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Vanguard: Saga of Incompletness...
Drachonis
Member Posts: 183
Goodness where shall I begin,
I really like Vanguard, but at the same time I am annoyed that it is in such an unfinishe state. I mean, lets take a little jaunt back into history shall we. Walk with me if you will, as we are swept back to fall a few years ago when two higley anticipitated mmorpgs were being released. I speak of course about the neblous release of Blizzards new and shiny mmo World of Warcraft. In the other corner was none other that $oE with a heavy hitting sequel to its amazingly popular Everquest game. Namely EverQuest Dos. Both games were release around the same time, and each game had its problems. WoW had server population and patching issues, but really was quite a playable game albeit a bit "Carebear" to some hardcore vets of UO,EQ etc... EQ II however was broken, buggy, and was in serious need of $oE's imfamous Content Updates and New Game Enhancements... The only problem is that some of us were trying to play this game. One can't serious overhaul mechanics on an unfinished without serious pissing off the player base. In essence I don't feel I should have to pay for Beta. And this is exactly what they did with EQ II in the beginning. The have fixed EQII don't get me wrong, but its a lot diffrent in respect to how it use to be in its unfinished state.
In any case, history does repeat itself. I want you to stop imagining now and come back to the present with me... well ok, the recent past to the release of Blizzards Burning Cursade expansion to World of Warcraft. Good solid expansion, great new areas and instances, but more of the same really. I must emphasize that this expansion was implement in a very polished and complete state, with hardley any problems. This gem sparkles, to bad its just Cubix Zirconium and not Diamonds... And how can we forget, the essential topic of this rant Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Yes released around the same time as TBC and essentially distributed and maintained server wise by $oE, we have a supposid real sequel to Everquest... The only problem is that this game is riddle with bugs and in need of a serious "overhaul" (reads as CU or NGE.) I do like this game a lot, don't get me wrong. I just wonder why they did it again. Here is a quote from Brad McQuaid himself "People ask me, 'are you launching a finished game?' and the answer is 'no, we're launching a game that is good enough to launch, but it's not finished.' And that's why I love these games: because they should never be finished."
Sweet I'm really glad I spent 50 bucks to get a game that was good enough to launch... to compete again with Blizzard, and to really release something very unfinished. This whole quote seems like an excuse to me. I feel like I need to roll up my pants legs cause the crap is getting deep. I'm not an idiot, and I hope others feel the same way about this uncompete game in its current state. I'm not shure if I will continue my subscription after the free month till the game is fixed a bit. Maby you all could shine some light onto the subject 
I had a few questions too? Namely, what is this supposid system of combining skill? I've read about it in numerious sources, but for the life of me have never seen any of this group dynamics go off in any way in the numerous groups i've been in. I suppose the second question is about the graphics. Are they really suppose to lag down high systems so much but in the end look utterly crappy sometimes? I mean wtf is wrong with the rocks? Where it the reflective surface pixel shading off the water so i can see my self or a spell reflected off the water. Are the graphic really bad code in serious need of an update?
Thanks for reading 
Comments
What I find really amazing about WoW is that it was Blizzard's very first MMORPG, every.
Yes, they had open Diablo2 servers and such. And I am sure they learned a lot about server farms, community, support and such.
But, for heavens sake, it was thier first time at bat. They not only hit it out of the Park, they put it into Orbit.
For V:SoH to be released in such a state, by the people that released it, is just shameful. Other than greed, and unwillingness to invest the proper time in the product, what excuse can they give?
Oh cmon now, this is a bit of an over statement. Sure Blizzard did alright with WoW, but I'd hardly say it was a homerun in terms of game design.
It goes without saying that WoW is successful, but just how much of it is deserved? WoW is just a dumbed down version of about 100 other MMO's on the market before it.
Now, I'm not here to say that WoW is a bad game, or that Vanguard is a good one, but your outlook on Blizzard's success just seems a bit starry eyed.
playing eq2 and two worlds
Oh cmon now, this is a bit of an over statement. Sure Blizzard did alright with WoW, but I'd hardly say it was a homerun in terms of game design.
