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Why Vanguard Sets a Bad Precedent for MMOGs
The ever-enjoyable Gamers with Jobs has up a fascinating look at the recently released MMOG Vanguard . The article's author, Elysium, takes pains to point out that it's not a review. He didn't play the title long enough to get a firm grasp of the game; he just didn't care enough to spend the time. He outlines what makes Vanguard a bad game, and then points out that the game's creator Brad McQuaid himself has as much as admitted it was released too early. Sony Online Entertainment saved the game from bankruptcy, and released it when the schedule said to and not a moment later. In Elysium's mind, this sets up a really, really bad precedent: "Now that the game has released in its incomplete state, in a state that McQuaid himself describes as requiring patches, bug fixes and new feature implementation on par with a beta product, Sigil essentially comes to the consumer as the third investor in the process of the development cycle, and that is not just a terrible way of doing business, but an irresponsible step in the wrong direction for complicit consumers. Let me put it bluntly, if a game is not ready for retail when the money runs out find another investor or shut the doors. We are customers, and the retail end of the industry is bad enough about not supporting incomplete or inoperable products without developers and publishers assuming we are investors in the development process. Your job as the industry is to create product, and then, and only then, we buy it."
As the President of a relatively successful independent MMO developer, and despite wishing to remain nameless, I feel compelled to leap in and pat you on the back for being able to see the wood amongst the trees. Good post my friend.
This guy openly admits this is not a review, so I can't bash him for obvious bias. With that said, the guy obviously does not like the game, so I really cannot see why he'd take this much time to say so. He slames the game for needed a hefty hardware requirements (even though its a brand new game, therefore may not run on 3 year old hardware, duh), he slames it for having a corpse run penalty, and he finds both combat and the card game (diplomacy) boring. He never looks at crafting.
With all that said, I play vanguard and I will admit now it does lag a bit but then I don't really have an amazing video card. The environments look beautiful to me, much better then EQ2, which I did not care for. One cannot compare it to wow as they are completely different, one goes for realism the other looks kind of cartoony (it still looks awesome though).
The combat is ok. Nothing special but then I wouldn't say it was bad either. The diplomacy is actually a great deal of fun. I thought the story was pretty interesting that was being told in the Wood Elves capital. It did take me a little bit to figure out that the names of the cards ment absolutely nothing but once I "learned" how to play, it was a great deal of fun.
This guy also mentions the complexity of understanding how strong a mob is. Personally, I love it. Once again, he complains about having to "learn" how something works and seems generally annoyed that it doesn't work like EQ or wow.
I haven't tried crafting either but from what I have read it seems fairly complex and likely requiring a little learning. Not a bad thing in my book.
Another thing the guy mentions is the buggyness of the game. Playing right now, I have noticed a couple of bugs, but nothing even remotely resembling a game breaking bug. If anything it hurt the immersion a little bit but thats about it. Also, comparing it to wows release, while wow was a pretty stable game (possibly the most stable) they completely fell flat on their face with server hardware. It took Blizzard well over a year from release to finally get the hardware done right. It took them another year to finally start trying to stop having freaken maintainence every single Tuesday morning, first only being 4 hours, then going to 6. And that was planned downtime, and had nothing to do with unexpected downtime (though blizzard did give free play time so that was cool). Vanguard has always been up and running for me and isn't that laggy. I was even on a UK server from california and was still playing just fine. UK to Cali lag was less in vanguard then Cali to East coast play in wow, and its a brand new game that just hit the market. Wow still couldn't say that.
This game has a slight learning curve but that should keep out some of the riff raff anyway. Overall I like this game and find it a very nice change from wow, which really was EQ lite. It was fun and I enjoyed it, but it was definitely easy mode MMO (why else do you think it has 7 million players).