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Akirax
Member Posts: 14
I did not play beta I didn't know about Vanguard till a month ago but for some reason I'm very interested in it maybe it's because I'm a lazy fan of Brad McQuaid or maybe it's because it's been 8 months since I decided to quit World of Warcraft and now I want a new MMO or even better... somehow I wanted to feel like EQ players did feel back in the days and I think in VSoH I shall understand how it is to be a MMO player again (WoW is a great game, for real, but it did not hold me back long enough for the expansion). So I decided to gather "good" review*s* to make the satisfaction of people like me (who feel the same way I do). Here it goes:
TrusteReviews.com
Welcome, if you will, to the third-age of MMORPGs. Let’s say the first began with Ultima Online, EverQuest, Asheron’s Call and Dark Age of Camelot – games that had a deep appeal for a particular audience, but could never quite manage to attract a mainstream following. Then came the second age. City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, Eve and Guild Wars started to knock out the elements of the genre that put off the majority of gamers, and perfectly suited those who had just taken up broadband and were looking for something to do with it. Well, now we’re ready for a third age; a range of games that, essentially, take the post-WoW MMORPG as a starting point and run from there.
Make no mistake. WoW is very much the elephant in the room where these games are concerned. All the players in the market – new and old – know that they need to either compete with Blizzard’s monster or attract a different audience. While some games are doing the former, using big-name licenses to pull in mainstream punters (Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar and Age of Conan come immediately to mind), Vanguard seems to be positioning itself slightly differently. Its geneology – developer Sigil was co-founded by Brad McQuaid and Jeff Butler, both instrumental in the development of EverQuest – might give you the idea that Vanguard isn’t exactly targeting the first-timer. In fact, it seems designed to provide a bigger, more complex, more grown-up alternative to WoW. Think more choice, more depth and fewer long-term limits.
‘Bigger’ and ‘more’ are very much the themes here. The world itself – Telon – consists of three huge, completely explorable continents, modelled after European, Asian and Middle Eastern settings. You also get a huge range of character races and classes and some enormous skill trees to start off with, plus such lofty long-term goals as flying mounts to ride on and virtual property you can build and decorate. There are even areas that you’ll only be able to access by air or boat. ‘Forget the other MMORPGs’, Vanguard seems to be saying ‘I want to be your one and only, not just now, but for the rest of your life.’
To this end, you get one of the most flexible character setups in the business. Sigil has made a lot of the 19 different playable races and 15 classes, and they’ve been right to. As well as the usual variations on Elves, dwarves and Halflings, there are several different races of men (in civilized and barbarian varieties). On top of these, the game throws in furry fox-like critters and cat-people in the Asian continent of Kojan, a race of scary-looking wolfmen, plus orcs, goblins and half-giants. The professions are sensibly split into defensive and offensive fighters and defensive and offensive spellscasters. However, as well as the usual tanks (the Warrior, the Paladin), ranged weapon and stealth types (Ranger, Rogue), healers (Cleric and Shaman) and heavy weapons dudes (the Necromancer, Sorcerer and Druid) there are some well thought out hybrids. The Dread Night, for example, is basically a tank with fearsome magic powers, while the Blood Mage is a healer with a nice side-line in offensive spells.
As usual, not all professions are open to all races, but all in all, there’s such a massive choice here that if you can’t create two or three characters you’d like to play, there must be something wrong with your imagination. Producing all these variants must have required a huge commitment on Sigil’s part, and I suspect that balancing them must be a nightmare. Only time will tell how well they manage it.
Like most MMORPGs, Vanguard is primarily combat-driven, but real effort has also gone into making sure that it’s not all dull right-click then sit-back stuff. Like Guild Wars or City of Heroes, you get a nice, responsive system of attacks and defences where the combos almost chain themselves together, and Vanguard also throws in a good system of reactive attacks and counters that only become available when specific conditions are met. More impressively, the game shows a real commitment to non-combat gameplay. I don’t really go in for crafting myself, but you can see how much thought has gone into virtual manufacture and shopkeeping.
Diplomacy, meanwhile, is something new entirely. Modelled on a trading-card game, the system has you playing debate-themed cards in order to drive a gauge up and down between you and your ‘opponent’. Things are complicated by the fact that each card played allots you and your opponent certain colour-coded points, and you both need these in order to play specific cards. It’s relatively complex at first, but there are good tutorials and it’s certainly not impossible to get your head around. What’s more Vanguard really runs with the idea, throwing in a whole tree of diplomacy quests that offer an alternative means of advancement.Perhaps the biggest draw of Vanguard, however, is the world itself. Powered by a heavily modified Unreal 2 engine, this is a feast of gorgeous textures, lighting and reflection effects, where – provided your system has a high-end GPU and a lot of RAM, you can expect enormous draw distances, truly panoramic landscapes and some great atmospheric effects (even if the rain is over-used in some locations). This is a game where even the trees look amazing. There are glitches here and there, and the odd clumsy bit of modelling, but overall this is as close to Oblivion as MMOs currently get. A lot of attention has clearly gone into landscape, architecture and creature design, and – as in WoW – it’s tempting just to explore and see everything the three continents have to offer.
However, while the world looks amazing, and the artistic style is frequently striking, there are several things that pull you out of the fiction. The first disappointment is how static the fauna is. Non-hostile creatures stand around waiting to be hunted down and battered into submission, while even hostiles don’t always react even when near-neighbours are attacked. Of course, some of this is to maintain a reasonable difficulty level – you don’t want the mobs ganging up at the opening of the game – but you can’t help feeling that WoW handles its menageries better. There are also a lot of areas in which everyone just seems to be standing around, waiting for the player to interact. This has always been the case with MMOs, and may always be so, but there are times when Vanguard’s illusion of its living breathing world simply isn’t as compelling as WoW’s, despite the clearly more advanced state of the visuals.
The most serious issue, however, is the underlying game style. Vanguard wants to provide a world of epic, group-based adventure, so you can’t expect the instant travel options and AI henchmen of a casual-friendly game like Guild Wars, but even given this there are long periods where Sigil’s baby feels like a good old-fashioned grind. For a game that prides itself on non-combat routes to advancement, there’s still a lot of emphasis on the classic ‘bash x Grey Wolves then return to me’ quest, to the extent that some quest-givers even give you a shopping list of monsters to be slaughtered. WoW and Guild Wars both do it to some extent, but both are usually better at hiding it. It’s a shame, because there are occasions when Vanguard does a fantastic job with its quests, linking several together as part of one mini-crusade against a particular villain, or pitching you as a hero who can halt a dark conspiracy.
