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Vanguard - Saga of Heroes Released
An anonymous reader writes "After years of promises and fan hype, Sigil Games Online and SOE has released Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. I've been playing the pre-release the last few days and I've been really enjoying it. I scoffed at the idea of diplomacy in a MMOG, but Sigil has done something with it I've never seen before. They made it a card game...within a game. MMORPG.com has a preview of the Beta game, and Gamespy offers up out of the box impressions of the game on Launch day. GameTrailers has a launch day trailer and dragon mount video to give you an idea of what it looks like in action. Whether the game turns out well or not, the fans are happy that it is finally on the shelves."
I scoffed at the idea of diplomacy in a MMOG...
This is someone who never played TradeWars back in the day.
Game still has a lot of problems and bugs. A lot. Needs about another 6-8 months of development to really work things out, but MMORPG gamers are used to paying to beta test games. Moreover, SOE is co=publishing, and they want their damn money.
I've been playing very late beta and pre-release. I've played EQII, WoW and Eve. I still play Eve.
... wrong. Sterile. Vanguard seems to do it better. Things look reasonably realistic and pretty. I have it on super-high quality (8800gtx, FX-60, 2gb ram), and I get good FPS most everywhere. The worst is the stuttering/slowdown when you go indoors or cross a chunk, but it's not a big deal. Those with less beefy computers may have more complaints.
On the whole, it's pretty fun to play. It is less simplistic than WoW. It is less ugly than EQII. Personally, I always found the low-poly high-quality art direction in WoW to look better than EQII, which just looked
It's been pretty stable. Very stable considering it just launched, not quite as stable as an established game.
I think, on the whole, I enjoy it because it feels a little more risky than EQII or WoW. Dying isn't penalty free after level 7. I find myself paying more attention as I wander around, and thinking twice before engaging an enemy.
I also like the huge world. You can see for miles, and it gives a sense of really being there that I haven't experienced before.
Crafting is less attention-demanding than EQII, and way more complicated than WoW. It's basically a minigame where you make decisions to spend a pool of action points to buff quality, move along progress, or alleviate problems. But it's not real time, you can sit and think and decide if the complication that popped up is worth fixing, or just living with since you're almost done.
Diplomacy is an amusing card game that you can get some nice lore/reading from if you look for it.
On the downside, their door/elevator code is buggy. The door one isn't too bad, but the elevator one is massively frustrating. Anyone who plays and has tried to do the storehouse near the human/halfling lands knows what I mean here. We had to leave and do something else, it was near impossible to get everyone on the same floor.
There are still some minor clipping problems with the artwork. And lots of features that are 'coming soon'. Despite that, it does feel like a full game. If you want a slightly more challenging mmorpg, this might be it. I think Gamespy's verdict of 'wait and see' is about right. It's not a disaster, it's not an obvious winner. It's a decent entry that, given good continuing support, could turn into something great.
Their fans are still all playing EQ. Seriously- this game takes everything that absolutely sucked about EQ (horrible grinds, corpse runs, long travel times, horrible grinds) and made them even worse. This completely ignores the industry trend to remove/minimize them that made WoW so popular. This is a game that will only appeal to the most hardcore raider/grinder type MMO players, most of whom are perfectly happy with Everquest.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I really wanted to like V:SoH. My guild from another game had a really large presence planned for it, and I wanted to finally start a game at the same time they did. I got into the closed beta, and never could get into the game.
I kinda felt similar to when I first played EQ2 back at its launch. That game made things difficult for the sake of being difficult, and V:SoH appears to have taken the same approach. Tedium summed up my experience the best.
I'm 40 years old now. I have an infant in the house for the first time in my life. I just don't have the time to dedicate to a game that has so many timesinks built right into it. Corpse Runs? I hope to never see another CR in my life, and certainly have zero plans to stay up til 2AM helping everyone else get their corpse. Oh, I can take an XP penalty, but it's really stiff? No thanks. And CRs were just the first major hurdle I didn't like. There were plenty of others.
I never thought it would be the case, but I have become a casual gamer. And V:SoH is very unfriendly to the casual player. It's more a raid dependent game, much like EQ1 was. That's fine if you have the time to spare, but I no longer do. And my wife would never, ever go for a game that made things this difficult again. I got her into EQ, and she did ok. Then she tried WoW, and she loved that it was so much more friendly. EQ2 seems even friendlier to her than WoW did, so we're enjoying that.
