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EQ2 Release ~vs~ Vanguard Release
Zarthaine
Member Posts: 62
I know that SoE is a bad subject here, but I just feel the need to say this. I keep hearing how all games are buggy at release and how this one is so far advanced that we can't expect it to be as good as it was pitched. I keep reading over and over how the system demands when EQ2 was released made it the same as Vanguard in respect that systems had to catch up to the game.
That much said, here is my experience. I left EQ-1 after playing since almost Beta and was able to play quite well out of the box on EQ-2 in balanced mode most times without lag. The features seemed far richer and the innovations over EQ-1 were enough to really provide a satisfying experience to my friends and too myself of course. Mind you I was running off a EQ-1 Machine that was going on three years old.
Then I bought Vanguard after reading up on all it was going to be and missing EQ-1 to some extent. I installed it on a system that was less than 6 months old and able to run EQ-2 in High Quality mode with no lag having great expectations on how this new generation of game would perform.
The "WoW" (no pun intended) effect simply was not there. I started as a Dark Elf in a very boring city with very little interest and dull quests. By accident, I discovered that starting as another race in (cat one, can't spell the name) was far more rewarding and interesting. Oh well, part of all MMoG's is live and learn, only a few hours lost. The graphics I'm sure would be far superior to EQ-2 if I could run them in better than High Performance with most effects toned down. No real thrill in that. Then there was a loss of a character as well as a few rollbacks suffered and a few days when I could not even login without crashing, again, no real thrill in that.
All in all, I enjoy the game, but not to the extent that I can say I enjoyed EQ-2 when I switched over from EQ-1 for a change of pace. The thrill factor is overshadowed by the chill factor of "now wtf went wrong?" Meaningful travel? I experienced that today while walking past level 10 NPC's and into level 32 NPC's resulting in a 4 death CR. To be honest, I chalked up the loss of experience as being better than the usual rollback or death from the sky; honestly, that concerns me.
I guess that's another factor though. In EQ-2 when I died learning the game I chalked it up to it being new and me having to adapt. Here, I have countless deaths that really should not happen do to chunks, glitches and bugs and have to also factor in my own learning curve which starts to feel like "I'm gonna crash anyway, so why bother".
I guess it will get better in time, but I guess I'm also tired of reading posts how this release was just like any other companies release because I really don't think it was.
That much said, here is my experience. I left EQ-1 after playing since almost Beta and was able to play quite well out of the box on EQ-2 in balanced mode most times without lag. The features seemed far richer and the innovations over EQ-1 were enough to really provide a satisfying experience to my friends and too myself of course. Mind you I was running off a EQ-1 Machine that was going on three years old.
Then I bought Vanguard after reading up on all it was going to be and missing EQ-1 to some extent. I installed it on a system that was less than 6 months old and able to run EQ-2 in High Quality mode with no lag having great expectations on how this new generation of game would perform.
The "WoW" (no pun intended) effect simply was not there. I started as a Dark Elf in a very boring city with very little interest and dull quests. By accident, I discovered that starting as another race in (cat one, can't spell the name) was far more rewarding and interesting. Oh well, part of all MMoG's is live and learn, only a few hours lost. The graphics I'm sure would be far superior to EQ-2 if I could run them in better than High Performance with most effects toned down. No real thrill in that. Then there was a loss of a character as well as a few rollbacks suffered and a few days when I could not even login without crashing, again, no real thrill in that.
All in all, I enjoy the game, but not to the extent that I can say I enjoyed EQ-2 when I switched over from EQ-1 for a change of pace. The thrill factor is overshadowed by the chill factor of "now wtf went wrong?" Meaningful travel? I experienced that today while walking past level 10 NPC's and into level 32 NPC's resulting in a 4 death CR. To be honest, I chalked up the loss of experience as being better than the usual rollback or death from the sky; honestly, that concerns me.
