Vanguard: Saga of Heroes [PC]

• Read the exclusive interview with the guys behind the game.

The word is out about Vanguard: it's the hardcore massively multiplayer game that's not for the sissies who'd rather kick back and play World of Warcraft. This is the tough-guy MMO with complicated tactical combat, mandatory group harvesting, extended dialogue trees, grueling corpse retrieval runs, prohibitive death penalties, and metal clamps that send a shock to your nipples when you take damage.

At least that's what some of the buzz would have you think about this new massively multiplayer RPG from the guys who created Everquest, the original tough-guy MMO. But the buzz is a bit of a distortion of developer Sigil's approach. Their idea isn't to be prohibitively difficult so much as it is to raise the stakes.

Sigil founders Brad McQuaid and Jeff Butler repeatedly hit a few talking points during the course of a day-long demo. One of the main themes is to be challenging without being tedious. They talk about returning a sense of accomplishment to an MMO. They both use the phrase "give the player more head room", which is obviously the language of guys who've gotten their World of Warcraft characters to level 60 and asked, "Now what?"

But first to clear up a few misconceptions: There aren't any nipple clamps. The "death penalty" is a standard experience point loss. You can offset that loss and get back your equipment if you recover your corpse. Your party can help you by actually dragging your corpse away from danger. If your party is wiped out, you all respawn at the nearest outpost (one of the main advantages of having player housing on the front lines).

The game is built to encourage characters to keep multiple sets of equipment, so you shouldn't have to run the corpse recovery gauntlet in your birthday suit. Restoring that stinging feeling to death is an example of how Vanguard hopes to raise the stakes -- not as a mechanism for punishment, but as a means of making victory more than just a foregone conclusion if you plug away at something.

Group harvesting isn't mandatory in the sense that everyone will have to do it, but it will be used as a way to "control 3D space", as Butler puts it. For instance, there's a cave-in at one end of a dwarven city. It opens the way to mines beneath the city where there are unique quests. But getting through the cave-in will require a certain amount of mining skill, not to mention specially crafted tools. And even if you do get through here, you'll have to develop your relationship with a powerful but secretive dwarven family to unlock the associated quest.

This is an example of how some of Vanguard's content is locked behind separate layers of gameplay. If you want to access that content, you'll need to engage in harvesting, crafting, diplomacy, and combat.