At these points, the game really takes off, but there are huge periods where it doesn’t and it all seems like hard work. Dying certainly doesn’t help. Up to level seven you simply reincarnate at the nearest base – a nice sop to keep us noobs from throwing in the towel – but after that you’re faced with a choice between paying heavy penalties or having to return to your place of death and loot the grave to get your kit back. In WoW, you could do so as a spirit and only had to get near the mark, making recovering your possessions a hassle but not a particularly perilous one. In Vanguard, however, you have to travel in your vulnerable, physical form without armour and with only basic weaponry, to pretty much the exact point where you died. This means you can actually die several times on the way to get your stuff back – not what I’d call entertaining.
Vanguard also gets hard on solo players fairly early. Again, this fits in with the classic ethos, but it means the game isn’t as flexible as WoW or Guild Wars. We don’t always have our buddies on tap to play with, and it’s not always easy to find a pick-up group to play with, particularly at times – and there are many – when the servers aren’t so full.
The main reason to persist is potential. While the early game can be a bit of a grind, there is a real feeling that, should you find a good group and put a lot of time in, there’s a fantastic world to explore here. Telon has an almost dizzying sense of scale, and even in the early stages you can see epic narratives building up. All the same, do you really want to grind today so you can have jam tomorrow, when other games give you jam right from the start?
Perhaps the real key to understanding Vanguard is that even though it looks third-generation, it’s driven by an old-school mentality and how you respond will depend on how much you can share it. Like any good MMORPG – and this is a good MMORPG – it’s addictive, huge and habit-forming. It’s also well-designed and thoroughly gorgeous to look at. Yet it demands the sort of commitment that means it will never pull in the casual crowd that took to WoW and Guild Wars in such numbers. Provided player numbers stay up or even grow, Vanguard will give back everything that you put in. The question is, do you really have the time and energy to give it in the first place?
Verdict
The first of the third-age MMORPGs looks fantastic, but feels a bit of a throwback to the first. A great step-up from WoW if you want more complexity and choice, but the more casual player is still better served by WoW or Guild Wars.
GameSpot.com
Experienced role players will enjoy the engaging combat and fascinating diplomatic gameplay, in spite of Vanguard's litany of bugs and singular focus on group adventuring.
The Good: Lively combat makes for fun group questing; diplomacy gameplay is an enjoyable way to involve players in npc dialogue; the complex crafting is interesting and rewarding.
The Bad: Bugs, bugs, and more bugs; forced grouping will leave solo players cold; stiff death penalty and lack of instanced dungeons are as frustrating now as they were in everquest's early days.
Since the release of Blizzard's monumentally popular World of Warcraft and its expansion, it's been impossible for new massively multiplayer online role-playing games to avoid the inevitable comparisons. That's probably for the best in the case of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, for while the aforementioned games have some superficial similarities to this one, their core designs are far different. Vanguard, for better or for worse, hearkens back to the days of EverQuest, when in-game death was more than just a slight annoyance and groups camped for bosses that rarely spawned. But by doing its own thing, Azeroth be damned, Vanguard sets itself apart, thanks to complex crafting and a wholly unique take on non-player character communication. It's also rough around the edges, exhibiting all the bugs and glitches of a game not quite ready for release. Yet while Vanguard is not outwardly friendly to genre newcomers, it's got enough rewarding gameplay to please experienced adventurers willing to overlook its technical hitches.
In Vanguard, home is the world of Telon, which features three main continents, 19 races, and 15 classes. While many of the choices seem fascinating, most of them boil down to archetypes and group roles familiar to anyone who's played an MMORPG before. There are a good number of ways to modify your avatar's physical appearance, so you could easily spend quite some time deciding on the look and purpose of your character. Once in the game, a system of pop-up messages guides you through the beginning steps, and you're off to explore, quest, and level. The starting quests are genre standards familiar to anyone who's played an MMORPG before, but once you've gained a few levels, you'll find just how daunting Telon can get.
The first and obvious challenge once you are around level seven is that, like it or not, Vanguard isn't for the solo player. That isn't to say it's devoid of content for the lone adventurer, but consistent soloing is a good way to get quickly frustrated. Most quests are obviously designed for groups, even if they're not necessarily identified as such in your quest log, and soloing what should seem like a simple mission can result in quick death if you aren't careful. Even with a full group, some areas and dungeons can be a time-consuming challenge, particularly because Vanguard doesn't feature any instanced quests. As a result, you might need to wait a while before the boss you need to vanquish reappears after the last group's battle. Multipart group quests may take three or four hours to get through, and even with a good party, a simple mistake can cost you your character's life.
That cost can be pretty high, since resurrection entails experience loss and a trip back to your corpse, assuming you want to regain some of that XP. You may summon your tombstone at an altar, but at higher levels, the amount of time you need to put into regaining all the lost XP is intimidating. In any MMO, returning to your corpse in a monster-infested dungeon may be next to impossible, and the additional loss of experience often makes the penalty even more frustrating in Vanguard. There's no experience loss by falling to the sword of another player on the free-for-all player-versus-player server, which eliminates the need to retrieve your corpse but means your killer can loot up to 15 percent of the coin you're carrying. Conversely, a second PVP server groups races into two separate teams. Along with the usual duels common to the genre, that's the only PVP content Vanguard offers on US servers.
But if exploring Telon is riskier business than we're used to seeing in MMOs over the last few years, the combat itself is satisfying and fun. Much of this is related to the reaction system, which grants you multiple spells and abilities that can be triggered only if certain criteria are met. For example, a successful parry may open up a counterattack not normally available. Because those attacks can be powerful, managing your skills and available energy adds some welcome strategy to your choice of spells at any given time. Chain attacks and bard songs, among other class abilities, make battles feel dynamic, especially considering your avatar doesn't need to stand still to perform most skills.
Vanguard's most fascinating feature is diplomacy, which lets you earn favor with various factions, area-wide buffs, and more by engaging NPCs in conversation. Parleying is a simplified strategy card game in which you play five cards that represent different types of statements, such as flattery and inspiration. A game board with an influence marker keeps track of how you are doing, and as long as you keep the marker on your side for the specified number of turns, you win the parley. As your skills improve, you earn new cards--and even gain the use of temporary cards when visiting certain areas. Parleying itself is pretty simple, although as you gain skill, winning a high-level conversation gets to be quite a challenge.
