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Vanguard: a step backward?
thej6m
Member Posts: 38
Vanguard REALLY dropped the ball in my opinion. It seems they have made just another inneration of EQ. All of this talk of it bringing back the "challenge" of mmos, did the developers miss the evolution of the genre over the past 8 years?
Comments
I just don't get why Brad MCquaid had to leave SoE to make a carbon copy of EQ2, it could have stayed there as Creative Director and focusing his efford in making EQ2 a better game.
On a positive note at least we can choose to play EQ2 without instances at least...........
Sony didnt take over EQ1 they controlled it from its inception.
Actually I think they wanted to emphasize a set of parts they had constructed in the hope it all fitted together into a nice MMO. I dont think they thought as far ahead as stuff like community, I really dont.
VSoH just seems like nothing more than an attempt to get a cash vehicle into the MMO market. Maybe Sigil has some other project they need money for and are hoping VSoH will be just successful enough to provide the funding, because personally Im still having trouble believing that this is all Brad has managed to achieve in 4 years of work.
They could have bought a game engine licence from Korea and put 12 months of translation work into it and got basically the same result.
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Actually I think they wanted to emphasize a set of parts they had constructed in the hope it all fitted together into a nice MMO. I dont think they thought as far ahead as stuff like community, I really dont.
VSoH just seems like nothing more than an attempt to get a cash vehicle into the MMO market. Maybe Sigil has some other project they need money for and are hoping VSoH will be just successful enough to provide the funding, because personally Im still having trouble believing that this is all Brad has managed to achieve in 4 years of work.
They could have bought a game engine licence from Korea and put 12 months of translation work into it and got basically the same result.
Let us hope you are right.
Please god, make sure it ain't gonna be Dark & Light 2
Cuz then i really have to rely on Age of Conan, which i think will be a great game, but i still dont like the part where lvl 1-20 is "singleplayer". I doubt they will have enough content for the rest 80 levels... to make it exciting.
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Actually I think they wanted to emphasize a set of parts they had constructed in the hope it all fitted together into a nice MMO. I dont think they thought as far ahead as stuff like community, I really dont.
VSoH just seems like nothing more than an attempt to get a cash vehicle into the MMO market. Maybe Sigil has some other project they need money for and are hoping VSoH will be just successful enough to provide the funding, because personally Im still having trouble believing that this is all Brad has managed to achieve in 4 years of work.
They could have bought a game engine licence from Korea and put 12 months of translation work into it and got basically the same result.
You know all this from playing 3 characters to what, level 5? You probably didn't even get to see a real city. Vanguard has one problem: hellish performance on avarage systems. I have 2 gigs of ram, which seems to be a good amount because with some tweaking I can play Vanguard on highest quality and only get a bit of lag in the city or if there are like 20 n00bs running around me. The artwork in Vanguard is stunning, but sadly the average gamer will just NOT be able to live through the horrible lag to get to see it.
Things like UI and settings do not enable you in game to change things like world terrain to simple, instead you have to type it into the client file itself. Average gamers just don't play that crap. The game checks for a joystick by default which hogs a bit of memory. You have to type it into the vanguardclient.ini file instead of being able to tick a box in options, and setting it to default OFF for craps sake, who the heck wants to play Vanguard with a Joystick?? Little things like that make for sluggish to hellish performance unless you have nice video card and a couple gigs of ram.
The starting areas are are mostly beautiful, but there are a couple that are rather farmish. Only at level 9 or 10 when you start to travel do you get to see the amazing variety and glorious artwork by the likes of Keith Parkins, Brom and others.
On a nice rig the combat is fluid, heated and spectacular. On an average system it looks like a bunch of random laggy crap.
If the Vanguard devs can improve performance to the level that average setups can play it on balanced settings then their bird will fly, no doubts. If they can't get the performance cracking, the bird is going to lose future subscriberships by way of bad first impressions. That means flop, at least in World of Warcraft terms. But then hey, what the heck isn't?
