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."

Comments

Diplomacy?!

[__aaclcg7560]

I scoffed at the idea of diplomacy in a MMOG...

This is someone who never played TradeWars back in the day.

Re:Diplomacy?!

[User 956]

This is someone who never played TradeWars back in the day.

Or Eve online, back in today.

Re:Diplomacy?!

[Lotvog]

To clarify on the parent post as well as my own post below, diplomacy in EVE-Online manifests itself just as it would in the real world: - Alliances and wars spanning dozens of different factions, encompassing tens of thousands of players - Non-Aggression Pacts and mutual defense treaties - Issuing of temporary hunting passes, rights of safe passage through space - Alliance membership conditions requirement corporations to patrol the claimed region(s) of space - Defections, "corporate" secrets, and espionage, etc. All of of the above were once generated, applied, and enforced by players, without any in-game mechanics. Since then, Alliances exist in an "official" capacity, though many of the required provisions rest solely in the hands of the players. Oh, and lest I forget, there's also the incredible wealth of lore and intrigue added by the developers since the game's launch, which is another game in itself.

Re:Diplomacy?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course EVE-Online players don't get to enjoy any of this because they have to spend all their time spamming slashdot on behalf of their game.

Re:Fans are quite ecstatic, obviously

[ImaNihilist]

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.

It just didn't cut the mustard for me

[garylian]

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.

Re:It just didn't cut the mustard for me

[casey1797]

Personally that is the whole reason that I wanted to play this game. This is not a personal attack on you, just my opinion. I've played eq2, eve, ddo, ultima online, plus some even older than that. All those games did was keep making it easier and easier to play which made it so easy that you didn't even have to think about it(which is why I stopped playing them). I get tired of games that think we are all morons who can't use our brains to figure anything out, or that we need everything spelled out for us. I agree that there are problems with the game, but name one MMO that did not have problems at startup. This game is not for everyone, and I understand that, but it is nice to see a game that actually makes you stop and think about what your gonna do, before you do it, and if you make a bad/foolish decision, well then there should be an consenquence too your action. Just my two...well no...just my thoughts.

First impressions

[snillfisk]

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.