It goes without saying that WoW is successful, but just how much of it is deserved? WoW is just a dumbed down version of about 100 other MMO's on the market before it.
Now, I'm not here to say that WoW is a bad game, or that Vanguard is a good one, but your outlook on Blizzard's success just seems a bit starry eyed.
Not really. Been playing now for 2+ years. Have tried all classes to 30. Have one at 60, one at 56. Have not even delved deaply into the Raid game, or the PvP servers. There is a reason it has 8+ million paying subscribers. It is flat out fun at all levels. I really enjoyed EQ1 and DAoC. Played both of those for multiple years. But, WoW is really fine.
Will give you a small example of what I think is outstanding. I go to a small outpost, say Freewind Post. NPC's there patrol around. If they are staying in one place, they are still breathing, and shuffling around. They have conversations with each other. When a quest is turned in, it can trigger and Event that everyone there sees. There are 'Wanted Posters' tacked to the wall of the Inn that you can click on to get a quest. There are different NPCs there with quests and storylines. There is a Loremaster there with world histories. This small post feels Alive! And it is like this *everywhere* in WoW.
Oh well. After playing the really great MMORPGs, EQ1, DAoC, EVE, and such, I find V:SoH just a giant letdown and failure. Should not have been this way.
"Freedom is just another name for nothing left to lose" - Janis Joplin
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playing eq2 and two worlds
Oh cmon now, this is a bit of an over statement. Sure Blizzard did alright with WoW, but I'd hardly say it was a homerun in terms of game design.
It goes without saying that WoW is successful, but just how much of it is deserved? WoW is just a dumbed down version of about 100 other MMO's on the market before it.
Now, I'm not here to say that WoW is a bad game, or that Vanguard is a good one, but your outlook on Blizzard's success just seems a bit starry eyed.
Not really. Been playing now for 2+ years. Have tried all classes to 30. Have one at 60, one at 56. Have not even delved deaply into the Raid game, or the PvP servers. There is a reason it has 8+ million paying subscribers. It is flat out fun at all levels. I really enjoyed EQ1 and DAoC. Played both of those for multiple years. But, WoW is really fine.
Will give you a small example of what I think is outstanding. I go to a small outpost, say Freewind Post. NPC's there patrol around. If they are staying in one place, they are still breathing, and shuffling around. They have conversations with each other. When a quest is turned in, it can trigger and Event that everyone there sees. There are 'Wanted Posters' tacked to the wall of the Inn that you can click on to get a quest. There are different NPCs there with quests and storylines. There is a Loremaster there with world histories. This small post feels Alive! And it is like this *everywhere* in WoW.
Oh well. After playing the really great MMORPGs, EQ1, DAoC, EVE, and such, I find V:SoH just a giant letdown and failure. Should not have been this way.
All WoW is is an endless item farm. It's fun the first time through, but in the end you realize how shallow the game truly is. But, again, this is just my humble opinion, and I know 10000 people who think its the be all end all of video gaming.playing eq2 and two worlds
Please do not confuse two issues: The fact that WOW (as shallow at it may be) feels alive, while VG is feeling barren and sterile. It's like saying that apples may be red, but roses have thorns.
This is familiar ground to SoE - remember Star Wars Galaxies launched without vehicles, mounts, and welll ... star wars. It was what, a year before the Jump to Lightspeed expansion actually let you fly a starfighter? And that system was never finished (multiplayer ships and their little problem of being lame ducks in PvP and the mining ship you could not see to pilot and that was out-mined by a fighter).
I love the idea of a solid fantasy MMO with persistent player housing, none of this "magic door" buy a room rubbish from EQ. But there is another problem with Vanguard:
Stock.
