Vanguard Saga of Heroes Exclusive With Salim Grant

Welcome to the MMORPGFocus.com exclusive interview with Salim Grant, Lead Content Designer and Producer of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.

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Transcript:

MMORPGFocus.Com Team: This is MMORPGFocus. We’re sitting here with Salim Grant, producer of Vanguard. We’re going to talk a little bit about what’s going on with the game right now, some of the updates that are coming to the game. Maybe we can start off with a question. I know a lot of people have talked about an AA or talent system being added to the game. Can you speak a little about that?


Salim Grant: The most information I can really give is what we released recently and that we’re modeling it after original EQ’s AA system. It’s a tiered system. You have general, art type class stuff. Because of the size of our team and resources and how large of an undertaking it is, we’re trying to go soft initially - Get the system in, get it debugged, get a feel for what the people want and desire, what’s not to game breaking. So it’s going to be relatively simple at first - very basic. Gain a certain amount of AA XP that turns into a point, that point goes into a pool. After I get so much in my pool, I can use that to buy an ability or increase my maximum whatever. So right now we’re not looking at limiting anyone and you can only use nine points here, choose how you want them. We’re just letting it be free form. It seems to be the most popular and kind of goes with what Vanguard is supposed to be about.


MMORPGFOCUS.COM TEAM: Okay, when you said not limiting anyone, did you mean… in other words, if I, an MMORPG staff member wanted to Vanguard intensively, could they keep earning AAs endlessly?


Salim: Yes, yes.


MMORPGFOCUS.COM TEAM: Oh that’s incredible. That’s a great feature. I know a lot of Everquest 2 people that said they wanted that.


Salim Grant: Yeah, and I can understand that. I mean, the idea of limiting… it kind of makes sense from the perspective of we want people to actually have consequences for their choices, forcing them to be different in a way with estimated points. So if I wanted to get this ability, I have to go this ability route so it’s different from this guy. But in general, I think it’s nicer to be able to just grind out however many points I want to eventually get all this. A lot of people are going to go down that path a different way so that way they’re “different” on the way there but I think it’s kind of cool if everyone can kind of get to the end of it and it gives you a reason to keep doing something. “Bored? Eh.. I’ll grind out some more AA points and get this ability I didn’t really think was that cool. But I did now cause I got everything else I want.”


MMORPGFocus.Com Team: We recently put up an article about Vanguard talking about how the game is in such a good, polished condition now that it almost deserves a relaunch. Do you think Sony will put some extra resources behind marketing the game again now that it’s really improved?


Salim Grant: Well, what a lot of people don’t realize about Vanguard is that we actually did do a relaunch. When Isle of Dawn came out, we did a relatively large marketing push, considering the game budget. After that, I think in January it was, we got Fileplanet for seven days front page. We had banner ads for a couple weeks. Obviously we’re on steam. There’s been a lot of marketing for Vanguard given a small budget. Unfortunately, some people just don’t see it. I mean, Fileplanet has four million plus people looking at their pages and we got a decent amount of traffic coming from that. Doing another relaunch, I don’t know if it would happen anytime soon if it does. I don’t know. Sony treats us well and we’re a part of the family. They do what they can for us but obviously Sony has other horses in the stable it has to take care of and every horse has to kind of fend for itself in the end. If it makes this much money and that much money has to go to things like staff and things like that…


MMORPGFocus.Com Team: Really? Is that how Sony allocates resources?


Salim Grant: In general, each game makes its money. It dictates our budget.


MMORPGFOCUS.COM TEAM: Yeah, it makes business sense. We like Vanguard a lot. In other words, being original Everquest players and the involvement of the original Everquest team in Vanguard, a lot of us feel that in some ways Vanguard is a spiritual successor to the original Everquest. I don’t know if you feel that way, or if you feel you’re following in the footsteps of the original Everquest as well as Everquest 2?


Salim Grant: I mean, that’s how Vanguard was marketed by Brad and I don’t think any other team would tell you they felt differently. Vanguard is, atleast for the creator for Everquest, his sequel to EQ. We’re all old Everquest players and Everquest was an awesome game… Actually I was just talking about one of my favorite MMO experiences – doing the Burning Breaker quest in Everquest . It was fun because there was danger and suspense and all this and Vanguard certainly has that capability. Visually, it’s a stunning game - one of the most beautiful MMOs one the market. And game play wise we have some cool elements – you know, letting you run while casting, dual targeting, brotherhood system, things like that that other people don’t have. I think that helps us stand out and ultimately for those who don’t like Everquest 2 I think for sure Vanguard is a worthy “successor “ in their mind for Everquest because we kind of go a different route than EQ 2.


MMORPGFOCUS.COM TEAM: Right. I’ve heard a number of people say that they play Vanguard as their sequel to Everquest. What class do you play?


Salim Grant: Um, my favorite class in any MMO is a rogue class… and boy have I played them all over the place. I currently have multiple 50s in Vanguard. Generally it’s rogue, DK and… geez… it’s hard to choose my third favorite class. Rogue, DK… and I’m either going to have to go with monk or ranger would have to be my third favorite. I’m kind of partially to druid…


MMORPGFocus.Com Team: See, I haven’t played a druid. I rerolled a blood mage recently and have kind of had some fun with that. It’s a little bit different play style. You know, you create the blood connection and whatever and you have the damage and healing component. Do you think we’ll see a box expansion to Vanguard.


