Yet another Vanguard Review.

Nopex

Yet another Vanguard Review.

 

I never normally bother to write a review on this site about any game I get the opportunity to beta test or play after purchase, but the massively varying opinions in this forum has spurred me on to cast my opinion on Vanguard.

 

First let me say, I’m pretty hard to please when it comes to MMO’s.  I played UO in the OLD OLD days and like many, it has raised my bar of expectation and left me eternally it feels, looking for the game to replace it. I have played UO, AC2, AO, Eve, Planetside,EQ, EQ2, D&D, Ryzom amongst others.

 

I’m waiting for Darkfall as it seems the closest, but Vanguard I can safely say will fill that gap for me until the day comes.

 

I played WoW for about 2 days until I left the uninspired world behind me. It’s mass appeal comes down to it successfully conquering the task of merging the best bits of all MMO’s in a basic way and presenting it to a mass market of people who had never experienced an online world.  EQ2 kept me interested for about 5 months, but hitting the same old buttons encounter after encounter after encounter gets tiring.

 

Vanguard, from what I’ve read and experienced seems to have an extremely new take on the way classes play, and the depth to their abilities and uniqueness is in my opinion unmatched.

 

This is a great thread which introduces you to this. Rangers being able to fire their bow at differing strengths to match the situation.  Necromancers reanimating corpses and harvesting corpses for skin grafts to place on their pets.  Blood Mages building up Blood Unions with targets to share in their damage. Rogues being able to stay in stealth if they don’t ge aggro.  Warriors having opening moves, bridging moves and finishers as well as most classes having different stances. Effecting combat in different ways  The list goes on and on:

 

http://forums.vanguardsoh.com/showpost.php?p=1475135&postcount=38

 

For those of you who are unsure about how the classes are different, heres a great reference for you to read and I’d SERIOUSLY recommend it to anyone considering:

 

http://wiki.silkyvenom.com/index.php/Category:Adventuring_Classes

 

There’s just so many gaps these guys are filling.  No more sitting around in groups spamming LFG channels for healers because they are so few and far between.  The blood mage has insane damage and the ability to form a bond with allies to take their damage directly.  It can take health from foes and transfer it to allies.  The cleric wears full plate mail and uses a war hammer whilst being able to heal and revive fallen foes. All healer classes can wade in their and dish out some damage rather than watching health bars and healing.

 

Trust me, on class level so far this game fills so many gaps other games have in them.  There are about 5 classes I want to play on launch – this never happens to me usually.

 

The game has some down sides, but at present the majority of them are attributed to it being in a beta stage.  Bad lag/FPS, lack of animations on some classes, dull lifeless spell casting animations and effects, but you have to see past this is my opinion. These guys have been working on a project for a very long time and unfortunately they have been forced into a release early.  I think a lot of people on here are over looking something important here – Does the fact that after five years these game designers have been FORCED to push the game out the door not suggest it is filled with content and depth?  It has not been polished yet, but it will be.  Performance is getting better all the time.

 

This is without me talking about diplomacy, crafting, player housing, flying mounts, caravaning.  All excellent implementations that help the game’s long term appeal.

 

I’ve said pretty much all I can say on the subject, but while I have the attention of those who have bee bothered to read this far.  Here’s a screenshot from the game  Me and my brother are into finding the biggest heights we can in an MMO and diving off it to our deaths.  In this screen we jumped right off this mountain on the left into the sea and swam into the harbor.  As you go up to the top of the harbor the mountains stretch as far as you can see to the right. I play this game on balanced graphical setting and look at the detail on the mountain path  There’s a sense of wanting to just always run forward in Vanguard to see what’s over the next hill.  It’s in a word stunning.