Even with three distinct continents, Telon doesn't feel very unique compared with any other fantasy world, nor do your adventuring quests make you feel all that involved with the scattershot lore. However, the addition of diplomacy not only rescues the splintered backstory, but makes it feel more personal than it otherwise would, because each statement hinges on your performance within the parley. Keeping the marker on your side of the board is key not just to winning the conversation, but to uncovering the next bit of information. By giving you an active role in your exchange with the NPC, Vanguard makes you look forward to what the NPC has to say. And because the dialogue is written well, diplomacy never feels like pointless busywork in a quest to raise your standing in one faction or another.
There's also plenty of crafting and harvesting to do, and making a finalized and useful product is a complex and lengthy task compared with crafting in other MMOs. Creating a single item requires a recipe, multiple tools and components, and a particular workbench. When you begin the session, you have a number of action points to spend and multiple steps to work through, and each step spends points while contributing to either the progress or the quality of your product. Additionally, crafting complications that need additional components or tools can crop up. For example, if your character is injured while working, he may need to mend his wounds, which requires bandages and uses up skill points. You can also earn coin and skills by doing work orders, which are crafting missions that have you creating and returning various goods. It's an involved process to be sure, but producing a high-quality product is appropriately rewarding.
Vanguard's most unfriendly characteristic is its instability. To its credit, it launched without a hitch, and server disconnects are relatively uncommon. Unfortunately, a number of other bugs infest the game. Respawning at an altar or teleporting to another continent may result in your character appearing inside the world geometry, underwater, or in midair. Lost quest items, random appearance changes to avatars, and other frustrating issues have popped up frequently in the weeks since release. Even turning on antialiasing functions on your graphics card can cause your screen to go black, flicker, or hide the character names over avatars. Lag spikes will hold up combat for several seconds, or even cause an action in progress to stop while still costing you the time or energy the skill requires.
Many of the visual bugs result from Vanguard's lack of support for full-screen antialiasing. Surprisingly, though, this missing feature doesn't have much of an impact on the beauty of the visuals. Many of Telon's vistas are stunning, from both an artistic and technological standpoint. The lush foliage and colorful Asian architecture of Kojan is one notable example, but exploration on all three continents reveals plenty of dramatic landmarks. The splendor doesn't translate evenly, though. The native, barren environments of Qalia are inconsistent, and many of the dungeons and enemies are graphically uninspired. But as pretty as most of it is, the game engine has difficulty keeping up. A top-notch system is required to see Telon in all its glory. Even on a high-performance PC, Vanguard is a system hog, requiring a lot of muscle and some adjustments to the graphics settings to run at a stable frame rate.
The soundtrack is attractive and often evocative. Musical tracks like the vocal elven swooning in the city of Ca'ial Brael and the Arabic strings of Khal reflect the local environment perfectly. The swooping harp glissandos and angry cello grumbles of diplomatic exchanges are also noteworthy. The din of combat and ambient noises are what you would expect, although some enemies are eerily silent when attacked. Just don't expect the pleasant NPC chatter from EverQuest 2, or witty WOW-ish quips; NPCs in Vanguard mutter a small number of short phrases, and most of them are delivered without a hint of enthusiasm.
Features like player housing and boats for travel extend Vanguard's shelf life for players approaching the top level of 50, and even with plenty of room for future questing content, there's plenty to see and do. But Vanguard is undoubtedly not for everyone. Multiple bugs, forced grouping, and a vocal player community sensitive to criticism currently keep players looking for an easygoing adventuring experience at arm's length. But Vanguard gets a lot right, and the engaging combat and nifty diplomacy are more than enough reason for genre enthusiasts to give it a shot.
YahooGame.com
The word is out about Vanguard: it's the hardcore massively multiplayer game that's not for the sissies who'd rather kick back and play World of Warcraft. This is the tough-guy MMO with complicated tactical combat, mandatory group harvesting, extended dialogue trees, grueling corpse retrieval runs, prohibitive death penalties, and metal clamps that send a shock to your nipples when you take damage.
At least that's what some of the buzz would have you think about this new massively multiplayer RPG from the guys who created Everquest, the original tough-guy MMO. But the buzz is a bit of a distortion of developer Sigil's approach. Their idea isn't to be prohibitively difficult so much as it is to raise the stakes.
Sigil founders Brad McQuaid and Jeff Butler repeatedly hit a few talking points during the course of a day-long demo. One of the main themes is to be challenging without being tedious. They talk about returning a sense of accomplishment to an MMO. They both use the phrase "give the player more head room", which is obviously the language of guys who've gotten their World of Warcraft characters to level 60 and asked, "Now what?"
But first to clear up a few misconceptions: There aren't any nipple clamps. The "death penalty" is a standard experience point loss. You can offset that loss and get back your equipment if you recover your corpse. Your party can help you by actually dragging your corpse away from danger. If your party is wiped out, you all respawn at the nearest outpost (one of the main advantages of having player housing on the front lines).
The game is built to encourage characters to keep multiple sets of equipment, so you shouldn't have to run the corpse recovery gauntlet in your birthday suit. Restoring that stinging feeling to death is an example of how Vanguard hopes to raise the stakes -- not as a mechanism for punishment, but as a means of making victory more than just a foregone conclusion if you plug away at something.
Group harvesting isn't mandatory in the sense that everyone will have to do it, but it will be used as a way to "control 3D space", as Butler puts it. For instance, there's a cave-in at one end of a dwarven city. It opens the way to mines beneath the city where there are unique quests. But getting through the cave-in will require a certain amount of mining skill, not to mention specially crafted tools. And even if you do get through here, you'll have to develop your relationship with a powerful but secretive dwarven family to unlock the associated quest.
This is an example of how some of Vanguard's content is locked behind separate layers of gameplay. If you want to access that content, you'll need to engage in harvesting, crafting, diplomacy, and combat.
The concept of diplomacy in Vanguard isn't new, since you've seen this sort of thing in plenty of single-player RPGs. But it is new for an MMO. Just as crafting is a separate part of a character's development, so is diplomacy. Every character will have a diplomatic class and rank, which is used any time you interact with an NPC. You can engage in a sort of conversation combat, where you play whatever "attacks" your class and rank allow. Your persuasion is pitted against your subject's tolerance. Whoever endures wins.