A Diku mud wrapped in EQII graphics. EQ 1.5 would be a good description as far as I am concerned.
I think it is leaps and bounds beyond Dark and Light and however I would put the game play and bugs slightly behind Horizons. Let the fan boys pay for the next few months of beta and wait for the free twen day trial.
I miss DAoC
I have a few characters into 20s and 30s and I have to tell you I have the same opinions as Razorback. True, the background is beautiful but background art is usually at the bottom of my list of a good MMO.
The settings is horrible. You literally have to go into your vanguard files and tweak them from the inside to get them to somewhat playable lvls.
You'll be lucky if you get a FPS past 7 (and thats with 2 gigs of RAM, d core, great ATV card, and about four collective hours of tweaking the config files in my vaguard folders).
Animations is the worst Ive seen in the last seven years. When you fight, you never look at your NPC....you just have this blank stare as if you are staring at something in front of you. Sounds good. But when you fight a beetle only 1 foot tall, the animation looks bad. There's no feel for immersion. It feels as if y ou are playing an NPC character. Don't even get me into the running animation........
Graphics are B-A-D when it comes to player creation design. I know many of you think "how shallow!!! You play the game because of other factors!!!"
Not me. When I create a character, I want to look unique. The only unique thing Vanguard had was the size of boobs you can have and another slider of how perky you can make em. Forget about the face details and the such. All the face does is add different shadows. You pretty much end up the same looking character when you first started; with a few minor details. You only get 3 hair choices per race as well.
Race wasn't too thrilling as well. At first I was like WOW look at the sheer number of races you can be. Low and behold they all LOOK the SAME. I would have never knew a goblin could look just like a human...except smaller with longer arms and green arms.
No matter how hard I tried to get into this game. Trying every race and class, I just couldnt do it.
Biggest let down of 2007
People who have to create conspiracy and hate threads to further a cause lacks in intellectual comprehension of diversity.
I've never understood why a game can't be fun and interested from the very beginning. Time and again i see fanbois tell someone who doesn't like a game that they didn't play the game long enough to get to the interesting/fun stuff. I've read many game design books and don't think i've ever seen the following advice:
step 1) Make sure your game is uninteresting at the start. Make it hard to get into, and difficult to understand. Complex UIs and lack of tutorials should help in this regard. The steeper the learning curve, the better. Keep all your "good" content for those who are willing to deal with the pain and suffering on the front end. Allow only the most hardcore of players experience the best that your game has to offer.
Absurd as the above sounds, this is often how MMOs turn out. Sure you want your players to stay around for the long haul so you can keep the subscriptions rolling in the door, but the notion that you should have to do a bunch of "unfun" stuff just to get to the fun is asinine.
Call me crazy, but could it be the game-makers fault that the game failed to engage and keep the player around for more than the first 5 levels, instead of being the players fault because he found the first 5 level of the game no fun and quit?
~PD
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Yes the constant battle to create a proper line of sight adds much fun to the combat! Mobs chasing you through "solid objects" but not door ways is realistic! Trainers randomly listing skilsl you already have no your hotbar is the sign of a truely stble database!
The concepts of Vanguard are great, but they never created them. Instead they blamed funding issues and created poor knock offs of other game's playstyles. They took a lot of parts from other games that would be great in a single product. Too bad they did them half way and game up. It is a step back for the MMO market and feels like it should be an EQ or EQ2 expansion and not a seperate product.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
Actually I think they wanted to emphasize a set of parts they had constructed in the hope it all fitted together into a nice MMO. I dont think they thought as far ahead as stuff like community, I really dont.
VSoH just seems like nothing more than an attempt to get a cash vehicle into the MMO market. Maybe Sigil has some other project they need money for and are hoping VSoH will be just successful enough to provide the funding, because personally Im still having trouble believing that this is all Brad has managed to achieve in 4 years of work.
They could have bought a game engine licence from Korea and put 12 months of translation work into it and got basically the same result.
