Measuring up the Situation

The saying "two's company, three's a crowd" doesn't quite apply to MMORPGs when taken literally, but there are many ways to apply this to the situation at hand. Just how many group members are necessary for the various adventuring encounters in the world of Vanguard? There will be three ways to look at encounters in the game, as stated by several developers: Casual, Group & Raid. To this end, we'll look at each subset on its own and explore the possibilities that each provide. It has been repeated that all three types of encounters and adventures will be equally supported, so it is worth the exploration.

Casual

An oft-overlooked, yet now-emphasized encounter style, are the "Casuals". This usually refers to players that don't have a tremendous amount of time on their hands at the moment and just want to take a sojourn of an adventure. Member-wise, this catagory falls under either "solo" or "small-group." Until the 2nd generation of MMOs, soloing hasn't been too emphasized. Players usually chose to solo and made off the best they could, utilizing tactics such as kiting to succeed.

Now, in the 2nd generation, we have games such as World of Warcraft where soloing is indeed the primary method of gameplay through the run of leveling. Other games like Everquest II and City of Heroes have also upped the "soloability" of their games to the point where a player does not need to socialize or group to progress. Casual encounters, as a device in Vanguard, will be achievable by both solo players and small groups; usually 2-4 people. It should be made apparent that casual encounters are not meant to be replacements for groups. They are a different set of goals and as such, the rewards will differ.

Group

The most important and emphasized encounters in most MMOs are the "Groups." They are also the most heavily debated as far as balanced size is concerned. One point often overlooked, however, is that a lot of the size issues have to do with, ultimately, how the game is constructed from the classes up.

In games such as Everquest and Final Fantasy XI, group size is limited to six members as the ideal. Similarly, the classes were constructed in a "holy trinity" emphasized group dynamic. In EQ, every group needed a tank, healer and crowd control. Half necessity, the other half usually dedicated to dealing damage. In FFXI, there was also a holy trinity along the lines of tank, healer and mana regeneration. In allowing half the group to be static and the other half to be more flexible, there was room to create interesting combinations. However, this proved to be very tedious as the static roles were often limited to simply one class, leaving an overabundance of classes that could be in a group, and an under-population of necessary classes.

One interesting approach to this dilemma was presented in World of Warcraft: Groups limited to five players. With a far lesser selection in classes but more diverse options in playing them, WoW attempted to solve the problem by creating more potential groups. Indeed there is a trinity of tank, healer and damage dealer; but roles were more flexible allowing for several classes to fill multiple jobs if needed.

In City of Heroes, five "archetypes" were presented, placing a player into very definitive positions: tank, melee damage, ranged damage, crowd control or support. Despite there being five roles, only four were needed for a solid group since two vied for the same job of dealing damage. Thus the maximum group size was raised to eight members. However, as a major difference, all missions scaled to the size of a group and maximum-member groups weren't needed at all times to be effective.

For Vanguard, we know that classes will be split up into four specific job types: tank, melee damage, healer, arcane damage. Developers have described this as an intended "holy quartet" to replace the old trinities. For a time, group size was been said to be falling between 6-8 members. However, the concrete maximum number that is currently being played with in beta 1 is eight members with most encounters tailored to seven. While it is still a flexible number, it also seems to be the right direction to take. Another game that attempted to have a "holy quartet" was Everquest II, however its maximum group size maintained the EQ standard of six. One could argue that the balance between necessary roles and free roles was off-balanced by the member limit, though with the graphics constraints, six was more than enough to get the CPU chugging. Moving back to Vanguard however, it seems only natural to recreate the balance of 'necessary versus auxiliary' while still maintaining the fact that every class can play a needed role.

Raid

The very nature of the "Raid" encounter moniker usually implies throwing as many people as you can at a situation. Indeed, in Everquest, raids became absolutely massive as time drew near. Upwards of 70 players could be present at one of these mob-mentality events, placing the might of the masses marauding the massive. Since then, raids have been somewhat subdued, and rightly so. With the more people you throw at a situation, the less a game remains strategical relying more on a leader shouting instructions to an obeying crowd. One of the efforts to subdue the massive raids was in Final Fantasy XI, greatly decreasing the maximum number of people to raid down to 18: 3 groups of 6. However, this number grew for a new tier of raid encounters known as Dynamis which involved up to 64 players splitting up through a larger area and tackling clusters of mobs as many sub-groups.

In World of Warcraft, raids were also shrunk to including 40 members: 8 groups of 5. The key, of course, is creating content that would be interesting to a large amount of people. Having a raid that involves clearing one mob, followed by lots of smaller mobs, rinse and repeat until you get to a boss fight, usually isn't all that entertaining no matter how many people you have. That said, Vanguard plans to have a variety of raid sizes and hasn't defined what the absolute maximum largest encounter will be. Since the plan with raids is to involve them at all levels, expect the sizes to reflect what exactly is going on regarding the encounter.

Conclusion

So, what exactly does the focus of keeping all three encounter types bring to the table for Vanguard?

- With the inclusion of casual content at all levels, players will always have something to do in their adventures. We hope that even at maximum level, there will be something casual in order to keep us occupied during the times that we don't have the resources to embark on an epic quest.

- A heavy focus on group content means that endgame is not limited to simply raids. There could be very strategic, single-group encounters at the high end that prove to be challenging and exciting regardless. Size isn't the determining factor behind difficulty or level prowess.

- Groups where everyone is either providing a primary or secondary role means more potential groups and situations where no one is deemed worthless in a group.

- Raids at all levels provide introductory experiences for the more epic high-end encounters sure to be presented for players as they reach maximum level.

From here, only the future (and developers) will tell where our adventures will lead us!