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My Report
wyzwun
Member Posts: 328
OK first, im a lvl 15 dorf sorc. I play on the PvP server…. Only because the pvp server has less lag. Secondly, I am only talking about issues that I have with the game. A lot of my problems have been reported while in beta. This is not an attempt to discredit all the good work that Sigil has done; this is NOT a review or a flame…
I’m only going to talk about the problems …
Server lag:: Really bad lag, almost everyone I know lags…. After tweaking the settings down on a 3 gig PC with a 256 meg GPU I can get it to run “decent”.
Stiff piss poor animations:: Some of the worst animations I have seen in an mmorpg. They need to be fixed, when I swing at a mob and hit it… I want my blade to look like it is hitting it. I should NOT be able to stand 4 feet away and hit something… I should not have the same animations more then 3 times… should be varied more… Example: everything should be the same over head swing…
Spell graphics: again, very poor… I plan to install a PSU for this game; right now the spell graphics aren’t even as good as saying Ever quest Online Adventuress… I just expect my next gen mmorpg to have better spell graphics & character animations then my current mmo (which is FFXI)
quests… way to generic for my taste, im kinda knit picking here
Repetitive music : seems like a lot of tunes get repeated way to often… again im knit picking.
Trade skill system : has no level progress bar, its hard to keep track of how im doing (again im being a hard ass)
Even though I already put my disclaimer I kinda expect the zealots to shot me down so I will talk briefly about the positives…
The world is simply breath taking… I haven’t been this taken back for a long time
Character creation & character models / hair etc are top notch here. I could spend days making a toon… just really really high class.
Ah I kinda bitched about sound before, but some of those tunes are really good, If they could vary this, they will have a great score.
Even though there is a lot of grinding… this just doesn’t bother me. I welcome the chance to hone my class and learn. I am glad that Sigil gives us a good grouping system so we can all play this mmorpg the way it is meant to be played… IN A GROUP. I believe the first 10 levels are setup really well. A few good dungeons, again a chance to solo and learn… and poof @ 10 you get a mount, it is very wise of sigil to reward there players early on, I appreciate this as a player… Never once did I get mad at the game which I tend to @ ffxi on almost a weekley basis lol. There is a lot of varied content here, I don’t have to play to cap to see that there is a lot to do here.
All in all, this game is special and if they just polish the animations I will be very happy J
Rites of the Four Horsemen
http://www.rotfh.com
Comments
And the animations are decent, could use some work. But they are actually better than many other games.
And from what i have heard, they are rewamping all animations to release, so this should not be a problem
Like i said, i like this game but for you to say that "its decent" is 100% pure grade A BS, simply put thats fan boy talk. Thanks for coming in to my post and basically trying to dis-credit my concerns with the game, good job... if sigil listens to you, well have another failed mmo launch...
Rites of the Four Horsemen
http://www.rotfh.com
14 high elf sorcerer here, I agree some of the animations are pretty shocking, the swimming was pretty horrible last time i saw it(haven't played in 2 weeks due to pc trouble) and chars look a bit stiff while riding mounts, but really, this stuff isn't really game breaking, i'm more worried about all the bugged quests.
I also agree with you on the server lag bit, i think this would be top priority for sigil to fix in beta 5 though.
but I disagree with the spell graphics, i actually really like them, the way you see fireballs actually shooting towards mobs instead of just surrounding them is really cool imo, this looks even cooler on AoE spells with lots of mobs around:P.
Ok, let me ask you this...
How many MMorpgs have you played, how many of them was at launch day?
I've played DAoC, SWG, EQ2, MOnline and WoW, all on the first day of release. And i've played every major mmorpg, not only trails, but most of them with a subscription.
I played DAoC from release in europe to the expansion-pack Trails of Atlantis came along, DAoC have and have always had these
"I can deal damage to my enemy without even touching it" thing. It also had only 2-3 combat animations. 1 for 1h melee and 1 for 2h melee. tho there were alot of different spell effects and animations that looked great, the melee animations sucked.
The game in general was ALOT of fun.
SWG release was a MESS! rollback every day, lost hours of work, nothing really worked as in should've done. It still got VERY popular and was fun untill NGE.
