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My continious review of vanguard ( unbiased )
gauge2k3
Member Posts: 442
Took awhile to get my settings tweaked, I can play at almost highest settings with pretty high fps.
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.18ghz
Geforce 7900GT
WD Raptor X HDD
2 gigs of gskill RAM
There are some good and bad things about this game thus far. Keep in mind i'm not branding this game as bad, just showing what a new player comes into.
Graphical errors - they are everywhere, certain ranges of mixed settings cause problems for me, while others work.....it lamost appears to be completely random which settings work together and which don't.
Graphics in general - This game is graphically demanding, we know this, i thought I was getting into a game that would look better then EQ2, as i can playt EQ2 on highest settings with 50fps+. to be honest, EQ2 looks better, quite a bit better actually. This was the part of my 45 minutes that I was most unimpressed with. Everyone talked about this and this was probably my only expectation thus far ( I expected graphical bugs ect ect. ) I would say they are a step down from EQ2 and LOTR, but definately better then WoW. IMO there is no way what i'm seeing should take up the amount of gpu it does. The grass looks cool. DO NOT EXPECT ANYTHING FANTASTIC CONTRADICTIVE TO WHAT OTHER PEOPLE ARE SAYING.
Quests - Nothing new here, not bad, not good, average.
Animation - Very poor, I mean extremely poor, even WoW puts this game to shame on this topic. Hell ragnorok online puts this game to shame on animations. Not to mention NPC's lack animation completely. I pull out my sword and no animation at all, it just appears in my hand.
Combat - See animations, without animations combat is booooooring.
Rendering - I do beleive that I am rendering objects that my charecter cannot actually see. Like objects behind buildings.....hello welcome to game programming 101, you don't render objects you can't see........
Lag - Not as bad as what I expected, however the amount of graphical lag when entering any building is insane, itl iterally stops everything for a good 5 seconds, loads, then continues. Again on highest settings EQ2 beats this hands down IMO, however on lower settings vanguard wins.
Shading - Underpar. Again EQ2 shading has this beat by leaps and bounds. You can't even compare the shading in EQ2 to this. Its pretty basic shading. On a side note pulling my torch out in game doesn't actually make me pull torch out, it just lights up surrounding area.
Thus far I am extremely dissapointed. For the amount of system resources I am using to play the game I am getting something that is what I would consider very substandard for what its using. I'm also afraid to fix some of these resource issues fixing the game engine is needed, and I dont' see that happening.
I consider this review to be honest. I HAVE ONLY PLAYED FOR 45 MINUTES, i wanted to stress that, I am not daming the game all you fanboys. I need to play it for at least a month to get a grasp on what its really like.
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.18ghz
Geforce 7900GT
WD Raptor X HDD
2 gigs of gskill RAM
There are some good and bad things about this game thus far. Keep in mind i'm not branding this game as bad, just showing what a new player comes into.
Graphical errors - they are everywhere, certain ranges of mixed settings cause problems for me, while others work.....it lamost appears to be completely random which settings work together and which don't.
Graphics in general - This game is graphically demanding, we know this, i thought I was getting into a game that would look better then EQ2, as i can playt EQ2 on highest settings with 50fps+. to be honest, EQ2 looks better, quite a bit better actually. This was the part of my 45 minutes that I was most unimpressed with. Everyone talked about this and this was probably my only expectation thus far ( I expected graphical bugs ect ect. ) I would say they are a step down from EQ2 and LOTR, but definately better then WoW. IMO there is no way what i'm seeing should take up the amount of gpu it does. The grass looks cool. DO NOT EXPECT ANYTHING FANTASTIC CONTRADICTIVE TO WHAT OTHER PEOPLE ARE SAYING.
Quests - Nothing new here, not bad, not good, average.
Animation - Very poor, I mean extremely poor, even WoW puts this game to shame on this topic. Hell ragnorok online puts this game to shame on animations. Not to mention NPC's lack animation completely. I pull out my sword and no animation at all, it just appears in my hand.
Combat - See animations, without animations combat is booooooring.
Rendering - I do beleive that I am rendering objects that my charecter cannot actually see. Like objects behind buildings.....hello welcome to game programming 101, you don't render objects you can't see........
Lag - Not as bad as what I expected, however the amount of graphical lag when entering any building is insane, itl iterally stops everything for a good 5 seconds, loads, then continues. Again on highest settings EQ2 beats this hands down IMO, however on lower settings vanguard wins.
Shading - Underpar. Again EQ2 shading has this beat by leaps and bounds. You can't even compare the shading in EQ2 to this. Its pretty basic shading. On a side note pulling my torch out in game doesn't actually make me pull torch out, it just lights up surrounding area.
Thus far I am extremely dissapointed. For the amount of system resources I am using to play the game I am getting something that is what I would consider very substandard for what its using. I'm also afraid to fix some of these resource issues fixing the game engine is needed, and I dont' see that happening.