As mind-boggling as it may seem, SoE seem to have serious issues around stock delivery in some regions. I pre-ordered a collectors edition of Vanguard Saga of Heroes in Janurary (yes I want the artbook whether I keep playing the game or not!), and it will not be in-store until at least 22 February 2007. I don't live in Europe, or the USA, but in the quaintly described "other". I can get shoes from Friedmans Shoes of Atlanta to my door within 2 weeks, but SoE apparently cannot get Janurary pre-ordered collectors edition to my local computer games shop wihin almost a month of release.
And what's better, the helpful people at SoE customer services advised me to just use the pre-order DvD code, which of course stopped working on what, 2 Feb? SoE's tradition of friendly, but technically wrong, customer support seems to be continuing - their customer people were not up to speed on this game for its launch, either. Not impressed SoE, not impressed at all.
From what I played of the pre-order, I really want to play this game. I'm deeply bored of WoW; I like the crafting system (for all its bugs), and in particular like the character customisation (even if a bug(setting?) made everyone look plastic and that bug that made the appearance change to a random character appearance). But SoE have failed to provide adequate pre-ordered stock to some retailers, which I find simply unbelievable, and the game really has been released too early. On the up side they are doing a lot of work to bring it up to speed, but it's sad that they did not just give it a month or two to get some more polish.
Flute.
I can't help but think of funding. You know, Blizzard funded themself and Sigil had to find it. Blizzard was a HUGE company before WoW became a hit and they had thier own money to throw at the game. It's also considerable less complex with a fraction of the depth of a game like VG. Far less coding, both in gameplay and in the world means they're not going to have quite as many problems.
And I really wish people would stop talking about server population as WoWs performance problems when it was released. Server population had nothing to do with the problems the game had at release. When a low population server has performance issues the population can't be blamed for it. WoW was no where near the perfect little MMO people imply it was on release. It had the same sort of bugs you see in VG, in fact the servers were way worse then VG's servers, and it was across the board for WoW; on both low and high pop servers.
Falling through the world, bugged NPC's, bugged quests, server stability, graphical glitches, item bugs etc etc. were all present when WoW was released. Most of the bugs that were found weren't even fixed, but instead work arounds were coded so the bugs wouldn't be detected until a solution to the problem could be found. These work arounds in a lot of instances caused more problems then they solved.
WoW was also an "incomplete" game as well. It took blizzard several months to open up most of the instances and fill in much of the high lvl zones. Even a lot of the video options weren't there for almost a year. And let us not forget, Blizzard spent two years completely redoing every class in the game. How polished was it really when every class had a complete overhaul of thier abilities and talent trees? Having to redo a large chunk of your combat mechanics and classes is the complete opposite of polished.
The biggest differnce I'm seeing between the two games is hardware demand. VG is a hog and because of that it's causing more performance problems on the hardware end then WoW could ever hope to have. Aside from that I'm seeing nothing new in the way of bugs in VG then I saw at the release of WoW or Lineage 2.
As far as polished releases go, City of Heroes has them all beat, and I think that more developers should look toward Cryptic and the job they did with thier FIRST GAME and use them as thier measuring stick when it comes to the of a release a piece of software.
Oh cmon now, this is a bit of an over statement. Sure Blizzard did alright with WoW, but I'd hardly say it was a homerun in terms of game design.
It goes without saying that WoW is successful, but just how much of it is deserved? WoW is just a dumbed down version of about 100 other MMO's on the market before it.
Now, I'm not here to say that WoW is a bad game, or that Vanguard is a good one, but your outlook on Blizzard's success just seems a bit starry eyed.
Hard to disagree with him when Blizzard can put their money where their mouth is. MMOs are businesses and businesses judge their success or failure in terms of profitability. In this sense, WoW is more than a homerun. It's the whole ball game and a bag of peanuts too. Everyone else is just playing stickball out in the street.
playing eq2 and two worlds
The point with Vanguard is it really did come out too early, even one month more would have made a huge difference to the all-important player first impressions. Just look a the patch notes on thier official site and you can see how hard they are working to get things right, but it really did have that good'dl'beta feel.
