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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'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.
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.
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.