I guess that's another factor though. In EQ-2 when I died learning the game I chalked it up to it being new and me having to adapt. Here, I have countless deaths that really should not happen do to chunks, glitches and bugs and have to also factor in my own learning curve which starts to feel like "I'm gonna crash anyway, so why bother".
I guess it will get better in time, but I guess I'm also tired of reading posts how this release was just like any other companies release because I really don't think it was.
Comments
Meanwhile EQ2 had less bugs but the gameplay was much weaker. There was minimal solo content; and most loot that would drop in dungeons was unusable due to it having a level limit higher than people fighting in the dungeon typically were. Not to mention, killing boss mobs in instances for no reward. Anyways I could go on about EQ2's lame gameplay but won't.
If memory serves me right, EQ2's servers were down WAY more than has happened with Vanguard. Server downages are very rare.
Bugs and all I think Vanguard is much more fun at release.
Here's what I remember from EQ2 launch. I was very excited about it, as I am now about Vanguard.
EQ2:
EQ2 was definitely more polished and ready to go on launch day and I believe all the intended game content was included. Definitely less bugs than VG at launch as well. However, I had the EXACT same system issues as I am having with Vanguard. That is, I bought a brand new top of the line Alienware to play EQ2 and I was astounded that I could not run things in the high quality settings. My FPS rates were low, even on balanced settings. In addition, I crashed almost EVERY SINGLE time I zoned during the first month of play. Finally, servers were down ALOT.
Vanguard:
Buggier than EQ2 was on release and is missing signficant chunks of content (boats, guild-houses, Tier IV and above diplomacy etc.). And for the first few weeks I crashed a lot due to the memory leak. However, with VG at 2 months now, I never crash anymore and I have not seen a single bug in the last week. I upgraded the same computer I bought for EQ2 (3-years old) with a Geforce 8800 GTX and no, I can't run VG with all settings on high and still get acceptable framerate. But comparitively speaking, it looks better than EQ2 does and I can run it at 30 fps in cities and 80 fps in the open with balanced setting and particular options cranked up; such as all the cool lighting features.
I logged into EQ2 one last time two weeks ago to compare graphics before I uninstalled it. In every category, Vanguard looks better in my opinion. And for old time sake, I cranked all the settings to max to see how it would perform on my Geforce 8800 GTX, and lo and behold, I got framerates in the low teens.
ONly my thoughts here ladies and gentlemen. For what it's worth...
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth
John Lennon
Ive played A LOT of MMOs (too much in my opinion) and out of all the launches I was involved in:
Out of all of those MMOs I was involved in release, the top best releases was:
The worse three was
People who have to create conspiracy and hate threads to further a cause lacks in intellectual comprehension of diversity.
I agree with the above poster who stated that EQ2 was much more polished than Vanguard.
In all honestly, upon release, EQ2 ran pretty similar to the way that Vanguard is running on it now. I ended up leaving EQ2 simply because I could not stomach having a really good machine and not being able to utilize it with the game. About 4 months ago, I tried EQ2 again. Lo and behold, they patched the game enough that I had a STARTLING increase in the way my system handled the game. Basically, I was able to jump up quite a bit, and the game looked and performed more in the way I expected it to. Still, I could not get over the multitude of instanced zones in EQ2, and I quickly lost interest.
It is my sincere hope that Vanguard will continued to be patched, and that many of the performance issues will be resolved. I HAVE played the game on a super-system which allows for good performance PLUS high-end graphics. While I still think Vanguard looked butt-ugly (I think Vanguard's presentation is laughably terrible) the game was much more fun to play.
http://aion.24-hrgaming.net
It seems to me a lot of people who complain about this sort of thing are being boiled in their own oil, so to speak. You had the option after seeing you had "made a wrong turn" of just summoning your corpse and going elsewhere. But instead you apparently (for no reason I can fathom) kept trying to get back to the same spot over and over again (this time without whatever equipment was on your corpses) and dying repeatedly.