Flute.
Oh, and let us not forget the exploits.
WoW had and still has possibly the most exploits of any mmo I've ever played.
Oh, wait. Exploits are just bugs.
... Just grinding levels out..
Gee, that sounds like fun.
But unfortunately, that is exactly what I have seen so far in VG - 2 characters, and once you get past 10 or so it just turns into yet another boring grind. In fact worse than most games, even EQ. And much worse than EQ2 since you can barely solo with most classes past 15 (and those that can - expect to be nerfed soon...).
I keep hearing time after time that ALL games are released "unfinished". And yes, that is true. But VG is about the MOST unfinished game I have tried in over 8 years of playing mmo's.
But my biggest disappointment with this game so far?
It is just BORING. Spending hours running around, hours trying to get a group to finish kill-a-rat quest #134, hours grinding on mobs that give like 1% xp for every 10 you kill.. grinding boring tradeskills (that are only about half working)..
Nothing new here, nothing innovative (in fact for innovation, I think Eve Online and EQ2 are by far the top of the pack).
Make sure when you make a statement like that you say that it is "in your opinion". From that statement alone I can tell you haven't played many MMO's Vanguard is hardly the greatest in my opinion it lacks alot even though it tries it doesn't do any thing greatly. It will improve hopefully but thats just guess work it could just remain an average game, which at the moment it is. I'm also not bashing the game I am currently paying to play it as i've tried nearly every MMO that's on the list of released games on the left hand menu and this is just another to add to my list of games to try.
I have to say in terms of depth, freedom and player maintained economies EVE at the moment is by far one the best games out there, the only problem I have with the game is I hate just flying around in space and am more a ground game MMO player.
Water cooled Intel Corei7 920 D0 Stepping OC'd 4.3GHz - 6GB Corsair Dominator GT RAM 2000Mhz - ASUS RAGE II EXTREME X58 Mobo - 2x HD 5870 in Crossfire X, OC'd 0.9Ghz core 1.3Ghz RAM - Dell 2407WFP Flat Panel LCD 24" 1920x1200
"Freedom is just another name for nothing left to lose" - Janis Joplin
.jpg)
... Just grinding levels out..
Gee, that sounds like fun.
But unfortunately, that is exactly what I have seen so far in VG - 2 characters, and once you get past 10 or so it just turns into yet another boring grind. In fact worse than most games, even EQ. And much worse than EQ2 since you can barely solo with most classes past 15 (and those that can - expect to be nerfed soon...).
I keep hearing time after time that ALL games are released "unfinished". And yes, that is true. But VG is about the MOST unfinished game I have tried in over 8 years of playing mmo's.
But my biggest disappointment with this game so far?
It is just BORING. Spending hours running around, hours trying to get a group to finish kill-a-rat quest #134, hours grinding on mobs that give like 1% xp for every 10 you kill.. grinding boring tradeskills (that are only about half working)..
Nothing new here, nothing innovative (in fact for innovation, I think Eve Online and EQ2 are by far the top of the pack).
But I thought Eve was just a fancy chat room? I can't think of anything more boring then mining and killing dots with a box around it.
You are right though, Eve is I think the most innovative game on the market, but I think that Saga of Ryzom is right there with it; not EQ2.
Edit: Fignar, are you running vista? If not, how are you getting your moneys worth out of the extra 2gb of expensive as all hell ram you're using? And if you are, how cool is it operating satallites on that thing?
This is just a ridiculous play on words.
In my opinion, the question is asking "Is this game COMPLETE, in terms of functionality and playability?", and not "So, there's never going to be any expansion packs or new content patches ever?"
Brad answers "No, the game is still buggy and broken, but it will never run out of content additions", where he should have said something along the lines of "We released prematurely, and it shows. There's still a lot of bugs and problems, but not so many that people won't buy the game."
It's really mind-numbingly retarded. The interviewer should have been more specific with the question though, so as to not allow such a broad answer to an overly-general inquiry. Oh well.