I don't see this game making any dent at all in the WoW player base. It may grab some from EQ2 that are looking for more of a challenge, but the WoW folks that decided to give EQ2 a try and have stayed because the game has gotten so much better than release? They aren't going to enjoy V:SoH, either.
So... What's going to be the next casual gamer friendly release that isn't a WoW or EQ2 title? Until it comes out, I'm sticking with EQ2.
As much as I want to hear what you're saying, I can't change the fact that supporting V:SoH supports Sony (SoE) in turn. Maybe it's FUD and I'm making the wrong stand? Who knows.
I got burnt on the Saga of Ryzom launch, when they didn't have most of the features implemented that were listed on the box. I won't buy an MMO without having tried it first anymore.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
You know those things you clame that WoW has minimized/removed? Ya, the reason I stopped playing the damn game is because they're still there.
I've been playing the game for the last four or five days, and my first impressions are that the game could have used quite a more bit of testing before being launched. There are quite a few obvious blunders in the UI and the game itself, and I've not spent much time playing (just getting around level 7).
The diplomacy idea is nice, but it gets a bit tiresome after doing one round of cards after another. The quests for getting started is probably my biggest grief so far, as they're not as tailored and adjusted as was the case in WoW. The same is the case for the user interface and the game environment in itself, and some places it just shines through that they're attempting a bit too much at being WoW (at least that's the way it feels, although you can argue otherwise).
The gameplay is a bit more advanced than WoW, in particular the diplomacy aspect of the game which is completely lacking other places. The crafting is far more advanced, but not on the level of Star Wars Galaxies (which still is my fav when it comes to crafting and resources). A cross between the easy-to-use interface of WoW and the more advanced form in Vanguard (possibly by starting people out with the easy version and incrementing it along to where Vanguard stands today) could have worked better. I see great potential here, but I'm getting a bit tired of reading conversations and doing tutorials just to understand the concepts that are basics of the game. The learning curve is simply a bit too steep when concerned with the fact that I can't sink that much time into a mmorpg any more, and I'm afraid that it may alienate potential customers.
To sum it all up: it could have used a couple of months more of closed / open beta testing and adjusted both the UI and the structure of the game. It's not as polished as one could wish. The concepts that separates the game from WoW (as this is what most people know) is interesting, but the execution could probably be timed better.
Running the game in 1920x1200 on a GF 7800GT, had to turn off hardware occlusion and are having quite a few issues with game objects (stones, npcs, close objects) popping out when they arrive within the first LOD-distance.
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
So, being a EQ, EQ2 and Planetside on-again off-again player, I went out and picked this up. Figured, why not, got the Station Access account anyway.
It looks good, it plays ok, but I feel it is Beta 3 quality. I was hit with a few bugs, most minor, all annoying, within minutes of playing.
Now, I don't have the fastest system out there (P4 3Ghz, 2GB RAM, ATi Radeon 9800 Pro, if you care), but geez, audio should not go skipping at the 'design your character screen'.
Give them a few weeks to work the bugs out, then read a new review and decide for yourself.
You should check out my DB site for Vanguard http://vg.mmodb.com/
It eliminated corpse runs (talk to a spirit healer), xp penalties, and long travel times (easily obtainable mounts, flight paths, warlock summons, now meeting stones at instance entrances). Grinds- the leveling grind is fairly easy, and made easier in the expansion. The gear grind does suck, thats the last thing they need to remove. Unfortunately, too many EQ style raiding guilds have the ears of the devs. At least the expansion drops raids to 25 man.
Still, I never said they eliminated them, but that the industry trend is to reduce them. WoW did that. I'd be willing to be the next big MMO will go even farther.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I was invited to a "closed" beta in December 06. Mind you, CLOSED less then two months ago.
As I started playing I heard rumors that they were going open beta very soon. I warned people and pleaded to Sigil not to be bullied by SOE and releasing a buggy, half baked game. Seems SOE used it's muscle to publish a game that is NOT ready for retail. But as everyone here has known from experience, SOE has a track record and an image to uphold. Releasing games to retail that are at best, closed beta.
