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The State of Vanguard one week into beta
danbala
Member Posts: 181
First Week Beta Test Report on Vanguard
I’ve spent a full week playing Vanguard in my free time. I still have not advanced any one of my alts past 10 level. But I have played about 5 of them. And the reason I have leveled so slowly has been because there has been too many interesting things to do that don’t involve leveling. In any case, I now have some more concrete impressions to share.
I think the easiest format is to take a topic and describe the good aspects of it and the bad.
Questing:
The Good: Where to begin with this one. This is definitely a quest-based game. My complaint with quests in WoW was that too many of them involved somewhat pointless “kill x creatures” or “collect x things from dead creatures” (“kill quests”) and too many quests that just pointed you at new territories (‘bread crumb quests”) without advancing and plot.
While there are kill quests and bread crumb quests in Vanguard, even at the lowest levels they are in the minority. Since diplomacy and crafting also have quests, there are far, far more things to do in this game in terms of questing then just killing creatures. Furthermore, even in the adventuring sphere (which is mostly about killing creatures) they still manage to have plenty of kill quests that have some sort of twist to them. (For example time limits, or the use of magic potions, or interesting follow ups). The importance of quests is emphasized by the fact that they are a far more efficient way of earning experience than just grinding. They are also usually tied into elements of the “macro plot” of the game world which makes them more fun.
Also, most quests in the game are part of chains. Some of these chains are long and very complex. During the chains you are given alternate paths that foreclose certain options and force you to make choices. New quests are available based on your faction with certain groups and your faction can be improved by completing diplomacy quests. This makes Vanguard quests feel more similar to questing in Neverwinter Nights or Oblivion then say, WoW.
The Bad: The quests are initially a bit dispersed. The map is larger in Vanguard than in WoW and the starter areas are not as quest rich as in WoW. Also, the very first quests are actually pretty damn hard in this game. You can actually die multiple times at first level. Also, like most areas of this game, many quests are still bugged, contain errors or have other problems to them.
The World
The Good: The world is huge – or at least it seems that way when you start the game. Each of the three continents has its own flavor and, although the terrain across them varies, you can get a sense of a specific time and place from the look and feel of the locations. The various races all have their own subcultures with unique architecture and this in turn is influence by the region. For the most part, the cultural influence of each race is lmited to certain geographic regions which again helps give you a sense of distance and space.
By comparison, WoW now feels a bit like a theme park with Adventure Land sitting between Frontier Land and new Orleans Square. WoW now feels a bit tumbled and hodge podge arbitrary by comparison.
The Bad: Getting around the world is intended to be a big deal. There are not many remote, friendly outposts in hostile territory. As a result there are not many convenient places to regear and provision. There is definitely not flight paths or other means for a group to easily converge on a remote location. If your party intends to plunder a distant dungeon, there will be a trip involved and the remoteness of the location will increase the difficulty of the endeavor.
This suggests to me that adventuring as a group in dungeons could be a bit more labor intensive than in WoW. Just getting to the location could be an adventure. As someone who like convenience, this could get tiresome. We’ll just have to see.
Graphics:
The Good: On an nvdia 8800, the terrain looks wonderful. The trees are alive with motion. The water ripples. The sky looks almost photo-realistic. Metal glistens in the touch light. You can see the quality of textiles based on their weave.
That being said, the game world isn’t filled with the same kind of drama as WoW. You rarely come across huge relief carvings in the sides of mountains or enormous tree villages – at least not in the starter areas. But there are still points of interest that draw you from one space to the next. And the more realistic look makes the fantastic elements stand out all the more. Still for some coming from WoW, this might feel like spending a day in Yosemite Park after a week of riding the rides at Disneyland. More enjoyable for me, but I could see where it might be a let down too.
The Bad: On an nvida 6800, the game looks like crap – more or less. Nothing is animated. Its basically unplayable. That tells me that most of you will have to upgrade your computer just to play this game as it was intended.
Beyond that, the character models are somewhat questionable. The human characters have this glazed, doll-like look that is a bit off putting. All of the character animations are not yet in the game and those that are there are a bit uninspired.
Diplomacy:
The Good: Diplomacy is played out like a collectable card game – not unlike Magic the Gathering. Like M:tG, you collect cards and use them to build a play deck. You also earn gear and other items that improve your game in addition to cards. There are a ton of diplomacy quests in every area and they are all quest chains that are story-based and involve little or now killing.
While you play the game are also generating a conversation that relates to the story of the game. This leads to learning a lot of information about the lore of the game and many of the details end up being clues or foreshadowing about what is to come later. There are even diplomacy classes that improve certain aspects of your game as you reach the higher levels.