This will not only add gameplay to city areas, but it will also allow for a sort of social model and networking advantages. "Can you imagine if you're a blacksmith what being the friend of the Dwarven King will do for you? Plus, there are a lot of opportunities for humor for the guys downstairs," Butler says, referring to the people working on content in their first-floor offices. "Especially for races like, you know, the halflings. Halfings are funny."
The combat in Vanguard is arguably where the game most deserves a "hardcore" tag. For example, there are rules for wound locations. Head wounds can slow mana regeneration, leg wounds will reduce movement speed, a serious chest wound can cause hit point drain, right arm damage can be an offensive debuff, and left arm damage can be a defense debuff. How's that for hardcore? But it's not just detail for detail's sake. The central idea is that during combat, you should be regularly presented with interesting and interactive decisions instead of biding your time while your most powerful spell refreshes.
The screen looks like a typical MMO interface, crammed as it is with information. A display along the left side shows your party members' status and what they're doing. On the right is the same display for enemies. Next to every entity's display is a little rosetta showing its position relative to you. There are indicators for drawing aggro, for threat level, for queued spells, for whether you can counter something, and so on. At first, there's a sense of information overload, but as McQuaid explains everything, the reaction is more like, "Ahh, that's just the sort of thing I'd want to know while I'm playing." And, of course, it's as flexible as you'd expect. You can turn displays on or off and move them wherever you want.
"There are lots of visual cues," McQuaid notes. "This kind of tactical awareness in combat is something we've taken to the next step." He compares the system to tactical miniatures combat. (It's worth noting that McQuaid's office is crammed with two-inch tall figurines, most of them HeroClix. They're covering nearly every horizontal surface save the floor, as if the room had just been hit with a snow of miniatures.)
There's a system of counters, chains, and cooperative attacks that are built into the interface. This is where you can really get a sense for how the combat is distinct. There are four tiny windows along the bottom of the screen, designated for chains, counters, rescues, and sympathies. Whenever you have the opportunity to use one of your abilities in the appropriate situation, its icon appears in the related window. To use it, you simply click it or hit the corresponding hotkey.
For instance, let's suppose you have a chain of complementary attacks that runs like so: Starting Attack, Attack Two, Attack Three, and Finishing Move. During a battle, you'll use Starting Attack by clicking on it in your taskbar. Assuming it succeeds, Attack Two will pop up in the chain window with a little timer bar to designate how long you have to take advantage of the opportunity. You simply click the chain window or its hotkey before the timer expires to continue on to Attack Two. If it succeeds, Attack Three will pop up in the chain window. And if it succeeds, Finishing Move comes up. All without having to use four slots on your task bar.
This is handy enough, but the real point is that there are three other windows presenting you with similar opportunities. One of these is the counter window, which displays a counter whenever an enemy is using an ability you can interrupt. So if you're a warrior in the middle of your chain of attacks, you might be presented with the choice of continuing or instead countering an incoming fireball spell with a Kick (the basic melee counter). Countering enemies involves being perceptive enough to know what they're doing. Whenever an enemy starts an ability, your character makes an automatic check against his perception skill. If you succeed, you'll be presented with the option to counter.
The other two icon windows along the bottom are used for rescues and sympathies. Rescues are opportunities to heal other characters or maybe intercept attacks. In addition to having an offensive target, you can also designate a defensive target, which specifies who will benefit from your rescues. So in the case of our hypothetical warrior working on his chain and faced with the dilemma of countering an incoming fireball, you can throw in that he might sometimes have to protect the party's sorcerer from any melee attacks.
Finally, there are sympathies, which are class specific interactions similar to Everquest II's "heroic opportunities." For example, a sorcerer casts Lens of Power. When it's finished, if the psionicist in the party has Mind Blast, a spell boosted by Lens of Power, its icon will pop up in the psionicist's sympathy window. Does he cast it? Or does he try to finish some chain he's working on? Or does he buff his defensive target? These windows are Vanguard's way of telling you what your options are and making them available without you having to cram a set of task bars to capacity.
McQuaid compares the combat to Magic the Gathering. "In Magic, it's not just about the cards you have. You have to deal with what your opponent is doing. So our mandate is that you need to pay attention to what's happening in front of you. And the idea is that many different decisions then pop up."
Visually, Vanguard is very clearly a next-generation MMO. To illustrate this, one of the artists is showing us a lush drawing of the human capital city. It's a sort of fortress with a tall keep in the middle, built on picturesque seaside cliffs. Think Masada meets the Tower of London meets Dover. The picture is among the work done on Vanguard by the late Keith Parkinson, a renowned fantasy artist whose drawings and paintings line Sigil's hallways ("If there were to be a museum to Keith's work," says McQuaid, "this would be it.").
Butler says they showed the picture to Microsoft, who thought it was concept art to indicate the direction they wanted to take. "We said, 'No, no, this is actually what we're going to do.'" And it's pretty much what they did.
The architecture, the scale, the way it's built into the rocks, the palette, and even the lighting are all demonstrated in the game's 3D engine. On three side-by-side monitors, one of Sigil's artists compares the original picture, a zoomed out overhead view, and the perspective from an avatar running around the streets. It all matches up in a careful and meticulous translation from Parkinson's artwork to Vanguard's engine. Of course, this is all easy enough to do when you're just running a demonstration, but Butler says they've had it running while it's stocked with a thousand characters.
The viewing distance right now is about 6 kilometers. The better your system, the farther out Vanguard can render the world. "It's kind of the everything engine," McQuaid observes while the camera is zooming around, going from up in the sky to looking at the items on a dinner table, "Things look good up close and far away."
The world of Vanguard is built from a heavily modified version of the Unreal 2.5 engine. If you can see it, it's there, we're told. There are no facades or skyboxes. McQuaid mentions "integrated ground, air, and water pathing", which means that you're not going to get away from that drake you see overhead by simply putting a river between you and it.
McQuaid rides a dragon into the sky to show off the volumetric clouds. He has a programmer show us the weather systems they've built that will sweep across the world. Clouds build up and darken as a storm rolls in. The idea is that this will even have an effect on gameplay. A druid, for instance, might have spells that only work when it's raining. Imagine what this might then do for weather prediction spells, or even cooperative spells that can summon rain. Like so many things in Vanguard, there's a cascading set of interrelated systems being carefully pieced together.