Long live SOE, the Beta god, so other companies can learn and create better games.
Try Guild Wars. It has certainly eliminated all that you're talking about. And I mean eliminiated.
Lord of the Rings Online sure looks like it's aiming at the WoW player base. Very familiar interface, easy to get into, very nice graphics, that LOTR world. Nicely done stuff with instances as well.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
is because its drawing what you cannot see. Dial down your distance and it should mostly evaporate. you will also need to set it back outdoors unless you can live with it
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I know everyone hates WoW.. it's slashdot, everyone here hates the 500lb gorillas. And who can blame them? But I have to say ... The WoW expansion is a work of art, pure and simple. Not only are the outdoor envronments beautiful, and I mean staggeringly so, but now you have flying mounts and casual friendly avenues to advancement. And yet raiding will still yield you the best gear all around. Just not as much better as it was pre-expansion. But still, better. Probably enough to satiate the hardcore raiders.
It's just.. almost perfect. V: SoH is nowhere near that.
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
This is off-topic, but don't MMOs deserve their own slashdot "section icon" by now? I can't be the only one who's tired of seeing Tellah and Gilbert associated so closely with "role"-playing games like WoW.
And, yeah, I understand that, going by my definition of role-playing games--ones where you play a role besides healer, nuker, or tank--Final Fantasy doesn't technically count, either. Considering the number of games articles that seem to pop up on slashdot, perhaps it's time to reorganize that section a bit?
From the GameSpy article:
"Vanguard makes use of Epic's Unreal 3 engine, and if you have a high-end system, you can really see what this allows for. There's so much that can look spectacular here, when all the settings are raised, like cobblestone path textures, volumetric clouds that float like puffy cotton balls across the sky, and trees that are so finely detailed you can count individual leaves on their gently swaying branches."
Ok, so I played in late beta and umm..it looks like Unreal 2 at best to me. Where is this pretty game they speak of? I put it all on Ultra-High settings on my 7900 GTX 512 and it stuttered horribly on interiors and zone chunking and did NOT look anywhere near close to Gears of War which IS Unreal 3. Where is the properly done HDR, models and bump mapping / specular etc etc etc. Vanguard looks like crap compared to Gears of War - and if they are using the same engine then Vanguard needs to get some new art design or something. The game runs terrible for the graphical quality that it gives you in my opinion.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
Long time to 40? There are a dozen servers now with characters that are Draenai or Blood Elf level 70. The first of which took 9 days of play, from creation to max level. Through casual play over three months I've hit 60 on 2 different characters and two weeks after the expansion I'm closing on 70 with only 2 hours of play a night and 3-4 hours on Sunday.
Guild Wars is a single player game pretending to have multiplayer. It prides itself on "find the random skill/gear drop" grinds just so you can watch an unbalanced Warrior-Monk n00b walk into a guild match and take down four or five people at a time.
Are you serious? If World of Warcraft were any easier, it would play itself.
In most UIs WoW does play itself.
--
Vanguard is more of a grind but it is fun. If you enjoy questing, dungeon crawls, and a real death penalty then this game is for you.
The deaths are much better than in EQ1 with corpse retrieval and as a plus you keep your mounts on you when you die.
The travel is not all that bad. Now if you are wanting to travel from the middle of one cont to the middle of another then it can be annoying but this is mainly due to the world being HUGE. Traveling isn't a time sink unless you are trying to see everything in game asap. You have "call of the hero" for dungeons, low level mounts, fast ships to get around the world (Even though its not truly an open ocean to run around on you travel to almost a "warpgate" like thing not what I was looking forward to,) and eventually flying mounts to speed up the on land travel even more.
The low levels (1-10) go fast then the game gets progressively harder. I find this a great game. I do not want to reach end level in one month or less of game play.
The game is buggy though. It has a beta 4 feel to it. Group options are auto reset, invites are buggy, guilds are buggy, there are a handful of dupe bugs in the game(and bug reported too) all of which I feel should of been ironed out before launch. There are also the average graphic, pathing, speed exploiting(a personal favorite nothing like going 1,000% speed), bugs you come to expect to find at launch of MMO games.
The archetypes have all been well implemented from what I have seen however there are still problems balancing the actual archetypes with each other.