Salim Grant: There’s probably never a chance we’ll be able to do an actual expansion…


MMORPGFocus.Com Team: No retail expansion? What about an electronic expansion? Via Steam or a ten dollar online… you know, like a super huge content patch that you guys sell for a nominal fee.


Salim Grant: Um, I have no idea. I mean, we just released a level increase for free with a large amount of content that we’ve been releasing in pieces over the past year and we still have another piece to release. And AA is going to be free too. We sat down and said we going to push the game forward, we don’t know if we’re going to be able to do an expansion but we still want to do stuff like that kind of get things going. So the team said with a leveling increase, we can do it. Let’s do AA’s, we can do it and I said, “Alright, let’s sit down, design it, and get it going, regardless of a new SKU for Vanguard.” So I don’t think that it would happen. I mean, maybe, we’ve got some big stuff coming up that we want to do online and if that stuff kind of aligns and we say this is enough that people would pay for it, then sure, we can see about doing that. But more than likely, things like AAs and stuff will be free.


MMORPGFocus.Com Team: Yeah, everyone loves free content!


Salim Grant: Exactly. Now granted, if we put it on a SKU on a shelf, that’s more exposure for Vanguard but there’s obviously a lot of overhead and it costs money. So we’ll have to see.


MMORPGFOCUS.COM TEAM: Okay, for all the fans out there, would you talk about how you got your current position? I know there’s a lot of people that play MMOs that wish they could do what you do.


Salim Grant: well, I’ve been in the industry since 1999. I was medically discharged from the military on disability and got into gaming with a friend, who still works at SOE now. I got a job at SOE – started at the bottom, worked my way up and after working on Age of Discord, Jeff Butler called me the day Discord came out and said did l want a job at Sigil, we’re working on the spiritualist quest in Everquest. They talked to me and I said alright, sure. You don’t pass up an opportunity like that - to basically work on a game from scratch. With people like Brad and Jeff, Bill Fisher – people from original EQ.


MMORPGFocus.Com Team: And that’s when I played Everquest. Back a long time when Jeff Kaplan and Brad, they all played.


Salim Grant: Yes. And so I worked on the tracking system for Vanguard along with a lot of other things that people don’t tend to realize. I helped with prop edit design, helped with class design. I did things like equipment expertise and things like that. I worked on a lot of things for Vanguard. I mainly did crafting stuff but when you were working on Vanguard, you had to wear a lot of hats, especially towards the end. So Vanguard came out. We had our problems and as things trickled down, I got more and more responsibilities and then the decision came down that I was there for the job.


MMORPGFocus.Com Team: It’s exciting. Congratulations.


Salim Grant: It’s exciting and it’s stressful. I mean at this point I’m not technically the producer, I’m just the lead designer, it’s just that we don’t have a producer so I’ve taken on an emotional role.


MMORPGFocus.Com Team: So you’re kind of wearing two hats still.


Salim Grant: Right now I’m wearing about six of them. I’ve got a lot of responsibilities and the work day is only eight hours, well it’s supposed to be only eight hours. It’s a lot of work but I enjoy it. If I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t be here.


MMORPGFocus.Com Team: Could you maybe comment on the diplomacy system?


Salim Grant: Well, we brought the diplomacy guy here this year and he has at least quest line plans where both crafting and diplomacy coincide. He’s working on a series of quests that’s supposed to take you from 1-50 to kind of reduce the grind and add some more to it. Obviously he’s itemizing these things so he’s restructuring rewards and stuff on the way up. And obviously we’ve been doing some other things, like we just put in some save decks, things like that. We’ve devoted some code time in the next month or so to doing some of the smaller things to diplomacy that seem to be easy to fix code wise. So, it’s getting some love. You know, it’s one of those things that makes Vanguard unique. Unfortunately it’s a system that was not fleshed out really at all and we kind of got stuck with this half a done system and the people who really knew about it were gone. So now we’re just kind of like how can we incorporate diplomacy and fix it without using a bunch of resources for the main focus of the game which is essentially adventure. Diplomacy will get some love here. It’s already gotten some – surprised some people. Like I said, there’s content being done for it alongside crafting stuff. Jameson splits his time between the two and does a really good job balancing them. Hopefully we can continue to do that as we get more into our groove.


MMORPGFocus.Com Team: Anything else you’d like our readers to know?


Salim Grant: Oh, you know. Play Vanguard. Tell your friends. We’re going to be here as long as we can and good things will be coming down the line. So… it’s a fun game. No if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. Come and play.

[Aronian]

Ask questions here and we will follow up for you with SoE.

LOL we don't bite.

[Swag]

Will focus ever shift back to bug fixes? I'm not talking about the highly restriced Player's Choice Update for bug fixes, but fixes for the bugs, glitches, typos, etc that have been around since beta.

On that same subject, I think the selection of bugs to be fixed in the Player's Choice Update could have been handled much better. The restrictions on bugs were, quite frankly, insane. People could only suggest one bug to be fixed, the bug had to be specific (meaning you couldn't say "fix raid grouping bugs," you had to have different people suggest one of the 7 or 8 bugs involving groups). Then restricting bug fixes to the top bugs voted on by people on the forums? It's just way too restrictive. that system makes sense for Ask A Dev, but it just makes the game look bad when you go so far to restrict the bugs that you're willing to fix.

Also, what's the ETA on the list of bugs that will never be fixed which was mentioned in the Producer's Letter?