In a recent announcement to the Vanguard community, the team has decided to be as frank as possible and outline the road map for the game in the year ahead. Due to limited resources and a new focus on bug elimination over ambitious content releases, some of the game's anticipated updates are being shelved indefinitely. Those features include the Halls of Shattered Souls, Pankhor Zhi, Nexus, and the anticipated "alternate advancement" system.
However, it's not all doom and gloom for Vanguard. The new roadmap includes an increased focus on smaller content releases occuring more frequently. In essence, the game is trading from a slow development cycle with large chunks of content to a faster development cycle with small bites of content. This new system will have an emphasis on longer test cycles of smaller batches of content to eliminate bugs while the content will start and end chunks of storytelling instead of leaving the story hanging.
The road map also includes plans for a hypothetical server merge to bring the community together, but lead developer Salim "Silius" Grant made sure to stress that the server merge is not set in stone at this time. The team wants to take the time to weigh the positives and negatives of merging the servers in order to make a sound decision.
The forum player base has reacted extremely negatively to this announcement, with cries of the death of high end raiding and angry sentences about the lack of alternate advancement resounding throughout the post. Some of the fans are even wishing for the game to go into the sunset.
Limited resources and limited development time are always hard restrictions and lead to difficult decisions, but we wish the Vanguard team the best of luck with their new plans in the year ahead.