You know all this from playing 3 characters to what, level 5? You probably didn't even get to see a real city. Vanguard has one problem: hellish performance on avarage systems. I have 2 gigs of ram, which seems to be a good amount because with some tweaking I can play Vanguard on highest quality and only get a bit of lag in the city or if there are like 20 n00bs running around me. The artwork in Vanguard is stunning, but sadly the average gamer will just NOT be able to live through the horrible lag to get to see it.
Things like UI and settings do not enable you in game to change things like world terrain to simple, instead you have to type it into the client file itself. Average gamers just don't play that crap. The game checks for a joystick by default which hogs a bit of memory. You have to type it into the vanguardclient.ini file instead of being able to tick a box in options, and setting it to default OFF for craps sake, who the heck wants to play Vanguard with a Joystick?? Little things like that make for sluggish to hellish performance unless you have nice video card and a couple gigs of ram.
The starting areas are are mostly beautiful, but there are a couple that are rather farmish. Only at level 9 or 10 when you start to travel do you get to see the amazing variety and glorious artwork by the likes of Keith Parkins, Brom and others.
On a nice rig the combat is fluid, heated and spectacular. On an average system it looks like a bunch of random laggy crap.
If the Vanguard devs can improve performance to the level that average setups can play it on balanced settings then their bird will fly, no doubts. If they can't get the performance cracking, the bird is going to lose future subscriberships by way of bad first impressions. That means flop, at least in World of Warcraft terms. But then hey, what the heck isn't?
No, at max settings it doesn't look that good. Why do you keep playing the "You didn't play past level X!" card?Its clear Vanguard is just EQ 2.5, its not going to do very well and it doesn't do anything new.
Er.. well, that's a bit extreme considering we just passed the one week mark into 2007. But yeah, a lot of people who bought into all the hype are going to be very disappointed with Vanguard.
I always find it strange how a company can post a proposed feature list for an MMORPG, then pretty up a few rendered "screenshots" and suddenly people think it will be the greatest game ever. It happens with every game of course, but I was blown away by how many people took the bait for Vanguard, and how quickly the rabid fanboy population spread. "I can't wait for Vanguard!"... "Vanguard will be the WoW/EQ killer!"... People had this kind of stuff in forum signatures all over the internet even before the closed beta started.
I managed to get into beta back when the first batch of public beta invites went out long ago. It was obvious early on that this was not going to be the supposed "WoW killer" that the fanboys were expecting. All along I could not believe Microsoft would ever put its name on this, and lo and behold MS pulled out while Sony (of course) jumped on it. The first thing you see when you start Vanguard became the SOE logo, and the login and patch interface is exactly the same as Everquest 2. Talk about capitalizing on hype...
I think the biggest blow to Vanguard will be the level of hype and expectations that the fanboys generated. Look at what happened to Dark and Light. I'm sure there will be some people who cling to the heels, and will probably come up with a name for themselves ("hardcore" seems to be popular) but I doubt it will last. My impression of Vanguard six months ago was it seemed a second-rate MMORPG that offered nothing exciting or new, and I still hold to that opinion.
I think it's already not DnL2, simply on the basis of technical quality. I get frequent disconnects, but the servers themselves seem to stay online, or come up fast afterwards. Play is mostly smooth, the beginning quests in my starting location seem to work, and I see only about the lag I expected from the seriously execrable server-limited round-trip times (w/E6600, 2 gig, 7900GS, cable modem). There are some graphical issues and database issues that IMO should have been fixed in an earlier beta phase, but it is possible that what I see are the effects of server load. It is entirely reasonable at this stage to favor server-uptime-protection at the expense of player connections. The download was horrendous, but the time taken was entirely consistent with a 20 gig footprint, most of which consisted of the world map. Startup and login were glitch-free, repeatedly so (verified by reason of the frequent connection loss
).
On the other hand, if the fixes and improvements do not come in a steady progression, with many steps forward and few steps back, some companies with names beginning with "S" are in for some trouble.
