Yesterday, one of Sony Online Entertainment’s venerable titles, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, began utilizing a hybrid free to play-subscription model. We had the opportunity to sit down with Creative Director Salim Grant and Director of Development Andy Sites to talk about Vanguard and what the future holds for the game. Keep reading!
Since February, the team has been regularly updating Vanguard to, as Andy put it, “smooth out the rough edgesâ€. Most of the current areas have been revamped and optimized to take advantage of the game engine. They even surprised players by bringing much of the F2P functionality into the game in stealth mode about a week ago. In addition, Andy mentioned that in the past, game updates had come along every four or five months. From today forward, however, the team has laid out an assertive update schedule that should see major updates on a monthly basis as well as smaller updates on a bi-weekly basis.
The latest edition of the Vanguard Producer’s Letter will strike joy into the hearts of fans of the game as it deals mostly with the transition from a subscription title to a hybrid subscription-F2P title. The letter comes complete with a handy membership matrix and an FAQ.
Over the next several weeks, we expect to begin rolling out a number of improvements throughout the game, in preparation for our free-to-play launch. And, as I mentioned earlier, we’ll need your help testing these changes in order to refine and finalize our improvements so expect to see many of our developers recruiting your help in the Vanguard forums soon!
Lastly, I want to answer the question I’m sure is at the top of your lists – the release date. We are planning our free-to-play transition this summer and as much as we’d love to share a specific date with all of you, we want to make sure we take the appropriate time to test and do this right so that way we’re ultimately delivering the best possible experience to our players. As I mentioned in my last Producer letter, we assembled our team with only the most passionate Vanguard developers. Therefore, you can rest assured that they’ve fought tooth and nail to acquire as much polish time as possible! ?The wall shuddered again, and Nobundo cursed the ogre below, who had undoubte
dly returned to pummeling the buttress. A second salvo of flaming meteors fell from the sky as Nobundo readied to meet the oncoming crush of attackers. He directed the fury of the Light into the first orc head-on. The green beast’s eyes dimmed, and he crumpled. Nobundo brought the crystal hammerhead down squarely on top of the orc’s skull, then yanked upward and swung left, feeling a satisfying crunch as the orc’s ribs shattered. He twisted and brought the hammer across at a downward arc into the side of another orc’s leg, shattering its kneecap. The beast howled in pain and fell forward off of the rampart.