Is it hardcore? Perhaps. Detailed? Certainly. Ambitious? Absolutely. McQuaid and Butler say their target market is anyone who's ever played an MMO and wondered whether there's something more out there. With Vanguard, they intend to provide it.
I'm not posting numbers. Please read and make your own opinion.
Lots of reading!
TrusteReviews.com
Welcome, if you will, to the third-age of MMORPGs. Let’s say the first began with Ultima Online, EverQuest, Asheron’s Call and Dark Age of Camelot – games that had a deep appeal for a particular audience, but could never quite manage to attract a mainstream following. Then came the second age. City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, Eve and Guild Wars started to knock out the elements of the genre that put off the majority of gamers, and perfectly suited those who had just taken up broadband and were looking for something to do with it. Well, now we’re ready for a third age; a range of games that, essentially, take the post-WoW MMORPG as a starting point and run from there.
Make no mistake. WoW is very much the elephant in the room where these games are concerned. All the players in the market – new and old – know that they need to either compete with Blizzard’s monster or attract a different audience. While some games are doing the former, using big-name licenses to pull in mainstream punters (Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar and Age of Conan come immediately to mind), Vanguard seems to be positioning itself slightly differently. Its geneology – developer Sigil was co-founded by Brad McQuaid and Jeff Butler, both instrumental in the development of EverQuest – might give you the idea that Vanguard isn’t exactly targeting the first-timer. In fact, it seems designed to provide a bigger, more complex, more grown-up alternative to WoW. Think more choice, more depth and fewer long-term limits.
‘Bigger’ and ‘more’ are very much the themes here. The world itself – Telon – consists of three huge, completely explorable continents, modelled after European, Asian and Middle Eastern settings. You also get a huge range of character races and classes and some enormous skill trees to start off with, plus such lofty long-term goals as flying mounts to ride on and virtual property you can build and decorate. There are even areas that you’ll only be able to access by air or boat. ‘Forget the other MMORPGs’, Vanguard seems to be saying ‘I want to be your one and only, not just now, but for the rest of your life.’
To this end, you get one of the most flexible character setups in the business. Sigil has made a lot of the 19 different playable races and 15 classes, and they’ve been right to. As well as the usual variations on Elves, dwarves and Halflings, there are several different races of men (in civilized and barbarian varieties). On top of these, the game throws in furry fox-like critters and cat-people in the Asian continent of Kojan, a race of scary-looking wolfmen, plus orcs, goblins and half-giants. The professions are sensibly split into defensive and offensive fighters and defensive and offensive spellscasters. However, as well as the usual tanks (the Warrior, the Paladin), ranged weapon and stealth types (Ranger, Rogue), healers (Cleric and Shaman) and heavy weapons dudes (the Necromancer, Sorcerer and Druid) there are some well thought out hybrids. The Dread Night, for example, is basically a tank with fearsome magic powers, while the Blood Mage is a healer with a nice side-line in offensive spells.
As usual, not all professions are open to all races, but all in all, there’s such a massive choice here that if you can’t create two or three characters you’d like to play, there must be something wrong with your imagination. Producing all these variants must have required a huge commitment on Sigil’s part, and I suspect that balancing them must be a nightmare. Only time will tell how well they manage it.
Like most MMORPGs, Vanguard is primarily combat-driven, but real effort has also gone into making sure that it’s not all dull right-click then sit-back stuff. Like Guild Wars or City of Heroes, you get a nice, responsive system of attacks and defences where the combos almost chain themselves together, and Vanguard also throws in a good system of reactive attacks and counters that only become available when specific conditions are met. More impressively, the game shows a real commitment to non-combat gameplay. I don’t really go in for crafting myself, but you can see how much thought has gone into virtual manufacture and shopkeeping.
Diplomacy, meanwhile, is something new entirely. Modelled on a trading-card game, the system has you playing debate-themed cards in order to drive a gauge up and down between you and your ‘opponent’. Things are complicated by the fact that each card played allots you and your opponent certain colour-coded points, and you both need these in order to play specific cards. It’s relatively complex at first, but there are good tutorials and it’s certainly not impossible to get your head around. What’s more Vanguard really runs with the idea, throwing in a whole tree of diplomacy quests that offer an alternative means of advancement.Perhaps the biggest draw of Vanguard, however, is the world itself. Powered by a heavily modified Unreal 2 engine, this is a feast of gorgeous textures, lighting and reflection effects, where – provided your system has a high-end GPU and a lot of RAM, you can expect enormous draw distances, truly panoramic landscapes and some great atmospheric effects (even if the rain is over-used in some locations). This is a game where even the trees look amazing. There are glitches here and there, and the odd clumsy bit of modelling, but overall this is as close to Oblivion as MMOs currently get. A lot of attention has clearly gone into landscape, architecture and creature design, and – as in WoW – it’s tempting just to explore and see everything the three continents have to offer.
However, while the world looks amazing, and the artistic style is frequently striking, there are several things that pull you out of the fiction. The first disappointment is how static the fauna is. Non-hostile creatures stand around waiting to be hunted down and battered into submission, while even hostiles don’t always react even when near-neighbours are attacked. Of course, some of this is to maintain a reasonable difficulty level – you don’t want the mobs ganging up at the opening of the game – but you can’t help feeling that WoW handles its menageries better. There are also a lot of areas in which everyone just seems to be standing around, waiting for the player to interact. This has always been the case with MMOs, and may always be so, but there are times when Vanguard’s illusion of its living breathing world simply isn’t as compelling as WoW’s, despite the clearly more advanced state of the visuals.
The most serious issue, however, is the underlying game style. Vanguard wants to provide a world of epic, group-based adventure, so you can’t expect the instant travel options and AI henchmen of a casual-friendly game like Guild Wars, but even given this there are long periods where Sigil’s baby feels like a good old-fashioned grind. For a game that prides itself on non-combat routes to advancement, there’s still a lot of emphasis on the classic ‘bash x Grey Wolves then return to me’ quest, to the extent that some quest-givers even give you a shopping list of monsters to be slaughtered. WoW and Guild Wars both do it to some extent, but both are usually better at hiding it. It’s a shame, because there are occasions when Vanguard does a fantastic job with its quests, linking several together as part of one mini-crusade against a particular villain, or pitching you as a hero who can halt a dark conspiracy.