I speak from experience when i say the animations are decent.
I have also played alot of free mmorpg's,because my friends are cheap asses that thinks "monthly-payment" is crap, so to play with them i've had to play alot of pure-shit.
Sure, i've followed Vanguard sence it was announced, so you might call me a "fanboy". But dont give me crap about me not knowing what i talk about. Animation does NOT make the game. and as i've said they are probably working on them right now, for the release or atleast thats what i've heard.
I have AoE's that actually have NO spell animations...
Rites of the Four Horsemen
http://www.rotfh.com
My beta test history goes like this
EQ > EnB > EQOA > FFXI > DDO > and so on... EQ has issues because it was a first, I expect animations to be good... not crap and thats what the animiations are, comapred to games like FFXI and compared to what i expect from this engine and what kind of hardware it runs on and what it will run on in the future...
clean it up and no biggie, release this game with this animaton and you fail. simple as that.
Rites of the Four Horsemen
http://www.rotfh.com
Oh, when i think about it. DAoC had more melee animations. backstabbing and pierce weapon fighting didnt look the same.
They added more animations later tho.
If crafting lacks a progression bar, i dont really know. Have you looked around? Have'nt done any crafting yet, wanna save something for release. But if you cant se your crafting exp, that is really poor.
A note to those with lower end systems, check the forum for the INI tweak file it will save you alot of frustration in the begining.
Oh god bless those poor new testers hitting the newbie zones, think im gona stay clear of anywhere within two chunks of a newbie area .....
unless they took some animations out since last i played, you should only have one AoE without an animation, which should be fixed in beta 5. But i'm talking about the 99% of spells that have an animation, which for the most part, i found quite good.
Don't get me wrong, i'm not saying vanguard is perfect as it is, it definitly needs work, and what your saying is valid, i just don't think the spell animations are that bad, maybe thats just me though:)
if you just came from EQLive lol, sure but the animations are very poor compared to games like FFXI and L2 and on and on... heck Diablo had far better spell animations then vanguard... just i get upset when i see people say "its ready" um no its not ready and this game needs all the time it can get to polished things up.
Rites of the Four Horsemen
http://www.rotfh.com
Let me pose you a question...... As a tester do you think it was ready to go into open beta?
Let me pose you a question...... As a tester do you think it was ready to go into open beta? Absoloutely not. Open beta implys that its ready to be launched and just needs a stress test.
My favorite part about this game is THE INCREDIBLE WORLD. At least parts of it that is. Right now my main beta toon is a Thestran high elf sorcerer. I have to say that the high elf area is THE BEST designed and most interesting area I have played in an MMO to date. There are huge structures with great architecture. There are mountains and hills with water falls and statues and statues with waterfalls coming out of them. Mountain tops have fantastic looking structures on top of them that make me want to explore the world.
My favorite scenic areas of the game so far are the forest areas. IMO the trees are some of the best I have seen to date. They all have a wind animations, and the individual leaves look like they are very high quality. There are different tree types with distinct looks like the way they are contructed, the way the leaves look, and their color. The forest floor has grass waving in the wind and the trees cast very cool shadows in realistic way.
In places the architecture blows my mind. The high elf buildings have high ceilings with curving shapes that make you think of leaves. Many of the more palace parts in this area have gold pieces lining the walls of building and these gold pieces have leaves and branches carved into them. Each room seems to be different or has different things than other, with cool decorations to look at that move around or have some cool effect. One complaint though is that some of the building. seemed like they where the same building. One of the low level dungeons looked or felt very similar to a royal palace type building. This could also be explained that the dungeon was a "Fallen Acadamy" of the high elves, so maybe i didnt read into the lore enough.
Second part is all of the things to do. There is the usual question for adventure xp. Then here is crafting which I actually like. This is the first MMO to date that I have liked crafting, and I have played every major MMO excluding FFXI. Next there is harvesting, which seems sorta like the system in Horizons. The first time I cut down a tree for wood, the tree came crashing down, having the appropriate sound and the screen even shook as the tree hit the ground.
