Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered

This last week has been the Electronics Entertainment Expo, or E3. Taking place in Los Angeles it gathers together the biggest and the brightest names in the gaming industry allowing them to show off their up and coming software for anyone that can get the credentials to get in.

Sigil had a presence in their own booth (complete with private air-conditioned lounge area for the more ViP guests) as well as one on the booth belonging to Sony Online Entertainment. Over the last three days torrents of information have quite literally flooded out from Sigil, so I felt it would be a good idea to put together a guide to it all for you guys to skim over.

1) The Gamespot 39!
A total of thirty-nine screenshots were released by Gamespot early on in the week and you’ll definitely be wanting to take a quick look at these. Amongst some of the standard panorama shots are some images that we have never seen before. You can catch glimpses of player operated boats, a crafting session along with crafting user-interface, the diplomacy session with it’s user-interface, a showcase for the advanced character customisation system (it’s been proven that no two characters will look identical), there are screenshots that appear to be from Kojan, images of player-owned (and decorated) housing and finally a look at the newly revamped User Interface itself.

2) The In-Game Video
While a promotional video was released two years ago, nothing of it’s type has been seen since until this week. A new promotional video which includes in-game footage set against in-game music has been released and shows battles in both Thestra and Qalia.

3) Gamespot Impressions Article
One of the first of the ‘commercial’ reviews sites to sit down with Sigil, Gamespot puts together this very positive article. Along with discussing briefly the change of publishers, they reveal that almost anything in the world of Telon can be used by players as decoration for their house (Beta already has over 8,000 objects that server this purpose, Star Wars Galaxies was apparently the influence for this) and the surprising news that they are now guaranteeing flying mounts will be implemented by launch (something they were saying wasn’t very likely a few months ago).

4) The Power Behind Character Emotions
One of the less covered pieces of information has been Mystic’s announcement that they created the EMotion FX animation system which has allowed Sigil to put together such extensive character customisation and that the system has also allowed each player character to have over 800 emotional animations.

5) Ten Ton Hammer Reviews Vanguard
The next review is from one of the affiliate sites and mostly covers information that was released at the Fanguard earlier this year, namely character customisation and how combat in the game actually works. That said, it’s a great refresher piece to remind us all what it’s like.

6) The Safehouse’s Splurge of Pictures
Another affiliate site, The Safehouse, has succeeded in getting a huge amount of images that aren’t screenshots, but pictures of a private sit-down with co-creator Jeff Butler as he discusses the game. Here we get to see an impressive looking Dark Elf in all kinds of glowing armour along with a User Interface which has had it’s elements repositioned by someone who is quite obviously much further into the game than some of the low-level characters we’ve seen demonstrations of. The interface has been heavily compared to World of Warcraft though I feel some of this is in how Jeff has laid out his UI (Jeff has admitted to being a WoW fan) though I think it’s just nice to see how I’m going to lay out my standard 5 million hotbars.

7) The Preliminary Box Art
Finally we get to see what’s been in the works for a very long time…the box art. For those who have read my write-up about this on my own site, the box art is a tribute to Keith Parkinson who was Sigil’s leading art designer until he passed away late last year. He hand-picked the man who designed this box-art which is unique in that it has been drawn as half Keith’s style and then half the new artist’s (Donato’s) style. A depiction of Keith has been placed in amongst the three heroes of Telon.

1Up’s E3 Blog
Vanguard makes it into the E3 blog of 1up.com, written by a man who has many promising things to say about the short glimpse he had of Vanguard through the day.

9) The One Negative Review
A quick warning : The site contains images which may not be work safe or suitable for children.
To show that this article isn’t entirely biased in Sigil’s favour, here is the one review that came out of E3 (seriously, only 1) which was less than complimentary about the game.

10) IGN’s Review
And straight back to positive, IGN had a lot of good things to say about Vanguard and also revealed more information that has never been released before. Here we find out that rather than being stuck with one type of mount (depending on race, a’la World of Warcraft) you do in fact have the option of being able to ride anything which looks to be mountable. An early screenshot from E3 does in fact show a character riding what looks to be some kind of tiger. Also discussed is the realistic meteorologically accurate weather system which allows weather fronts to travel across the world, reacting realistically to climates and seasons. Finally, a detailed description of Hillsbury Manor, a huge dungeon that does include loot for crafters and also has a trick up it’s sleeve which doubles it’s size once all the boss mobs are eliminated.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 12th, 2006 at 9:21 am and is filed under Gaming, Hobbies, Rayda Skaldensen, Dwarf Paladin, Vanguard : Saga of Heroes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.