At these points, the game really takes off, but there are huge periods where it doesn’t and it all seems like hard work. Dying certainly doesn’t help. Up to level seven you simply reincarnate at the nearest base – a nice sop to keep us noobs from throwing in the towel – but after that you’re faced with a choice between paying heavy penalties or having to return to your place of death and loot the grave to get your kit back. In WoW, you could do so as a spirit and only had to get near the mark, making recovering your possessions a hassle but not a particularly perilous one. In Vanguard, however, you have to travel in your vulnerable, physical form without armour and with only basic weaponry, to pretty much the exact point where you died. This means you can actually die several times on the way to get your stuff back – not what I’d call entertaining.
Vanguard also gets hard on solo players fairly early. Again, this fits in with the classic ethos, but it means the game isn’t as flexible as WoW or Guild Wars. We don’t always have our buddies on tap to play with, and it’s not always easy to find a pick-up group to play with, particularly at times – and there are many – when the servers aren’t so full.
The main reason to persist is potential. While the early game can be a bit of a grind, there is a real feeling that, should you find a good group and put a lot of time in, there’s a fantastic world to explore here. Telon has an almost dizzying sense of scale, and even in the early stages you can see epic narratives building up. All the same, do you really want to grind today so you can have jam tomorrow, when other games give you jam right from the start?
Perhaps the real key to understanding Vanguard is that even though it looks third-generation, it’s driven by an old-school mentality and how you respond will depend on how much you can share it. Like any good MMORPG – and this is a good MMORPG – it’s addictive, huge and habit-forming. It’s also well-designed and thoroughly gorgeous to look at. Yet it demands the sort of commitment that means it will never pull in the casual crowd that took to WoW and Guild Wars in such numbers. Provided player numbers stay up or even grow, Vanguard will give back everything that you put in. The question is, do you really have the time and energy to give it in the first place?
Verdict
The first of the third-age MMORPGs looks fantastic, but feels a bit of a throwback to the first. A great step-up from WoW if you want more complexity and choice, but the more casual player is still better served by WoW or Guild Wars.
GameSpot.com
Experienced role players will enjoy the engaging combat and fascinating diplomatic gameplay, in spite of Vanguard's litany of bugs and singular focus on group adventuring.
The Good: Lively combat makes for fun group questing; diplomacy gameplay is an enjoyable way to involve players in npc dialogue; the complex crafting is interesting and rewarding.
The Bad: Bugs, bugs, and more bugs; forced grouping will leave solo players cold; stiff death penalty and lack of instanced dungeons are as frustrating now as they were in everquest's early days.
Since the release of Blizzard's monumentally popular World of Warcraft and its expansion, it's been impossible for new massively multiplayer online role-playing games to avoid the inevitable comparisons. That's probably for the best in the case of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, for while the aforementioned games have some superficial similarities to this one, their core designs are far different. Vanguard, for better or for worse, hearkens back to the days of EverQuest, when in-game death was more than just a slight annoyance and groups camped for bosses that rarely spawned. But by doing its own thing, Azeroth be damned, Vanguard sets itself apart, thanks to complex crafting and a wholly unique take on non-player character communication. It's also rough around the edges, exhibiting all the bugs and glitches of a game not quite ready for release. Yet while Vanguard is not outwardly friendly to genre newcomers, it's got enough rewarding gameplay to please experienced adventurers willing to overlook its technical hitches.
In Vanguard, home is the world of Telon, which features three main continents, 19 races, and 15 classes. While many of the choices seem fascinating, most of them boil down to archetypes and group roles familiar to anyone who's played an MMORPG before. There are a good number of ways to modify your avatar's physical appearance, so you could easily spend quite some time deciding on the look and purpose of your character. Once in the game, a system of pop-up messages guides you through the beginning steps, and you're off to explore, quest, and level. The starting quests are genre standards familiar to anyone who's played an MMORPG before, but once you've gained a few levels, you'll find just how daunting Telon can get.
The first and obvious challenge once you are around level seven is that, like it or not, Vanguard isn't for the solo player. That isn't to say it's devoid of content for the lone adventurer, but consistent soloing is a good way to get quickly frustrated. Most quests are obviously designed for groups, even if they're not necessarily identified as such in your quest log, and soloing what should seem like a simple mission can result in quick death if you aren't careful. Even with a full group, some areas and dungeons can be a time-consuming challenge, particularly because Vanguard doesn't feature any instanced quests. As a result, you might need to wait a while before the boss you need to vanquish reappears after the last group's battle. Multipart group quests may take three or four hours to get through, and even with a good party, a simple mistake can cost you your character's life.
That cost can be pretty high, since resurrection entails experience loss and a trip back to your corpse, assuming you want to regain some of that XP. You may summon your tombstone at an altar, but at higher levels, the amount of time you need to put into regaining all the lost XP is intimidating. In any MMO, returning to your corpse in a monster-infested dungeon may be next to impossible, and the additional loss of experience often makes the penalty even more frustrating in Vanguard. There's no experience loss by falling to the sword of another player on the free-for-all player-versus-player server, which eliminates the need to retrieve your corpse but means your killer can loot up to 15 percent of the coin you're carrying. Conversely, a second PVP server groups races into two separate teams. Along with the usual duels common to the genre, that's the only PVP content Vanguard offers on US servers.
But if exploring Telon is riskier business than we're used to seeing in MMOs over the last few years, the combat itself is satisfying and fun. Much of this is related to the reaction system, which grants you multiple spells and abilities that can be triggered only if certain criteria are met. For example, a successful parry may open up a counterattack not normally available. Because those attacks can be powerful, managing your skills and available energy adds some welcome strategy to your choice of spells at any given time. Chain attacks and bard songs, among other class abilities, make battles feel dynamic, especially considering your avatar doesn't need to stand still to perform most skills.
Vanguard's most fascinating feature is diplomacy, which lets you earn favor with various factions, area-wide buffs, and more by engaging NPCs in conversation. Parleying is a simplified strategy card game in which you play five cards that represent different types of statements, such as flattery and inspiration. A game board with an influence marker keeps track of how you are doing, and as long as you keep the marker on your side for the specified number of turns, you win the parley. As your skills improve, you earn new cards--and even gain the use of temporary cards when visiting certain areas. Parleying itself is pretty simple, although as you gain skill, winning a high-level conversation gets to be quite a challenge.
