Silky Venom and Last Fanboy merge

Pirotess · 08-30-2005, 01:11 PM

This morning brings news that the Silky Venom and the Last Fanboy staff are merging under the Silky Venom banner. This gives the site a great supply of quality people dedicated to bringing Vanguard fans relevant news and features. Congratulations!

Brad has kept up his posting deluge started over the weekend and posted a number of very interesting things on the OVF (official vanguard forums). Most interesting to me was this quote about housing:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aradune

1. We go in ahead of time and zone the world like a modern city does. If an area isn't zoned for, say, houses, you can't build there.

2. Houses will likely have an upkeep, but they are also in a sense non-moving persistent pets. They have HP, they can big configured, they have an inventory. And so they can die too. NPCs will attack your house if you build it near a dangerous area. And if you never pay your upkeep, my guess is something similar will happen. But that's where crafting comes in -- just a cleric rezzes your corpse, the crafter fixes your house, making it accessible again. Now, what if you leave for a year... obviously, there are some restrictions we'll be forced to place.

3. The plan is no instancing, even with player houses. Think SW:G in this case -- the houses are really there in the world.

4. It's hard to answer that. The general answer is that no content in the game is guaranteed, including owning a house. We'll have to see in beta how well we can accomodate people. But also keep in mind that you aren't supposed to keep your house forever -- you'll abandon it when you outlevel the area. Also, the world is BIG, so lots of room. And finally, if a group of people form a little town, while they can keep you out of their residence, they can't keep you out of their city (speaking about PVE servers). And cities come with publicly accessible buildings, crafting stations, places to bind, banks, etc. So even if you don't own a house, you will be able to take advantage while traveling of other's towns when you come across them.

As for whether they will feel like a ghost town. Well, first you'll be able to set up offline merchants. You will summon an NPC merchant, give him the items you want sold, set prices, and when you log off he will stay there. Also, we hope to spawn other NPCs doing their thing too (this gets into city building and I don't want to get detailed as I don't know how much of our lofty goals and plans we'll be able to realize by release). You'll likely also be able to hire guards to protect your house from NPCs.

Lastly, if we make having a house or a town compelling and an important part of gameplay, then people should be there. We certainly do not want ghost towns that are just storage units visited once a week by their owner.

It is my sincere hope that Vanguards player run cities can thrive in ways the player run cities of SWG could not or had alot of trouble doing. Seeing a living, breathing city that you helped create is a hugely satisfying part of gaming. Here's to everyone getting to experience that.

Once again the Forum Debrief feature can only be fully seen by clicking the "Read More" link at the bottom of this news section. Enjoy!

Forum Debrief:

Korelin · 08-30-2005, 02:43 PM

I really enjoyed building a city in SW:G, and having my business thrive even more once we got everything setup. SW:G may have done a lot of things wrong, but their crafting and cities were top notch.

Here's hoping Vanguard pulls it off, and takes it up another step.