As for the bad points:
The game still does have quite a few bugs that they are going to have to fix. There are missing textures in places (an NPC will have a head and legs but the rest is missing, etc.). There are also missing animations/spell effects, unless where they look to be missing there are in fact are not supposed to be spell effects. There are a few quests that are still buggy, and some of the quests are pretty unclear and downright confusing. Example:
There was one quest that asks you to talk to two people and acquire two items. What the quest doesn't tell you is that you have to talk to one of these people first, and then it will allow you to talk to the second person. While I eventually talked to the first person after thinking the second person was bugged, it was still pretty confusing as the quest text never said you had to talk to a certain person first.
There are some bad points about the architecture. Many of the areas seem very inconsistent with how they look/perform/feel. I give very high praise to the Thestran High Elf area and theres another elf race on another continent that I forget now. There is a human Thestran starting area that has some bad building architecture. Some of the buildings look like they where just copied and pasted from games made 5 or 6 years ago. The textures where very bland and flat seeming, almost like they where 2D textures and not 2D made to look like 3D...if ya know what I mean.
The quests themselves are fairly standard. Many of them are kill X amount of this monster. To be honest the quest system so far is what I am least impressed with. I do think I wasn't totally bored with the quests because many of them are quest chains and the fact that the area I started in was so interesting helped with quest boredome. Thats not to say that there aren't some interesting quests, just that the majority seem to fall within the "kill X amount of monster" routine.
As far as combat goes, im kinda meh about it. While some of classes are interesting, they all seem so "dis-interested" in the combat. Its hard to explain what I mean, having a virtual character with no feelings being dis-interested in fighting, but somehow the animations and the way the combat looks is just sorta bleh and boring. There are some classes that I have liked so far. The druid is pretty cool. I got a few levels on him and increased one of his spells and unless I am crazy I could have sworn that the storm cloud effect got larger with the spell level increase. Pretty cool if this actually happened because that would mean spells, or at least some spells, got according graphical buffs as the spell damage/level increased. A good incentive to keep leveing to get those new spells.
Along with combat seeming kinda bleh, the NPC's and monsters also seem kinda bleh within the environments. It's sort of a shame because for the most part the environments are fantastic, yet the creatures that fill them are pretty much the MMOPRG standard. I do like many of the NPC's and monster interactions. In the cities there are some NPC's going around for a stroll. Other NPC's are using the crafting machines in the crafting areas. There are huge treants on guard patrol. In some of the question areas there are even NPC's locked in a never ending battle with mobs, both sides forever spawning more troops to fight each other. With that said, like the combat, it seems like NPC's are again just dis-interested in the world. Many of them are standing around just for the sake of having NPC's there, with no real purpose to the world. On one level I can't really complain about this. I don't remember playing an MMO/RPG sort of game that had a dynamic NPC/monster system. It seems that a majority of all creatures in these worlds exist for a few purposes 1)To be killed for quests, experience, items 2)To hand out quests and rewards 3)Class trainers and merchants who exist to sell you spells/moves and equipment/other items. I guess I can't really complain about this because it really is a standard in these sort of games, but it still would have been nice to have a more dynamic system in which NPC's and mobs dont purely exist just to exist.
While I havent gotten that bad of lag, there are some lag spikes and server crashes are frequent enough to be annoying. Optimization wise, the graphics seem pretty on par for a newer game coming out, minus those areas I thought had horrible textures. My rig is an AMD X2 3800, 2 gigs of crappy RAM, and a 7600 GT. I am running the graphics on balanced settings. This allows great environmental shadows to be turned on, a decent viewing distance, great lighting effects, and great environmental and texture looks. One odd thing is when I try to turn all of the setting onto the highest quality, it doesnt appear that much has changed, yet I take a HUGE performance hit. Shadows dont look they have increased or gotten better quality. View distance was enlarged a little bit. But over all the huge performance descrease doesn't justify an increase in graphical quality.
Optimization seems to be pretty good so far, though it could be better. I still run into an area every so often when the game slows a crawl FPS wise. Nothing has changed on the screen, its still the same forest around me, but its like I ran into a perfomance wall. Maybe the game is loading things that don't need to be loading yet? I dont know, I have no idea how that stuff works.
