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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."
Oh yes, forgot to mention that "corpse runs" aren't required in Vanguard. You can always retrieve your tombstone by paying a few measeley copper.
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.