Hello All!

In the past couple of weeks, I have been expanded my role at SOE to involve being the producer of EverQuest. Obviously that bears the question regarding my role or the vacant position on Vanguard and PlanetSide. Going forward, I will have a lesser role with Vanguard and PlanetSide but the roles of other people will change along with me. For the interim, Salim Grant, Lead Designer on Vanguard will be expanding his role to pick up more responsibilities in the day to day operations and leadership of Vanguard. He and I will keep in constant communication to provide a seamless transition.

For PlanetSide, I will continue to work with the team on current and future projects. So, while my responsibilities have changed, it still remains the same in some regards.

Thank you for your continued support and my apologies for the delay in posting this. Sometimes the stars just don’t align perfectly when you want them to.

 Best regards & see you in game!

Thom Terrazas

You only turn 2 once and this time around we’re going to take a glance back at the bash that we threw Vanguard as it turned two on January 30th, 2009. 

I had just taken the reigns of Vanguard at the time and we were looking squarely in the eyes of Vanguard’s second birthday. Plans had not been set just yet however, we definitely wanted to do something grand since Vanguard is the baby of the troop and it really deserved a nice party for all of the players.

I got my wheels turning and I had to wrap my head around what we could do that would be fun and awesome for everyone to take part in. I wrote down a laundry list of ideas; some of these included having a contest, active in-game audio coverage, and in-game activities.

First I talked with the contest/challenge guru Zatozia and ran the idea by her. She was able to whip up a contest for the Vanguard players and in no time flat it was getting approved. I believe within a week’s time I saw it run through my e-mail box as approved; which isn’t a bad turn around time at all!

My next stop was to the desk of resident designer extraordinaire Silius. I went to Silius and asked him “So, do you think we could get a vendor and a spot to hold a birthday event for Vanguard”. He thought for a moment and exclaimed “Sure,” and the next thing you know I’m getting coordinates to where we could hold our little shindig.

After that I talked with one of our prolific podcasters and host of Voyages of Vanguard, Rikoorakoo. I dropped the idea of what we were trying to accomplish with having some live coverage and he agreed to help cover the event. Four hours on two days in one week is pretty tough but he was able to make it happen without a hitch but the best part of it all was it was in game video so you could actually see everything going on!

After all the plans were set in place I was able to get the word out through our social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr) and let the players at large know where and when they needed to be at the designated spot which happened to be shortly after the actual birthday but close enough in proximity to make it viable. We were also able to let everyone in on the “It Takes Two” contest which was an awesome opportunity for players to get one of their pieces of art put into the game!

The birthday event rolled around and we had a fantastic turn out. I live blogged the entire event to give everyone an up-to-date play by play of everything that went on in-game. I have to say that even though Vanguard’s second birthday has come and gone it’s left a lasting impression on many of us, including myself. It will be something I remember for quite some time and I hope everyone enjoyed taking part in it as much as I did.

Joel Sasaki – Community Relations Manager

The Isle of Dawn is now Live! The team has been working diligently to get out a great new starting area and to offer a free and smaller download to anyone that would like to try out Vanguard for the first time. The Isle of Dawn has some of the best starting content offered with rewards only available on the island. If you’ve got a friend out there that hasn’t played Vanguard yet and you’ve been itching to get them to play, here’s your answer. Send them the download and roll a new character to show them the ropes.

 Check it out and download the trial: http://vanguard.station.sony.com/isleofdawn/

It’s probably customary to introduce oneself in the first Blog but I hate conforming, so I’ll let you guess who this is instead. I’ve been with Sony for 10+ years; spent my fair share of time in the CS Department honing my skills helping customers; working on various projects in development the past three years including Station Pass Games, The Matrix Online, PlanetSide & Vanguard; was sent away by my father through space before my home planet exploded and was found and raised on a small farm by the Kent family. A few years later to escape persecution, my name was changed to Thom Terrazas. J

Ok, I’m not that powerful any more but I get to work with some awesome people at SOE creating content for PlanetSide and Vanguard. That in itself if pretty powerful.

SOE returned back from Fan Faire 2008 in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago and if you were there then you’ll know what I mean when I say that it never ceases to amaze me to see the passion from not only the different teams I get to work with daily but also from you, the players, customers and fans of our games. If you didn’t make it out there this year, I hope you’ll make it to the next one. They just keep getting better, every year I go. Where else can you have your CEO rock the house with a perfect rendition of Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle,” debating passionate fans on how to tune the games while throwing back a few drinks over dinner (…ok…and probably a few more after dinner), and then getting to San Diego and having total memory loss for everything that happened in Vegas? Probably not too many places.

Let’s talk about something better now – Vanguard! Vanguard is cruising towards Update #6 currently and it contains the character model improvements that we have been discussing for a few months now. It started earlier in the year with Update #4 by getting Helmets in the game. In order to do that, we removed some character customization functionality. That was the first phase of this process and Update #6 is the second and hopefully the final phase of our improvements and introducing most of the customizations back into the game.

As I write this on the Friday after Fan Faire, we are primarily working on the female character models. The males are essentially done and ready for battle! All models have been on the test server and we have been making tweaks here and there because we have been getting some great feedback from our players regarding many little things that can be improved. …and rightfully so – we were not completely happy with them as well but we are committed to making the best we possibly can. This week, we corrected some lighting issues as it relates to skin, we’ve been making changes to the cheeks, lips, mouth and noses that resemble what you would be more familiar with on female characters from game Update #2 through #4. In addition, we have made some slight modifications to some armor types that may have been a little over the top but we are not losing the sexiness. Bringing sexy back was and still is our goal for females. Revealing a little more skin on the female characters while improving their shape and giving the male characters more of a heroic and muscular build is what we set out for and that is what you’re going to get. We won’t let these character improvements go live until we are all happy with the end result.

Complimenting the improvements to character models, we are shipping the Isle of Dawn, our new starting area containing vastly enhanced content for lower levels. The Isle of Dawn will be accessible by all of our current players when Update #6 goes live. You will be given the option to start a new character on the Isle of Dawn or choose to go old school and start in the current areas of the game you may already be used to playing. Within a short period of time, we will have the Isle of Dawn up as a stand alone playable area for anyone that would like to try the game out for the first time. We’ve got hundreds of new quests, items that level up with your character and some of rich content to keep you entertained no matter your play style. “Set Yourself Free” to do nothing else other than to try this out in September. J (I couldn’t help myself)

We’ve got many more things coming down the pipe with this update especially in regards to polish and fixes to game content. We believe you will be significantly pleased with our delivery of Update #6.

On behalf of the team – Thank you for your patience, feedback and dedication to Vanguard. We’ll see you in game! (Probably as soon as I finish dinner)