Leave everything but the camera at home. Then you'll hear the local music instead of the same old tunes, see the places you visit instead of a Mac screen, and meet actual people instead of wasting your time on gadgets. When your camera fills up you can find cyber-cafes to burn CDs and mail them home. As a bonus, without all that stuff you won't have to worry about it being stolen or carry the weight around.
Best of all, after you force yourself to do without things you'll discover in a couple months how much your stuff owns you instead of the other way around, and if you listen to yourself then you'll be free of the consumer game forever.
I spent years travelling the world (http://www.bougerolle.net/travel/) and that's one big lesson I learned from all of it - the less stuff you have the happier you are.
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.
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Leave everything but the camera at home. Then you'll hear the local music instead of the same old tunes, see the places you visit instead of a Mac screen, and meet actual people instead of wasting your time on gadgets. When your camera fills up you can find cyber-cafes to burn CDs and mail them home. As a bonus, without all that stuff you won't have to worry about it being stolen or carry the weight around.
Best of all, after you force yourself to do without things you'll discover in a couple months how much your stuff owns you instead of the other way around, and if you listen to yourself then you'll be free of the consumer game forever.
I spent years travelling the world (http://www.bougerolle.net/travel/) and that's one big lesson I learned from all of it - the less stuff you have the happier you are.
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.