Even with three distinct continents, Telon doesn't feel very unique compared with any other fantasy world, nor do your adventuring quests make you feel all that involved with the scattershot lore. However, the addition of diplomacy not only rescues the splintered backstory, but makes it feel more personal than it otherwise would, because each statement hinges on your performance within the parley. Keeping the marker on your side of the board is key not just to winning the conversation, but to uncovering the next bit of information. By giving you an active role in your exchange with the NPC, Vanguard makes you look forward to what the NPC has to say. And because the dialogue is written well, diplomacy never feels like pointless busywork in a quest to raise your standing in one faction or another.
There's also plenty of crafting and harvesting to do, and making a finalized and useful product is a complex and lengthy task compared with crafting in other MMOs. Creating a single item requires a recipe, multiple tools and components, and a particular workbench. When you begin the session, you have a number of action points to spend and multiple steps to work through, and each step spends points while contributing to either the progress or the quality of your product. Additionally, crafting complications that need additional components or tools can crop up. For example, if your character is injured while working, he may need to mend his wounds, which requires bandages and uses up skill points. You can also earn coin and skills by doing work orders, which are crafting missions that have you creating and returning various goods. It's an involved process to be sure, but producing a high-quality product is appropriately rewarding.
Vanguard's most unfriendly characteristic is its instability. To its credit, it launched without a hitch, and server disconnects are relatively uncommon. Unfortunately, a number of other bugs infest the game. Respawning at an altar or teleporting to another continent may result in your character appearing inside the world geometry, underwater, or in midair. Lost quest items, random appearance changes to avatars, and other frustrating issues have popped up frequently in the weeks since release. Even turning on antialiasing functions on your graphics card can cause your screen to go black, flicker, or hide the character names over avatars. Lag spikes will hold up combat for several seconds, or even cause an action in progress to stop while still costing you the time or energy the skill requires.
Many of the visual bugs result from Vanguard's lack of support for full-screen antialiasing. Surprisingly, though, this missing feature doesn't have much of an impact on the beauty of the visuals. Many of Telon's vistas are stunning, from both an artistic and technological standpoint. The lush foliage and colorful Asian architecture of Kojan is one notable example, but exploration on all three continents reveals plenty of dramatic landmarks. The splendor doesn't translate evenly, though. The native, barren environments of Qalia are inconsistent, and many of the dungeons and enemies are graphically uninspired. But as pretty as most of it is, the game engine has difficulty keeping up. A top-notch system is required to see Telon in all its glory. Even on a high-performance PC, Vanguard is a system hog, requiring a lot of muscle and some adjustments to the graphics settings to run at a stable frame rate.
The soundtrack is attractive and often evocative. Musical tracks like the vocal elven swooning in the city of Ca'ial Brael and the Arabic strings of Khal reflect the local environment perfectly. The swooping harp glissandos and angry cello grumbles of diplomatic exchanges are also noteworthy. The din of combat and ambient noises are what you would expect, although some enemies are eerily silent when attacked. Just don't expect the pleasant NPC chatter from EverQuest 2, or witty WOW-ish quips; NPCs in Vanguard mutter a small number of short phrases, and most of them are delivered without a hint of enthusiasm.
Features like player housing and boats for travel extend Vanguard's shelf life for players approaching the top level of 50, and even with plenty of room for future questing content, there's plenty to see and do. But Vanguard is undoubtedly not for everyone. Multiple bugs, forced grouping, and a vocal player community sensitive to criticism currently keep players looking for an easygoing adventuring experience at arm's length. But Vanguard gets a lot right, and the engaging combat and nifty diplomacy are more than enough reason for genre enthusiasts to give it a shot.
YahooGame.com
The word is out about Vanguard: it's the hardcore massively multiplayer game that's not for the sissies who'd rather kick back and play World of Warcraft. This is the tough-guy MMO with complicated tactical combat, mandatory group harvesting, extended dialogue trees, grueling corpse retrieval runs, prohibitive death penalties, and metal clamps that send a shock to your nipples when you take damage.
At least that's what some of the buzz would have you think about this new massively multiplayer RPG from the guys who created Everquest, the original tough-guy MMO. But the buzz is a bit of a distortion of developer Sigil's approach. Their idea isn't to be prohibitively difficult so much as it is to raise the stakes.
Sigil founders Brad McQuaid and Jeff Butler repeatedly hit a few talking points during the course of a day-long demo. One of the main themes is to be challenging without being tedious. They talk about returning a sense of accomplishment to an MMO. They both use the phrase "give the player more head room", which is obviously the language of guys who've gotten their World of Warcraft characters to level 60 and asked, "Now what?"
But first to clear up a few misconceptions: There aren't any nipple clamps. The "death penalty" is a standard experience point loss. You can offset that loss and get back your equipment if you recover your corpse. Your party can help you by actually dragging your corpse away from danger. If your party is wiped out, you all respawn at the nearest outpost (one of the main advantages of having player housing on the front lines).
The game is built to encourage characters to keep multiple sets of equipment, so you shouldn't have to run the corpse recovery gauntlet in your birthday suit. Restoring that stinging feeling to death is an example of how Vanguard hopes to raise the stakes -- not as a mechanism for punishment, but as a means of making victory more than just a foregone conclusion if you plug away at something.
Group harvesting isn't mandatory in the sense that everyone will have to do it, but it will be used as a way to "control 3D space", as Butler puts it. For instance, there's a cave-in at one end of a dwarven city. It opens the way to mines beneath the city where there are unique quests. But getting through the cave-in will require a certain amount of mining skill, not to mention specially crafted tools. And even if you do get through here, you'll have to develop your relationship with a powerful but secretive dwarven family to unlock the associated quest.
This is an example of how some of Vanguard's content is locked behind separate layers of gameplay. If you want to access that content, you'll need to engage in harvesting, crafting, diplomacy, and combat.
The concept of diplomacy in Vanguard isn't new, since you've seen this sort of thing in plenty of single-player RPGs. But it is new for an MMO. Just as crafting is a separate part of a character's development, so is diplomacy. Every character will have a diplomatic class and rank, which is used any time you interact with an NPC. You can engage in a sort of conversation combat, where you play whatever "attacks" your class and rank allow. Your persuasion is pitted against your subject's tolerance. Whoever endures wins.
This will not only add gameplay to city areas, but it will also allow for a sort of social model and networking advantages. "Can you imagine if you're a blacksmith what being the friend of the Dwarven King will do for you? Plus, there are a lot of opportunities for humor for the guys downstairs," Butler says, referring to the people working on content in their first-floor offices. "Especially for races like, you know, the halflings. Halfings are funny."
