reply to this post
Find all posts by Aradune Mithara.
Find all posts in "I hate to bring up another gross part of Vanguard.....".
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