Many of the problems people claim the game has are not problems. The one I hear most is taunts/tanks are bugged/broken. Players were given tanks with unbreakable agro in the last few games and now they are unsure how to play and manage their own agro generation. Many see this as a problem in the game. Personally I see this as a trial to separate the player base. Players who want to change the game and players who want to overcome the obstacles before them.
After 4-8 months of polish this game should get a final review. For now I see it simply as a pay to play beta and the final version is too early to be seen.
"They made it a card game...within a game."
I guess you never played Knights of the Old Republic.
"It prides itself on "find the random skill/gear drop" grinds"
Nonsense. Anyone can get max gear and any skill they want in Guild Wars with a very limited amount of work... there's nothing like the kind of grind that's in other MMOGs; 'let's go raid the Temple Of Phat Lewt for the five hundredth time and hope the Sword of Total Destruction drops!'
"you can watch an unbalanced Warrior-Monk n00b walk into a guild match and take down four or five people at a time."
Maybe you should try joining a guild that's not full of total noobs.
Guild Wars also eliminated the MMOG aspect from the game. Towns are just chat rooms with avatars. Everything is instanced. It's just a single player game that allows you to join up with a few people.
Yeah. The word on the street is they ran out of investor money and had to push the product to market a little early. That being said, I still enjoyed the (closed) beta I participated in and will probably pick the game up soon myself.
Yeah, I'm one of those people that still proudly plays regular EQ. Been playing it since the first expansion (Kunark). World of Warcraft - I played it since day 1, hit 60 in under 2 months (with a wife and young son... without I would have hit it a lot sooner), sold the account. It was way too easy for me. But let me remove some of the innacuracies from your post:
...
eliminated corpse runs (talk to a spirit healer)
If you want **no** penalies than you **cannot** talk to the spirit healer. Otherwise you **do** have penalties. And EQ eliminated the corpse run with the guild lobby system, where you can summon your corpse from any zone in the game. xp penalties
With the guild hall, this is a moot point, summon and rez. It might take a few minutes but you will get 96% of your experiance back. easily obtainable mounts, flight paths, warlock summons, now meeting stones at instance entrances
Mounts are not level capped, so you can have them at level 1 (Unlike WoW). Not hard to get. There are multiple tiers from 10k-100k platinum. 10k plat is not hard to come by anymore. That's less than 10 hours of grinding in a good group. Magicians in EQ can summon players in a zone, not quite a warlock summon but close. Druids and Wizards can port across zones and egress (port to a safe spot in the zone), which has no equivalent in WoW. EQ also has a cross-zone 'Looking for Group' tool where you can post what kind of group you are looking for, or what player(s) you need to fill your group. Something WoW also does not have. Grinds- the leveling grind is fairly easy, and made easier in the expansion.
You can grind a character 0-70 in EQ quicker than 0-70 in WoW. When Ykesha came out, a froglok cleric was ground this way in about 24 hours. Recently posted on Digg, the first level 70 in WoW (with the assistance of a bunch of guild members, the frog cleric only had **1** person helping him) was ground that high in about 20 hours. I doubt the first 60 would come in 4 hours
There. Mostly debunked. EQ is a challenge, but some of us like a challenge.
Since the last stage of beta they've been stomping out lots and lots of bugs lately but there are still some left. Those who think it needs another 6-8 months should see all the progress they made just in the last two weeks. Most of the really annoying ones are video-related (like the way it insists on setting my screen to 1600x900 in size no matter how often I tell it 1680x1050, thus killing the frame rate). The bugs aren't show-stoppers and they'll probably have all the worst fixed within days. To those comparing it to WoW: you are missing the point. Vanguard is developed by the same bunch of people who did the first Everquest, and that's their natural market for this game. Everquest is just showing its age too much. The community isn't what it used to be, players are spread across way too many zones that have piled up during endless expansions, old mistakes have accumulated. The same is true of Dark Age of Camelot and other old-guard games. The Vanguard design has benefitted a lot from the successes and failures of these and other games (yes, obviously including WoW). It's not aimed at the casual gamer, indeed, and probably can't compete with WoW there. Whether it will lure people away all those first-generation games is the real big question. There are a lot of people on Everquest who aren't happy with the state of the game and are watching for the Next Big Thing, hoping this might be it (I know because I'm one of them and hear from lots more). We want to start over with a new community and get back the thrill we used to have playing EQ at its peak. Vanguard looks very, very promising that way. I'm not totally sold yet and haven't cancelled my Everquest account, but I'm inclined to stick with it now. The big question for me is what play will be like once I've made it up a few dozen levels.
