Widescreen Gaming Forum

Brad McQuaid (of Everquest fame) recently found our little corner of the web and joined the forums to tell us that he had their current build of Vanguard running on his Dell 24" at 1920x1200. I dropped him a line about having an interview, and he graciously agreed. We will get to interview both Brad (CEO & President of Sigil Games) and Ryan Elam, the lead programmer on Vanguard.

The best thing is that you get to help with the interview! Please send your questions to [email protected]. I will go through them and select as many as I can to be included in the interview. Several random submissions will get a free game from my current stash, just for helping with the interview (See this link for the current stash).

Whoever submits the best question will get a free copy of the Collector's Edition of Guild Wars.

Submissions will be accepted through June 19th. I cannot guarantee that all questions will be submitted to, or answered by Sigil.

Get more info here: http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/features.html

Questions for the interview can be posted to this thread.

Only tens days left...

OK, I'll chip in with a few. Might not be the greatest questions in the world, but they are things I'd be interested in knowing. ;)

- What's the graphics engine capable of? (obviously widescreen :D, more in regards to lighting, vertex/pixel shaders, texture size, bump mapping, etc...) Those screenshots already look mighty impressive.

- What sort of experience/level caps are present?

- Since dual-cores are such a big thing at the minute, is the game going to be multi-threaded? Or can that come later in a patch?

- Leading on from that... 64bit support?

- How scalable is the engine? (Low -> High spec systems)

- (If this question doesn't break NDA's) How is the game treated by SLI or CrossFire?

If even a couple of these are answered, I'll be happy. :) If anyone has any questions about plot etc, I'll close my eyes. ;) I don't want to be spoiled. :lol:

What are you going to try and do to bring back many of the players whom are becoming disillusioned with the treadmill that is becoming the standard in just about all mmorpgs on the market.

Ultimatly the reason to play a mmorpg has to do with purpose (Without purpose what is the point). What will be the purpose of Vanguard. Will there be more creative and challenging ways to advance, other than the standard treadmill.

What will combat be like? Will it be exciting with little to no downtime or will there be large amounts of downtime? The reason I ask is in many games the only way that the developers can balance gameplay is by creating challenge, and many consider time to equal challenge. It does not, it just creates boring gameplay that will not be as popular in this stage of the game.

I also got an entry from Supercop007, and the contest ends this Sunday.

1. How will your mmorpg stand out from the multitude of contenders on
the market today? What makes your game unique and drive the casual
gamer to play?

2. What can we expect in terms of loading times and bandwidth requirements?

3. Will your game appeal to both the combat oriented PvP player as
well as the traditional RPG player? How will this be integrated into
the Vanguard world as a whole?

4. How customizable will the characters be? An increasingly
important feature in mmorpgs is the individuality a player can make
their character and be unique without having to see thier "twin" every
5 minutes.

5. A la Guild Wars, will players be able to "hire" henchmen if they
would like to play by themselves with little or no interaction with
other players?

6. As gamers yourselves, did you use any aspects of other games that
inspired parts of Vanguard?

Supercop007 wins the copy of Guild Wars. I will be wrapping up everyone's questions, along with my own and delivering them to the Sigil folks in the next couple of days.

Thanks! Hope the interview goes well :D