Waiting for something fresh to arrive on the MMO scene...
Originally posted by TedDanson
Just a heads up before you get flamed to hell, you may want to spell check your posts before you hit "Post Message"...
/sigh
Spelling was really never one of my strong points, but hopefully it did not detract from the message. A bit pedantic perhaps, but it is how I feel. I must emphasize that this is just my opinion, but it is an educated one on the topic of games and mmorpgs.
Thank you everyone for you incite full comments, and I appreciate the community that is here, even if we all are just a bunch of jaded gaming addicts
As for Vanguard... I really love the game. I was playing with a guild group earlier this evening and having a blast. This game could have been delayed and polished, much like a lot of games. And I know that all mmorpg are bug ridden and a bit rough to play in the beginning... /sigh like I've never played a game on release b4. I just fell that with such heavy hitters as Brad McQuaid, Microsoft, and the dreaded $oE on Vanguards side, it could have been a bit more polished. But hey, I guess money talks until the proletariat actually eviscerate the Bourgeois pigs. Leaving in its path nearly releasable games where you pay for them to make they game the way it was intended to be (read as “paying for beta”. I don't really mind though on VGSoH. It has some bugs, it has some problems, but they don't really interfear with the core EQesque mechanics which I always have liked. The world is huge, and there are lots of things to see and explore albeit some of the textures cold have been a bit cleaner. The classes are unique and well balanced pve which makes for pandemonium over on the free-for-all server. All in all it is a good game worth playing. Vanguard is a great game, but either stay it out with some problems now and then, or wait till they get them fixed. $oE and Sigil have been doing a great job so far with patches, but there still are some obvious things that need work on.
I agree that D2 was a test run at MMO management but I really think WoW succeeded mostly for the simple fact that they implemented alot of features that players pleaded with Verant/SOE to put in Everquest. Everquest could have been much more successful but the devs were too arrogant to listen to common sense. If it wasn't for WoW we'd probably still be stuck with grindfests like VG.
Also, anybody who says WoW is easy has not played on a PVP server. The content is the same regardless of server type so they had to factor in the added challenge of PVP into the quests and relative strength of the monsters you fight. Most EQ/vanboy types are too casual to even try PVP. Their idea of PVP is training each other in Everquest.
My youtube MMO gaming channel
Oh cmon now, this is a bit of an over statement. Sure Blizzard did alright with WoW, but I'd hardly say it was a homerun in terms of game design.
It goes without saying that WoW is successful, but just how much of it is deserved? WoW is just a dumbed down version of about 100 other MMO's on the market before it.
Now, I'm not here to say that WoW is a bad game, or that Vanguard is a good one, but your outlook on Blizzard's success just seems a bit starry eyed.
Not really. Been playing now for 2+ years. Have tried all classes to 30. Have one at 60, one at 56. Have not even delved deaply into the Raid game, or the PvP servers. There is a reason it has 8+ million paying subscribers. It is flat out fun at all levels. I really enjoyed EQ1 and DAoC. Played both of those for multiple years. But, WoW is really fine.
Will give you a small example of what I think is outstanding. I go to a small outpost, say Freewind Post. NPC's there patrol around. If they are staying in one place, they are still breathing, and shuffling around. They have conversations with each other. When a quest is turned in, it can trigger and Event that everyone there sees. There are 'Wanted Posters' tacked to the wall of the Inn that you can click on to get a quest. There are different NPCs there with quests and storylines. There is a Loremaster there with world histories. This small post feels Alive! And it is like this *everywhere* in WoW.
Oh well. After playing the really great MMORPGs, EQ1, DAoC, EVE, and such, I find V:SoH just a giant letdown and failure. Should not have been this way.
All WoW is is an endless item farm. It's fun the first time through, but in the end you realize how shallow the game truly is. But, again, this is just my humble opinion, and I know 10000 people who think its the be all end all of video gaming.Do you honestly believe Vanguard will be any different? Honestly?