Vanguard: Saga of Heroes Impressions - E3 2004

Microsoft Game Studios was on hand at E3 2004 with its upcoming massively multiplayer game Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. The game has been in development at Sigil Games, a studio founded by some of the original creators of EverQuest--designers Brad McQuaid and Jeff Butler, and fantasy artist Keith Parkinson. The new game is currently in a pre-alpha stage, but it already features a number of built-out environments, including an expansive dry swampland lined with short grass and dotted with towering pillars of rock. We then moved to a huge town with cobblestone streets lined with crowded villas, past which townspeople bustled and across which the citizenry had hung its laundry out to dry. The team at Sigil will attempt to make the world of Vanguard completely seamless and continuous--that is, there will not only be no load times, but also, every single visual feature on the landscape will be a real 3D object you can reach.

According to Sigil's Jeff Butler, the development team will attempt to make each part of the world of Vanguard contextually relevant. For instance, towns won't just be places to sell the loot you've recovered from monsters; in fact, the game will have a crafting profession that thrives within towns and can advance in experience levels by completing quests and tasks within town, in much the same way that a typical adventurer finds experience and rewards by hunting in dungeons. In addition, the team clearly intends to make the world of Vanguard huge, and as Butler explained, Sigil also intends to make travel "meaningful." As part of its plan to make Vanguard a game that is "challenging but not tedious," the team will implement numerous means of noninstantaneous travel, such as easily affordable horses that players should be able to acquire early on in their careers (even characters at a relatively low experience level of level 5 should be able to afford them; the game is currently planned to feature a level cap of 40). However, travel on horseback may be dangerous, or to put it another way, fraught with adventure--according to Butler, in many epic works of fantasy fiction, journeys themselves are adventures (rather than being tedious timesinks that stand between you and the next dungeon full of loot).

In addition, the game's character advancement system will also let you be a craftsman who can, with the help of other crafters, pool skills like carpentry and textile working to build a simple ship that can skirt the coastline of a continent to avoid monsters on the mainland, though the most exciting exploration will likely occur when highly skilled craftsmen pool their skills to create seagoing vessels. Vanguard will actually feature what McQuaid describes as "two character spheres"--that is, two separate ways in which characters may advance. In the game's current alpha state, a single character may advance to level 40 in an adventuring profession and may also advance to level 40 in a crafting profession--the sample character we were shown was actually a level-5 cleric and a level-10 prospector. In fact, Sigil currently plans to let players actually take on several levels of multiple character class types, so anyone who wishes may very well be able to create a fighter/cleric/wizard/tailor/armorer character in the final game. You'll be able to acquire each new profession by speaking with a computer-controlled trainer character.

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes has been actively in development for about a year and a half. The game will be released once Sigil Games completes development on the launch game.