I can't really speak for the gameplay yet. My only toon is still at the hand-hold newbie stage. I have never played EQ, EQ2 or WoW, so I have no comparison with the antecedents. The devil is in the details of more advanced play, and in particular in the interaction of the spheres of activity. I've seen some good chat comments about some of the more advanced quest environments, and I've gotten a glimpse of a starter dungeon (L6 - L10+ mobs) that I'm quite enjoying. Certainly, there are bases for some very sophisticated gameplay that has not been seen before in a structured MMO. Whether the systems to support it evolve depends on the game's success, it's customer base, and most importantly on the vision of its designers.
I have played EQ2 a lot, I have played asian MMO's, and FFXI, and WoW. Vanguard is in no way a copy of any of these games, though Vanguard has really taken my favorit aspects of many MMO's and tossed in some great new Ideas.
For your information, before open beta started, Vanguard ran very smoothly, with consistant high frame rates per second. So as optimization, and server improvements continue I expect this to be the case in future.
Does anyone remember the first year of WOW? There were so many server crashes, and so much down time that Blizzard had to credit our acounts for all the play time we missed. And WoW still has bug's such as the getting stuck looting problem. And characters still get stuck in rocks, or fall through the world.
I have played Vanguard for a few months, and I am constantly impressed with it.
Actually I think they wanted to emphasize a set of parts they had constructed in the hope it all fitted together into a nice MMO. I dont think they thought as far ahead as stuff like community, I really dont.
VSoH just seems like nothing more than an attempt to get a cash vehicle into the MMO market. Maybe Sigil has some other project they need money for and are hoping VSoH will be just successful enough to provide the funding, because personally Im still having trouble believing that this is all Brad has managed to achieve in 4 years of work.
They could have bought a game engine licence from Korea and put 12 months of translation work into it and got basically the same result.
You know all this from playing 3 characters to what, level 5? You probably didn't even get to see a real city. Vanguard has one problem: hellish performance on avarage systems. I have 2 gigs of ram, which seems to be a good amount because with some tweaking I can play Vanguard on highest quality and only get a bit of lag in the city or if there are like 20 n00bs running around me. The artwork in Vanguard is stunning, but sadly the average gamer will just NOT be able to live through the horrible lag to get to see it.
Things like UI and settings do not enable you in game to change things like world terrain to simple, instead you have to type it into the client file itself. Average gamers just don't play that crap. The game checks for a joystick by default which hogs a bit of memory. You have to type it into the vanguardclient.ini file instead of being able to tick a box in options, and setting it to default OFF for craps sake, who the heck wants to play Vanguard with a Joystick?? Little things like that make for sluggish to hellish performance unless you have nice video card and a couple gigs of ram.
The starting areas are are mostly beautiful, but there are a couple that are rather farmish. Only at level 9 or 10 when you start to travel do you get to see the amazing variety and glorious artwork by the likes of Keith Parkins, Brom and others.
On a nice rig the combat is fluid, heated and spectacular. On an average system it looks like a bunch of random laggy crap.
If the Vanguard devs can improve performance to the level that average setups can play it on balanced settings then their bird will fly, no doubts. If they can't get the performance cracking, the bird is going to lose future subscriberships by way of bad first impressions. That means flop, at least in World of Warcraft terms. But then hey, what the heck isn't?
why should he have to play past level 5? If the game made a bad impression then thats info enough that the game needs alot more work.
People who have to create conspiracy and hate threads to further a cause lacks in intellectual comprehension of diversity.
"Freedom is just another name for nothing left to lose" - Janis Joplin
.jpg)
No, at max settings it doesn't look that good. Why do you keep playing the "You didn't play past level X!" card?Its clear Vanguard is just EQ 2.5, its not going to do very well and it doesn't do anything new. Thats pretty much what I have seen. Again, it looks like greed got the better of them and they were forced to release the "open beta" a little too soon.
I am not buying it.