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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.
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.
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.
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.
IIRC Might and Magic VII had a card game inside even before Kotor.
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.