I fail to see how you can fault the game for that. There are MANY flaws in Vanguard... not least of which is that their new "quest con system" is utterly broken (I have had grey con quests that I can't do with a full team, and yellow con ones that I can solo... which shouldn't be the case at all). But having to do corpse runs is NOT one of the problems. I have not once, ever, done a CR in this game. I just summon my grave and find a way around whatever killed me (in a case like you describe).
C
After almost five years in development the game should have been much more finished at this point. WTH were they doing all this time? I will agree that there was alot of hype that resulted in disappointment, but alot of this hype was done on the part of Sigil. What is so new, so third gen about this game?
Releasing the product as is, and passing the cost onto the players as a third investor to finish the title is not the best precedent to set. It would suck if it became an industry standard to release products in beta and have the players pay for full development. And yes, before someone says it, I know no game is finsihed at release...but this game gives "unfinished" a whole new meaning...
Although I disagree with many people's opinion's on how 'horrible' VGs release has been, I had invisioned better in both performance and just generic tools from a '3rd Gen' game. I had hoped with all the years of development and learning from other MMOs that some much better guild tools would be available upon release. While this is a small detail in the grand scheme of things this early in VGs life, it is also a very important one. Everything from guild banks(not mules, actual banks. Ala EQ2), access permissions, and other guild tools.
The most lacking thing to be honest is overall information about certain important points in the game. Vanguard has hundred's of 'factions' in game, how does increasing ones status in 'X faction' help me vice 'Y faction'? I'm not talking about the obvious getting off the KOS list if you're a hated race with another town, I'm talking about the mid-lvl factions such as New Targonor and other towns. What benefits does becoming a member of the New Targonor Trading Company have over the Imperial Trade Company and vice versa? My list can go on and on about the lack of information about some of the more important details that would greatly affect people's decisions on which direction to follow. My opinion is that Sigil at this point either doesn't know how their going to implement all these features or maybe they just haven't bothered to put in the time to develop it.
That been said, I do enjoy discovering hidden rewards, hidden quests and other various things but there's a fine line that they're walking here. A moderately intelligent person can deduce that they 'hidden items/quests' simply aren't there yet or possibly never will be. So that hard working crafter that is grinding faction up with a company may be completely wasting his time since that content will never be used or removed in time.
Just a few critiques.
I really don't think you can compare the two. MMO's have a lot more exposure and more of a following now. Also there's a lot more variety nowadays. Just like in football people say the 1972 dolphin's perfect season is one of the most coveted NFL records that every team that is off to a good start is compared to. Back then the season was shorter, there were less teams, no salary cap, etc etc. Times change, peoples views on games change, more people have computers now, the internet is more accessable and so on and so forth.
It seems to me a lot of people who complain about this sort of thing are being boiled in their own oil, so to speak. You had the option after seeing you had "made a wrong turn" of just summoning your corpse and going elsewhere. But instead you apparently (for no reason I can fathom) kept trying to get back to the same spot over and over again (this time without whatever equipment was on your corpses) and dying repeatedly.
I fail to see how you can fault the game for that. There are MANY flaws in Vanguard... not least of which is that their new "quest con system" is utterly broken (I have had grey con quests that I can't do with a full team, and yellow con ones that I can solo... which shouldn't be the case at all). But having to do corpse runs is NOT one of the problems. I have not once, ever, done a CR in this game. I just summon my grave and find a way around whatever killed me (in a case like you describe).
C I'm sorry if that statement was misunderstood.
I made a dumb mistake (thinking I could retrieve the corpse, then having two corpses making it more important at the time to retrieve both of them, and as you can see, I gave up at 4). I made a dumb mistake and in NO WAY blame the game. What I was trying to express is that I can handle stuff like that because it's under my control.
Now loosing characters, suffering rollbacks, dieing while chunking, all which happened to me is something I can't enjoy because no matter how well I play, I can't combat those effects.