 

http://img406.imageshack.us/my.php?image=biggestmmojumpeversm7.png

Abolith

Nice review.  Sums up the game pretty well.

dominia

Thier lack of polish bothers me, either

• a. they spent too long working supplying content for 3 continents and consiouly desided not to not to ploish the animation, graphics, UI and other misc things in hopes gamers would look past it given enough content.
• b. they were rushed, which is a silly statement since they've already been on a deadline once with Microsoft, one would think they would of done at least some polishing.
• c. they don't care about polish, whihc again is silly since clunky UI, animation and memory usage lead to a less immersing experience (which is exactly what this game is about, the experience)
• d. Sony pulled the rug out form under them, meaning when they singed the deal with sony they were promiced more time and sony went back ont he contract, entirely possible but we've all had the hint VSoH was coming sometime in Jan so very unlikely (i.e. going live jan. 30 wasn't suddenly announced yesterday)

the probelm i have is that with a, b, and d senerios the easy solution is to cut back on the number of continents (preferrably 1), over design content for it, and release the next continent this summer, and the thrid in the winter when they are ready. Thus freeing up time to polish the game to their hearts content. But that didn't happen for one reason or another.

The reason why polish DOES matter in a game is because you lose immersion by your user with game hicups (clipping, bad animation, UI text not matching image ect...), you lose a large customer base who won't pay $$ and worl hard to level when it doesn't even look like the devs are working hard for them, and generally it gives your game a very uninspired look and feel. Say what you will about WoW (it's grind, endgame, pvp, lack of content ect) it's very polished, has a good system for user to game involvement (controls are responsive, easy to use UI), the game has gravity (ie.e the characters don't look like their running on air or some ploygon plane) and there is great atmosphere.

The reason why I worry aobut Vsoh future is while it's ok to have very little polish at release (look at EQ2 and see who they did), it's very hard to play catch up especailly when users are expecting content regularly. I'm very glad you enjoy Vsoh, but untill they fix a lot of issues I can't justify spending the monthly fee on it.

--D^t

Cerion

Pretty good review.  I have both good a bad things to say about Vanguard, but I've mentioned those elsewhere.

Bottom line is, if Ford tried to sell you a car that was missing its back seat, and told you that every once and awhile the engine simply stops and you have to restart it, would you buy the car?  No, you would not.

Or perhaps you saw the movie "Battlefield Earth"? The horrendous movie starring John Travolta. You don't really care why the movie sucked, you don't care that they may have had a bad director or poor screenwriter, or went over budget and had to finish the movie early.  All you care is that it in fact sucked. All of the excuses of why it sucked will not make you like the movie.

Now Vanguard doesn't suck. But it is unfinished, with only 15 days to go. It is buggy, and servers are still crashing.

The condition I see this game launching in was expected of 1st, maybe even 2nd gen games. But a third generation game with professional designers needs to deliver a professional product.  You only get one chance to make a first launch.

anarchyart

Nice overview of the game, I hope people who haven't tried it will at least read them. If it doesn't intrigue you then I suggest you probably really don't like MMORPG's all that much.

KombatJesus

Originally posted by dominia


he reason why polish DOES matter in a game is because you lose immersion by your user with game hicups (clipping, bad animation, UI text not matching image ect...), you lose a large customer base who won't pay $$ and worl hard to level when it doesn't even look like the devs are working hard for them, and generally it gives your game a very uninspired look and feel. Say what you will about WoW (it's grind, endgame, pvp, lack of content ect) it's very polished, has a good system for user to game involvement (controls are responsive, easy to use UI), the game has gravity (ie.e the characters don't look like their running on air or some ploygon plane) and there is great atmosphere.
The reason why I worry aobut Vsoh future is while it's ok to have very little polish at release (look at EQ2 and see who they did), it's very hard to play catch up especailly when users are expecting content regularly. I'm very glad you enjoy Vsoh, but untill they fix a lot of issues I can't justify spending the monthly fee on it.
--D^t

No game has been released polished as far as I know, except for City of Villains, which was basically just an expansion pack for City of Heroes and not a real seperate game, lol.  When you look at the caliber of game, I would say WoW better had been polished when it came out, but it wasnt.  But I do agree that the animations better be done, one of the reasons why we may not be doing so good right now is because of the old grandmother servers they are on.  We better be on some quad core, dual xeon per chunk in the city and dual core dual xeon per chunk in the country ownage at release. . ..

Sigil has two teams currently, the live team and the expansion team.  And the expansion team will be assisting the live team two months after re