Diplomacy is the perfect solo game for when you have a small amount of time. The games can be played in a few minutes and the quests usually involve only a small amount of travel, if any. It’s a great way to pass the “downtime” between adventuring.
The Bad: none. There is really nothing bad to say expect maybe that some of the quests are still bugged.
Crafting:
The Good: Crafting is yet another mini game with its own gear, tools and other items. It’s a bit hard to describe, but stated simply, when you start building an item it begins a chain of events that is essentially a decision tree. You can to make certain decisions to apply your skills various ways. That can led to success or further complications that require more decisions. I guess the simplest way to put it is that it is a resource allocation game similar in some ways to the resource and tech building decision trees in some games like Starcraft or Civilization.
One nice touch is that what you are doing is animated so when your character stokes the bellows it starts huffing and when you spill something accidentally there is an animation that shows that too.
Like Diplomacy, Crafting seems like a great solo or “downtime” way to spend time in the game.
The Bad: This game is a lot more complicated and much harder to pick up than Diplomacy. The NPC instructors are not very good at helping you getting going either. Expect a lot of trial and error at first.
Also, the crafts are dependant on materials that you get for harvesting. But so far I have had very little luck finding them anywhere. I am not aware of any easy way to identify or track down materials so this part of the game has gotten a little frustrating.
No Instancing
The Bad: Since dungeons are fairly linear, the non-instancing has caused some issues there. The obvious one was that just as you were setting down to solve a particular encounter, some other group would swoop in and start the fight. It made moving through the encounter much more random. In some places whole sections of encounters were missing and you progressed quickly. At other points you had sudden batches of respawns that would get you out of the blue. Occasionally, just before a wipe someone would appear and save your butt.
It boggles my mind how this would work for raids. It seems inevitable that on PvP servers raid guilds would be engaging in constant brawls over the location of the choice raid encounters. I imagine these brawls could be their own mini-game. Would they be fun or frustrating?
The Good: On the other hand, it this meant that there is always some reason to go to a dungeon even if you could find a full group or even any group. Depending on circumstances, it would easy enough to fall in with a group or just draft along behind them if you wished. That would mean that there'd be less reason to sit around spamming guild chat for a group. You could just go and see what happened.
Also, it meant that the dungeons themselves are genuinely different every time you played them. With each pass there would be no guarantee that you'd seen the whole thing. That should improve replay value a great deal.
They do have a kind of mini instancing called "advanced encounter routes". Encounter Routes are interactive adventures that can be used to progress a storyline. They are spawned via items and other secret ways. (They have both covert and overt Encounter Routes.) Although a section is not instanced these encounter spawn only for the party triggered them and interaction is limited to them.
Performance
The Bad: Even on a dual core 3.2 with a nvidia 8800 performance for this game is still poor. In some city areas my frame rate still drops to about 10 FPS and I often get hitching or occasional lock ups. Furthermore there seems to be a build of RAM use while you run the game, causing you to have to /flush every so often.
Also, others have reported that they have trouble logging in from certain locations in the world. I’m not sure if this is just a feature of the beta.
The Good: Nothing good to report on this except that it might be getting better. But as bad as its was/is, that’s damning with faint praise.
Verdict: Am I going to subscribe to this game when its release? I think so. But a big part of that decision will be based on how well the tackle the bugs and the performance issues. If the game went live right now, you would be basically paying to be a beta tester. That doesn’t seem fair to me. Better then to wait and let someone else have that burden. On the other hand, they have about two weeks and it’s still possible that they will get things sorted out in the time they have left.
I’ve spent a full week playing Vanguard in my free time. I still have not advanced any one of my alts past 10 level. But I have played about 5 of them. And the reason I have leveled so slowly has been because there has been too many interesting things to do that don’t involve leveling. In any case, I now have some more concrete impressions to share.
I think the easiest format is to take a topic and describe the good aspects of it and the bad.
Questing:
The Good: Where to begin with this one. This is definitely a quest-based game. My complaint with quests in WoW was that too many of them involved somewhat pointless “kill x creatures” or “collect x things from dead creatures” (“kill quests”) and too many quests that just pointed you at new territories (‘bread crumb quests”) without advancing and plot.