Well they fully admitted they only released now because they ran out of development funds and it was either release it and start getting income, or fold the project.
I personally cancelled my pre-order. One of my closest gaming friends can't even run the game on her brand new system. When we inquired with their QA they told her she'd need to roll back her graphics drivers to a version older than her system. When that didn't work we learned that despite saying they support all 7xxx series nvidia cards, they've only had time to test 7300 and 7800 cards. If you have another card its hit or miss that it will work. Apparently if you have a 7500 (the one my friend has) you're SOL till they get around to making it work.
I refuse to pay for a game most of my friends can't even play.
The altar you respawn at in Vanguard can summon your corpse for an XP and gear quality penalty. Almost everyone has a 40% run speed horse by level 10 and as you get higher there will be personal flying griffons, speedy player-controlled boats, etc.
There has been something missing from recent MMOs, and that is exploration and a sense of scope. WoW and EQ2 play like themeparks, Vanguard is more spread out. There are advantages and disadvantages to both (I loved EQ2 for the years I played it for what it's worth). It is a narrower audience that is looking for this, but the audience is still out there, and not all of us want to solo grind our way up to level 70 and two billion AA or whatever the place where you can finally get groups in EQ1 is now.
The avatars are seriously far behind what one can create in Everquest2 or especially Second Life. They are crude and unappealing. It's Star Wars Galaxies- type avatars really, or only a little better than that.
Vanguard has graphics that look 3 years old, at launch. I played the beta and found it to be disappointing. The sky does look pretty, but that isn't enough to make me want to play the game.
Gameplay itself is no better or worse than other games of this type. I'll stick with EQ2, personally, for various reasons, but mostly just because the game engine is so much better in EQ2 than it is in Vanguard.
I think this is precisely why there's no free trial. They know the game was released too early, and they don't want casuals testing the waters with trial accounts just to learn first hand that what's promised on the box/previews/hype isn't the same as the experience you'll get playing. Those that decide to go ahead get to basically pay every month for an unfinished beta, for the privilege of a head start towards endgame content essentially.
SOE / Vanguard's mismanagement of funds/development isn't coming out of my piggy bank. I was kind of surprised that they wouldn't run a trial, I thought I'd give the game a try based on all the good things I kept hearing about it, in spite of all the warnings about how SOE would ruin it. My curiousity isn't worth laying out money for though, and statements like the one made above about running out of money, although candid, don't inspire confidence in the long term health of the game.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
I'm giving SOE a bit of a benefit of the doubt on this. As I understand it a large portion of the blame is squarely on Sigil themselves. Apparently when SOE picked it up from MS there was an infusion of development funds from SOE(one of the reasons it was moved, MS was getting tired of spending on it).
This game definately got stuck in a bit of the death spiral that you can see from games. The one advantage it has is that as an MMO is has a means of generating revenue while still doing development. It is not however the optimal situation. The game needs to be in a good enough state that it survives long enough to get to "completed" status.
I personally plan to sit on the sidelines for a while. If things seem to get better an the user base is healthy and they get their graphics support cleared up, my friends and I might join down the road. Of course that all depends what else is out there. Conan, LotR, and Warhammer online are all looking like better options right now as new games. In the mean time there are still WoW and EQ2.
Accusing him of FUD for disagreeing with your personal preferences, though - that makes you wrong.
I dunno if I remember any MMO that launched with a free trial. People that buy the collector's edition do get ten buddy keys to distribute to friends for week-long trials or something like that (I think that's similar to the deal WoW launched with, IIRC). The only way I'd say SoE has "ruined" anything is if they were the motivation behind limiting to eight character slots across all servers. Otherwise their amount of control has been nearly imperceptible.
Bottom line is Vanguard had a lot of development time with experienced guys at the helm and wasn't ready in time to meet several of their launch goals, including this one, but they need to launch now since they're bleeding money. It's still a decent enough game that I'm willing to play it, but I'm recommending that my friends who aren't dead set on it hold off for at least a month to see what happens.