The combat in Vanguard is arguably where the game most deserves a "hardcore" tag. For example, there are rules for wound locations. Head wounds can slow mana regeneration, leg wounds will reduce movement speed, a serious chest wound can cause hit point drain, right arm damage can be an offensive debuff, and left arm damage can be a defense debuff. How's that for hardcore? But it's not just detail for detail's sake. The central idea is that during combat, you should be regularly presented with interesting and interactive decisions instead of biding your time while your most powerful spell refreshes.
The screen looks like a typical MMO interface, crammed as it is with information. A display along the left side shows your party members' status and what they're doing. On the right is the same display for enemies. Next to every entity's display is a little rosetta showing its position relative to you. There are indicators for drawing aggro, for threat level, for queued spells, for whether you can counter something, and so on. At first, there's a sense of information overload, but as McQuaid explains everything, the reaction is more like, "Ahh, that's just the sort of thing I'd want to know while I'm playing." And, of course, it's as flexible as you'd expect. You can turn displays on or off and move them wherever you want.
"There are lots of visual cues," McQuaid notes. "This kind of tactical awareness in combat is something we've taken to the next step." He compares the system to tactical miniatures combat. (It's worth noting that McQuaid's office is crammed with two-inch tall figurines, most of them HeroClix. They're covering nearly every horizontal surface save the floor, as if the room had just been hit with a snow of miniatures.)
There's a system of counters, chains, and cooperative attacks that are built into the interface. This is where you can really get a sense for how the combat is distinct. There are four tiny windows along the bottom of the screen, designated for chains, counters, rescues, and sympathies. Whenever you have the opportunity to use one of your abilities in the appropriate situation, its icon appears in the related window. To use it, you simply click it or hit the corresponding hotkey.
For instance, let's suppose you have a chain of complementary attacks that runs like so: Starting Attack, Attack Two, Attack Three, and Finishing Move. During a battle, you'll use Starting Attack by clicking on it in your taskbar. Assuming it succeeds, Attack Two will pop up in the chain window with a little timer bar to designate how long you have to take advantage of the opportunity. You simply click the chain window or its hotkey before the timer expires to continue on to Attack Two. If it succeeds, Attack Three will pop up in the chain window. And if it succeeds, Finishing Move comes up. All without having to use four slots on your task bar.
This is handy enough, but the real point is that there are three other windows presenting you with similar opportunities. One of these is the counter window, which displays a counter whenever an enemy is using an ability you can interrupt. So if you're a warrior in the middle of your chain of attacks, you might be presented with the choice of continuing or instead countering an incoming fireball spell with a Kick (the basic melee counter). Countering enemies involves being perceptive enough to know what they're doing. Whenever an enemy starts an ability, your character makes an automatic check against his perception skill. If you succeed, you'll be presented with the option to counter.
The other two icon windows along the bottom are used for rescues and sympathies. Rescues are opportunities to heal other characters or maybe intercept attacks. In addition to having an offensive target, you can also designate a defensive target, which specifies who will benefit from your rescues. So in the case of our hypothetical warrior working on his chain and faced with the dilemma of countering an incoming fireball, you can throw in that he might sometimes have to protect the party's sorcerer from any melee attacks.
Finally, there are sympathies, which are class specific interactions similar to Everquest II's "heroic opportunities." For example, a sorcerer casts Lens of Power. When it's finished, if the psionicist in the party has Mind Blast, a spell boosted by Lens of Power, its icon will pop up in the psionicist's sympathy window. Does he cast it? Or does he try to finish some chain he's working on? Or does he buff his defensive target? These windows are Vanguard's way of telling you what your options are and making them available without you having to cram a set of task bars to capacity.
McQuaid compares the combat to Magic the Gathering. "In Magic, it's not just about the cards you have. You have to deal with what your opponent is doing. So our mandate is that you need to pay attention to what's happening in front of you. And the idea is that many different decisions then pop up."
Visually, Vanguard is very clearly a next-generation MMO. To illustrate this, one of the artists is showing us a lush drawing of the human capital city. It's a sort of fortress with a tall keep in the middle, built on picturesque seaside cliffs. Think Masada meets the Tower of London meets Dover. The picture is among the work done on Vanguard by the late Keith Parkinson, a renowned fantasy artist whose drawings and paintings line Sigil's hallways ("If there were to be a museum to Keith's work," says McQuaid, "this would be it.").
Butler says they showed the picture to Microsoft, who thought it was concept art to indicate the direction they wanted to take. "We said, 'No, no, this is actually what we're going to do.'" And it's pretty much what they did.
The architecture, the scale, the way it's built into the rocks, the palette, and even the lighting are all demonstrated in the game's 3D engine. On three side-by-side monitors, one of Sigil's artists compares the original picture, a zoomed out overhead view, and the perspective from an avatar running around the streets. It all matches up in a careful and meticulous translation from Parkinson's artwork to Vanguard's engine. Of course, this is all easy enough to do when you're just running a demonstration, but Butler says they've had it running while it's stocked with a thousand characters.
The viewing distance right now is about 6 kilometers. The better your system, the farther out Vanguard can render the world. "It's kind of the everything engine," McQuaid observes while the camera is zooming around, going from up in the sky to looking at the items on a dinner table, "Things look good up close and far away."
The world of Vanguard is built from a heavily modified version of the Unreal 2.5 engine. If you can see it, it's there, we're told. There are no facades or skyboxes. McQuaid mentions "integrated ground, air, and water pathing", which means that you're not going to get away from that drake you see overhead by simply putting a river between you and it.
McQuaid rides a dragon into the sky to show off the volumetric clouds. He has a programmer show us the weather systems they've built that will sweep across the world. Clouds build up and darken as a storm rolls in. The idea is that this will even have an effect on gameplay. A druid, for instance, might have spells that only work when it's raining. Imagine what this might then do for weather prediction spells, or even cooperative spells that can summon rain. Like so many things in Vanguard, there's a cascading set of interrelated systems being carefully pieced together.
Is it hardcore? Perhaps. Detailed? Certainly. Ambitious? Absolutely. McQuaid and Butler say their target market is anyone who's ever played an MMO and wondered whether there's something more out there. With Vanguard, they intend to provide it.
I'm not posting numbers. Please read and make your own opinion.
Lots of reading!
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"Jack-of-all-trades-Master-of-none"