While there are kill quests and bread crumb quests in Vanguard, even at the lowest levels they are in the minority. Since diplomacy and crafting also have quests, there are far, far more things to do in this game in terms of questing then just killing creatures. Furthermore, even in the adventuring sphere (which is mostly about killing creatures) they still manage to have plenty of kill quests that have some sort of twist to them. (For example time limits, or the use of magic potions, or interesting follow ups). The importance of quests is emphasized by the fact that they are a far more efficient way of earning experience than just grinding. They are also usually tied into elements of the “macro plot” of the game world which makes them more fun.
Also, most quests in the game are part of chains. Some of these chains are long and very complex. During the chains you are given alternate paths that foreclose certain options and force you to make choices. New quests are available based on your faction with certain groups and your faction can be improved by completing diplomacy quests. This makes Vanguard quests feel more similar to questing in Neverwinter Nights or Oblivion then say, WoW.
The Bad: The quests are initially a bit dispersed. The map is larger in Vanguard than in WoW and the starter areas are not as quest rich as in WoW. Also, the very first quests are actually pretty damn hard in this game. You can actually die multiple times at first level. Also, like most areas of this game, many quests are still bugged, contain errors or have other problems to them.
The World
The Good: The world is huge – or at least it seems that way when you start the game. Each of the three continents has its own flavor and, although the terrain across them varies, you can get a sense of a specific time and place from the look and feel of the locations. The various races all have their own subcultures with unique architecture and this in turn is influence by the region. For the most part, the cultural influence of each race is lmited to certain geographic regions which again helps give you a sense of distance and space.
By comparison, WoW now feels a bit like a theme park with Adventure Land sitting between Frontier Land and new Orleans Square. WoW now feels a bit tumbled and hodge podge arbitrary by comparison.
The Bad: Getting around the world is intended to be a big deal. There are not many remote, friendly outposts in hostile territory. As a result there are not many convenient places to regear and provision. There is definitely not flight paths or other means for a group to easily converge on a remote location. If your party intends to plunder a distant dungeon, there will be a trip involved and the remoteness of the location will increase the difficulty of the endeavor.
This suggests to me that adventuring as a group in dungeons could be a bit more labor intensive than in WoW. Just getting to the location could be an adventure. As someone who like convenience, this could get tiresome. We’ll just have to see.
Graphics:
The Good: On an nvdia 8800, the terrain looks wonderful. The trees are alive with motion. The water ripples. The sky looks almost photo-realistic. Metal glistens in the touch light. You can see the quality of textiles based on their weave.
That being said, the game world isn’t filled with the same kind of drama as WoW. You rarely come across huge relief carvings in the sides of mountains or enormous tree villages – at least not in the starter areas. But there are still points of interest that draw you from one space to the next. And the more realistic look makes the fantastic elements stand out all the more. Still for some coming from WoW, this might feel like spending a day in Yosemite Park after a week of riding the rides at Disneyland. More enjoyable for me, but I could see where it might be a let down too.
The Bad: On an nvida 6800, the game looks like crap – more or less. Nothing is animated. Its basically unplayable. That tells me that most of you will have to upgrade your computer just to play this game as it was intended.
Beyond that, the character models are somewhat questionable. The human characters have this glazed, doll-like look that is a bit off putting. All of the character animations are not yet in the game and those that are there are a bit uninspired.
Diplomacy:
The Good: Diplomacy is played out like a collectable card game – not unlike Magic the Gathering. Like M:tG, you collect cards and use them to build a play deck. You also earn gear and other items that improve your game in addition to cards. There are a ton of diplomacy quests in every area and they are all quest chains that are story-based and involve little or now killing.
While you play the game are also generating a conversation that relates to the story of the game. This leads to learning a lot of information about the lore of the game and many of the details end up being clues or foreshadowing about what is to come later. There are even diplomacy classes that improve certain aspects of your game as you reach the higher levels.
Diplomacy is the perfect solo game for when you have a small amount of time. The games can be played in a few minutes and the quests usually involve only a small amount of travel, if any. It’s a great way to pass the “downtime” between adventuring.
The Bad: none. There is really nothing bad to say expect maybe that some of the quests are still bugged.
Crafting:
The Good: Crafting is yet another mini game with its own gear, tools and other items. It’s a bit hard to describe, but stated simply, when you start building an item it begins a chain of events that is essentially a decision tree. You can to make certain decisions to apply your skills various ways. That can led to success or further complications that require more decisions. I guess the simplest way to put it is that it is a resource allocation game similar in some ways to the resource and tech building decision trees in some games like Starcraft or Civilization.
One nice touch is that what you are doing is animated so when your character stokes the bellows it starts huffing and when you spill something accidentally there is an animation that shows that too.
