Guard your Van!

2007-03-14 by Frank Sinatra

The era of World of Warcraft

is slowly coming to an end. Its impact in online gaming can only be considered as monumental, and there is both good and bad consequenses.

Some good parts are primarily the extreme number of new players starting their addictions to consistent online worlds. Due to the cash machine it also is the gaming world will probably see more risk willing investor cash flowing around.

Bad things are also considerable. The money required for a top title is getting so high that the original and innovative idea never will come outside the mind of the aspiring developers because it is not a sure thing.

In my daily job as a Business Process Engineer/Architect at IBM, and a lifelong gamer it is so clear to me which way the games has to go in terms of content and motivation but the sad thing is that I simply dont see it coming. It is going to be Clone Wars in online development for a while, ironically the Clone Wars was made by George Lucas when the Gaming world needs exactly one like him. We need a man with a vision - not being afraid to try a different approach who also incidentally is a Multi Billionaire.

For a Guild like SUN, this has also been moving the mindsets a little, playing WOW for 2 years and spending a zillion hours to get the next item in a new shiny color.

WOW proved the commercially great idea to have a game without losers, but sometime not long after your 12th birthday you realise that if there are no loosers, then there are no winners either.They say that in WOW everyone is a winner, where I with equal right can say everyone in WOW is a looser - there is simply no diversity. One fun part however is that I dont think I know anyone who have played WOW a lot who didnt mean that they really rocked at playing the game. And that itself is a nice achievement, but if you step back this is simply the result of a game with no punishment for sucking.

This brings us to our next game of choice, Vanguard

Ironically Vanguard is made by some of the biggest pve bears the mmorpg world has to offer, but they actually made a ffa server.It is insane how much this little thing changes a game from being a trivial timekiller to a game of conflict. Even though the legendary Raph Koster beleived he failed when he gave too many options to the players because they abused them - in reality he did not fail. He was just making the right thing at the wrong time because the gaming segment 10 years ago was way different that today, and the more morally inclined people were lacking then, but has come in bulk now.

Vanguard is not a finished game, its customer service thrives on deleting all petitions once a day, they say they dont have zones, but inventet chunks which really equals the zoning in EQ1 which was legendary bad. There are lots of bugs, and the optimization is non existant. But they have ffa pvp. No safe zones, money drop, and no mercy.

This is what its all about, a tough gaming environment where you depend on your friends because they are there for you and not because you need a third druid to sleep dragons in a given encounter.

So we have jumped on the Vanguard boat, making the usual SUN love entry by simply killing everyone and everything we meet (or at least try to). Online hate is a good thing, and a great motivation to play. Vanguard has real guildbased fighting and even though the game is questionable in some ways the hardcore (compared to WOW pvp servers) ffa ruleset makes up for alot.

It feels good to be back in a real SUN environment where you cannot go afk if you are alone, if you enter a town you dont just ride in, but scout it out first, never for a second think that another person will leave you alone - because the moment he can get help from a friend or somehow get the upper hand, he will kill you.

We are SUN, and we are here to kill you - and damn it feels good.