Over all for me this game is definitely a winner. The core mechanics are in that make the world interesting and addictive. The game mechanics are a little more hardcore than the said "carebear", easy system so often proclaimed to exist in World of Warcraft. There is a death penalty with a death run. There is an experience penalty for death and item decay does exist. For me this makes the game a little more interesting. I will try not to die because it means a lenghty and sometimes hard body run. The crafting sytem is intuitive yet also has elements of a hardcore yet easy to use system, requiring resources to be harvested, refined, made into secondary products, and finally made into the finished product. The game world is for the most part interesting to look at and has some of the most interesting and visually rewarding architecture and environments every to be put into a game.
I hope that Sigil can fix the fairly large number of bugs and performance problems. If they can do that and remain dedicated to improving the game and listening to the paying players, I think Vanguard will be a winner. Never on the terms of World of Warcraft' 7 million subscribers, maybe not even on the level of a a few hundred thousand subscribers, but more on the level of EVE onlines cult following. Fairly small yet totally dedicated.
to be really honest, its hard to say. As i said i do like this game... and im not an mmorpg dev... (im an actual DBA in RL) so i am not going to play arm chair dev... not going to assume that i know what the devs know because that would be foolish (almost as foolish as the people who post about the animiations being decent...)
I expect a game to have bugs, but i expect polish. Can Sigil get the animations polished and fix the server lag by end of open beta.... truth is i really dont know. It is one of those things where only the devs know... my only goal was to post here in a public forum my concerns about the game... IMO this game could use another 2-3 months of beta but unlike my views on the animiations being craptastic, I could be wrong.
I recently rolled a sorc and got him to 15, already 2 of my spells have no animation, there is still loads of stuff missing from the game.Let me pose you a question...... As a tester do you think it was ready to go into open beta?
Rites of the Four Horsemen
http://www.rotfh.com
the stiff animations could not make me feel immersed in the game
... and those $%&#@! DOORS!
here is your realism:
go to a door, click then waaaaait for it to slooooowly open, enter, now you are on a corridor that has nothing in it only another door, now you need to open that as well and you are inside the building. Repeat to get out. The "learn to craft" quest sends you in an out of this building at least 3 times in a row ... drove me nuts
Quite boring combat too and horrid performance. One positive thing that I remember, a nice sky.
What Blizzard does well (and the reason WoW is successful) is that they polish their games, this one needs many months of work
kk
I don't mind the doors, in fact it kinda reminds me of an old SNES FP rpg that i cant remember .... IMO this game is better then WoW right now but thats not saying much...
Rites of the Four Horsemen
http://www.rotfh.com
I thought new combat animations are to come before release.
The revamp on the monk is awesome, the combat animation is top.
Now playing: VG (after a long break from MMORPGS)
Played for more than a month: Darkfall online, Vanguard SOH, Everquest, Horizons, WoW, SWG, Everquest II, Eve
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Rites of the Four Horsemen
http://www.rotfh.com
What we all need to realize that nothing fun will last forever, eat the best food every day you'll find problems with it after a few months, get yourself the best car, you'll be bored and looking for something else in a year.
There is no hope of finding a game that will do the job for you, the only lasting fun you'll have is if you get into a community and live a 'second life' within the game. Then you can have amazing memories in WoW, EvE or EQ. Alas where you cannot have these is a bad, unpolished and unfinished product, where leveling up is uninspiring, where you simply can't find enough like minded individuals.
Finally let me just point this out in general, just by being able to identify the problems that WoW has, does not mean that some other MMO will be able to address those while keeping the same experience intact.
It has been many many years until they made and RTS comparable in fun to Starcraft. (personally I still think Starcraft is the king, and its still $20 at Target! ). The same thing is with WoW, it is here for a very, very long time, decades, it will be here when VSoH will be long gone, rightfully so, a glowing testament that LOVINGLY POLISHING a game is the way to create lasting value.
That is what Sigil and other MMO companies should be copying, not the interface.
kk
edit: added LOVINGLY POLISHING
I will rephrase it:
LOVINGLY POLISHED