Allakhazam interviews Vanguard's Producer, Thom Terrazas. It's a good read, gives you a bit of a heads up regarding the future of Vanguard. You can find the full article here.
We recently had an opportunity to chat with Thom Terrazas about the state of Vanguard, the improvements made, and still being made, and his own personal view of how things are going...
Allakhazam: Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions for us! To start off, would you please give us your name, position on the Vanguard team, and some background information?
Thom: My name is Thom Terrazas, Producer on the Vanguard team. For SOE, I began working as a Project Manager (PM) and functioning as a liaison between SOE and Sigil Games from October 2006 to May 2007. After the launch of Vanguard in January 2007, I continued on as the PM for SOE and joined the team full time in May 2007 when SOE acquired the assets of Sigil Games Online and more importantly, Vanguard and the awesome team working on the game. In October of 2007, I took over as Producer and continue to manage both Vanguard and PlanetSide.
Allakhazam: Looking back at Vanguard, there were undeniably some issues at launch. What would you say was the greatest issue facing this title, and where does that issue stand today?
Thom: Performance; Optimization; High System Requirements. Everyone may have a different name for it but at the end of the day, optimization challenges were the biggest hurdle faced at launch. We lost too many customers at launch due to the inability to run the game smoothly and we have been making huge improvements in this area in every update since. I can speak to this first hand actually: When I started playing at launch, I experienced some horrible “hitching” while moving from one area to another on what I consider an average gamers’ computer. When I began to play more extensively a couple months later, I noticed some considerable improvements to my frame rate. Today, it is night and day superior than it was at launch. Optimizing the game has been one of our top priorities and in the last six months, we have made some considerable strides in improving the player’s experience. If you haven’t logged in recently or if you gave us a look in the beginning and haven’t been back since, check it out now - I’ll even flag your account for free for a period of time if you want to go in and prove me wrong.