Like Diplomacy, Crafting seems like a great solo or “downtime” way to spend time in the game.
The Bad: This game is a lot more complicated and much harder to pick up than Diplomacy. The NPC instructors are not very good at helping you getting going either. Expect a lot of trial and error at first.
Also, the crafts are dependant on materials that you get for harvesting. But so far I have had very little luck finding them anywhere. I am not aware of any easy way to identify or track down materials so this part of the game has gotten a little frustrating.
No Instancing
The Bad: Since dungeons are fairly linear, the non-instancing has caused some issues there. The obvious one was that just as you were setting down to solve a particular encounter, some other group would swoop in and start the fight. It made moving through the encounter much more random. In some places whole sections of encounters were missing and you progressed quickly. At other points you had sudden batches of respawns that would get you out of the blue. Occasionally, just before a wipe someone would appear and save your butt.
It boggles my mind how this would work for raids. It seems inevitable that on PvP servers raid guilds would be engaging in constant brawls over the location of the choice raid encounters. I imagine these brawls could be their own mini-game. Would they be fun or frustrating?
The Good: On the other hand, it this meant that there is always some reason to go to a dungeon even if you could find a full group or even any group. Depending on circumstances, it would easy enough to fall in with a group or just draft along behind them if you wished. That would mean that there'd be less reason to sit around spamming guild chat for a group. You could just go and see what happened.
Also, it meant that the dungeons themselves are genuinely different every time you played them. With each pass there would be no guarantee that you'd seen the whole thing. That should improve replay value a great deal.
They do have a kind of mini instancing called "advanced encounter routes". Encounter Routes are interactive adventures that can be used to progress a storyline. They are spawned via items and other secret ways. (They have both covert and overt Encounter Routes.) Although a section is not instanced these encounter spawn only for the party triggered them and interaction is limited to them.
Performance
The Bad: Even on a dual core 3.2 with a nvidia 8800 performance for this game is still poor. In some city areas my frame rate still drops to about 10 FPS and I often get hitching or occasional lock ups. Furthermore there seems to be a build of RAM use while you run the game, causing you to have to /flush every so often.
Also, others have reported that they have trouble logging in from certain locations in the world. I’m not sure if this is just a feature of the beta.
The Good: Nothing good to report on this except that it might be getting better. But as bad as its was/is, that’s damning with faint praise.
Verdict: Am I going to subscribe to this game when its release? I think so. But a big part of that decision will be based on how well the tackle the bugs and the performance issues. If the game went live right now, you would be basically paying to be a beta tester. That doesn’t seem fair to me. Better then to wait and let someone else have that burden. On the other hand, they have about two weeks and it’s still possible that they will get things sorted out in the time they have left.
Comments
That pretty much tells the tale...
There is a game there, just have to be willing to search for it!
We never believed in the ancient prophecies... Until the day the sky rained gnomes
--------------------------
Very good write up, was well thought out and based on your actual experiences.
Scaring me a bit on the hardware requirements, I have a decent laptop, but its not really upgradeable so if it can't handle the load I'm going to be out of luck on this one I think.
"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
Thanks for a well written, honest post!
Cheers,
Lelle
My advice would be to wait. I've played it now on different systems and its really only fun on high end systems that can produce the nice landscapes.
Thank you Danbala, that was quite possibly the most well worded, easy to read player review of Vanguard I have seen thus far. Very objective too! Objectivity is gold around here, and I think you again.
Vanguard is far from perfect, but what is there is rich, detailed and very worthy. The places in the game, I just really like being there experiencing it. I will play from the very start because all games have their faults at launch. I would rather play a game with bugs than have a 2 hour queue to wait to get on my server any day. I haven't been in a game right at launch since Ultima Online, and this is a game I will not pass up getting in on the ground floor.
Of course, this sort of thing is subjective, so I just wanted to add my opinion to the mix. I certainly won't deny that it would look better on an 8800GTX. Again, nice review!
I'm just waiting for a F2P overhyped sandbox WoW clone with full PVP, epic raid bosses, instanced group content, and Crysis-quality graphics to come out. That, or something fun.
That certainly is the question. Anyone know what the monthly subscription is going to be?
Same as EQ2.
thats not the State of Vanguard, that's a comparison of Vanguard to WoW.
Nice write-up, but I think soo many people are so sick of hearing about WoW, its WoW this WoW that. I think we all need to focus on VG and not other games.
Hey Indiana Jones (anarchyfart), did you really need to quote his entire post?
The answer is no, you didn't.
Regal
Hehehehehe, the subscription fee. I thought I was answering your question above. lol From my CP at SOE, it should fall in as same price as EQ2. But for $25, if you have multiple games at SOE, you can pay 1 price for all your games. I like that, so that's what I do since I have a crafter in EQ2 that I like to maintain. Plus Planetside is still fun when I need a good shoot-em-up fix. I'm hearing that MXO is ramping up something interesting. I may have to jump in and look!
btw, if you don't know by now, anarchyart is a repeat quoter! heh.
MMORPG's w/ Max level characters: DAoC, SWG, & WoW
Currently Playing: WAR
Preferred Playstyle: Roleplay/adventurous, in a sandbox game.
What races did you play so far ? I started out with the cat people ( can't remember their name..those guys with the Planescape Torment backstory, hunters across different planes of existance ) and rolled one of the wolf guys next. Neither had any interesting quests, all were just "kill xxx" or "take xxx to xxx". Did I just pick unfinished ones ? ( I did give feedback to flesh out the lore part of those quests of course ).
Also about the visuals, I did like ( beta ) EQ2 better than what I saw so far, additionally I had better performance as well. ( Same system I had back then, except a better graphic card now ). I realize quite a few people hated EQ2 looks, I very much liked it, so maybe a matter of taste here.
As I stated in another post already, I really dig the adventuring classes and general PvE focus of Vanguard though. Disciple and Monk are what I played so far, both seem capable of soloplay and very useful to groups. It will remain to be seen how they do in any form of "endgame" content.
I didn't bother with tradeskills or diplomacy yet, mostly because of the performance issues.
Conclusions: Improve performance on average systems, implement fun lowbie quests for all races/classes, give cities/hubs some more life and this actually might lure people into buying the game. Currently ( again, speaking only for the races/areas I tested ) the game is lacking any sort of immersion and has p*ss poor performance even on low gfx settings.
/applause
At $25 the Station Access sub is a value unmatched anywhere else. EQ1/EQ2/SWG/Planteside/MXO...and Vanguard, cheaper than my cable bill. I will add VSOH just to say I was there, when I had to go uphill both ways in the blinding snow..........
My one complaint, and maybe someone with more exp can correct me if wrong, why do all of the furry races not have the option to change fur pattern/color?
I played Orc, goblin, gnome and halfling. That almost all start out with a few kill quests and a few bread crumb quests and then branch out from there. You need to play past about level 5 and start on the diplomacy and crafting to get a full sense of the questing system.
As WoW owns at least 1/2 of the MMORPG market, it is the defacto standard against which all games are compared. Its like comparing other hambuger places to McDonalds.Although to be honest I used WoW as my bench mark because it happens to be the other RPG that I'm playing right now. Vanguard is is competing with Burning Crusade for my attention span.
Gives a MUCH better representation of the state of the game than a "omg this game sux" or a "this is the most r0x0rz game, eva!" post.
I think the fella above who said play something else for 6 months has it spot on. There will be the hardcore lot who will stick through the release - much like EQ2, which I see this game mirroring in a lot of ways - who will help Sigil keep it afloat I hope. Is a shame to see the money coming to an end and thus a need to publish regardless, but such is business.
So yeah, I think checking out TBC (for the month it takes to be bored again), and something else for a couple of months, may be a wise choice eh? Three months down the track perhaps they'll have really started to scare away the bugs etc.
One thing I've yet to get confirmed, which determines if I check it out at release (not sure if anyone knows yet though):
Do we or do we not still need to buy a box to get an activation key?
I understand the subs are all included, thus why I can play SWG, EQ2 and EQ1 whenever I feel the desire. But I didn't need to buy the boxes for SWG or EQ1.
Seeing, though, as this is a brand new release, do I still need to buy the $80 Aus box? Or can I just download the updater and download the (huge freaking) install with it automatically tacking on to my Station Access?
Would really appreciate finding this out. Would determine whether I check it out at release or not.
"(The) Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude." - George W Bush.
Oh. My. God.
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
I understand the subs are all included, thus why I can play SWG, EQ2 and EQ1 whenever I feel the desire. But I didn't need to buy the boxes for SWG or EQ1.
Seeing, though, as this is a brand new release, do I still need to buy the $80 Aus box? Or can I just download the updater and download the (huge freaking) install with it automatically tacking on to my Station Access?
Would really appreciate finding this out. Would determine whether I check it out at release or not.
For good or for bad
you dont need to buy the box.
If you have beta client, you will only need to buy the game key and download a patch ...
"Before this battle is over all the world will know that few...stood against many." - King Leonidas