I consider this review to be honest. I HAVE ONLY PLAYED FOR 45 MINUTES, i wanted to stress that, I am not daming the game all you fanboys. I need to play it for at least a month to get a grasp on what its really like.
Comments
This is a pay-to-play beta.
Yet, it's still my favourite MMO at the moment. If that sounds wierd to you, then you're a Sith - used to dealing with absolutes
Playing Vanguard is like reading Lord of the Rings, an epic and timeless adventure, on toilet paper, on a bus which keeps breaking down.
Still waiting for your Holy Grail MMORPG? Interesting...
Life can be tapped
I have to agree here with you - while the game does look 'nice' - it doesn't look nice enough to justify the requirements. It looks like a slightly nicer EQ2, graphically - though the former had better animations. Some of the caster classes have some cool spell effects, but for the most part you swing weapons, you see damage numbers, things die. Sometimes your character will do a bit of a flourish when they swing the weapons but, nothing impressive. I mean, I'm not expecting another 9dragons here (where watching your character fight was just...wow), but I was expecting a little more, I think. I played a bard and was really disappointed, for example, that nothing I did made little music notes or any sort of effect, not even my 'shout' - I just fight silently with the occasional sword-clink. I did manage to see music notes once on my bard, I think it was some combination of effects in my bardsong, but I've never been able to reproduce it since. There's also no MUSIC. Even old school games like DaoC gave 'musical' classes a flare of music notes or some actual MUSIC when you played your instrument or started your 'bardsong'. EQ2 did it as well. And the whole game is like this : While buffs and some nukes have minimal particle effects, it was all just very underwhelming.
I don't know, maybe it all looks very blah at the beginning because at 50 the skills all look amazing. I hope so, though I rather doubt it.
Gaming? That's not gaming!
That's just people sat 'round in costumes drinking...
CONTRIBUTE INTO THE GAMING INDUSTRY! STOP PAYING FOR BORING COPYCATS, UNFINISHED BUGFESTS AND CRANKY JUNKWARE. BE A RESPONSIBLE GAMER!
Well, the graphics IS definitly a disappointment for me. If I compare this to let's say Oblivion then - the style, and the execution are just not on par. Sadly. Animations are bad, the rendernig is slow although there simply is not enough done on screen to justify that.
It seems to me like somoene is not using his great 3d engine (Unreal 3) too well here, definitly. I sort of bet they use a quadtree or simple octree to render. They definitly have SERIOUS bugs in there.
I can in some scernatios regularly see through doors - looks like objects (doors) get not rendered over a certain distance, but all the people behind do. So sometimes I see another person through a closed door, go nearer and the door appears, open it and there is a room behind (i.e. the person was outside the wall).
I also miss night-animations (please, no shields etc. ,hold up a torch and all that).
I do feel i'm being honest. I'm going to update my post later tonight after playing a few hours.
You know I bet you are right, once i loaded the building going into them again was flawless, it was loading them for the first time that lagged me. But if this far clipping thing does indeed do this then my assumption that I am rendering objects I can't see is true, and that is a very bad thing.
That is wild in my opinion.
I'm sitting with a
P4 3.4 Ghz, Geforce 7600GT 256MB, 2GB DDR2 Ram
and can hardly play on lowest setting. If I increase the settings just a bit, my CPU go nuts and almost overheats.
Was wondering and of course only if you have time, if you could enter Oalia (Mordebi human) and go to Khal (the area I seem to have the biggest problem in) and see how the lag and FPS are working out?
This is not a troll post. Curious, whatever or not it is a problem with the game or just on my end and you seem like an objective poster (tester/gamer).
http://twitter.com/xmcgraw
Again, it's inconsistant. I was underwhelmed by the animations at first but I think part of that was that it was running like crap, and when your FPS is low it looks really bad. Either that or I got used to it. After awhile I have found that the combat animations are pretty good.
Yesterday I was in three rivers and we were on horseback (which have mediocre animations, btw) running from some mobs. One pulled back his bow, shot, and ran after us WHILE continuing to pull back his bow and shoot. It was actually the first animation that impressed me in Vanguard and it looks great. Hopefully the others will get better in time.
That is wild in my opinion.
I'm sitting with a
P4 3.4 Ghz, Geforce 7600GT 256MB, 2GB DDR2 Ram
and can hardly play on lowest setting. If I increase the settings just a bit, my CPU go nuts and almost overheats.
Was wondering and of course only if you have time, if you could enter Oalia (Mordebi human) and go to Khal (the area I seem to have the biggest problem in) and see how the lag and FPS are working out?
This is not a troll post. Curious, whatever or not it is a problem with the game or just on my end and you seem like an objective poster (tester/gamer).
Because of my specs i really think the CPU plays a HUGE part in Vanguard performance, I have a AMD X2 4800+ with 2 Geforce 6600 in SLI and 2 gig ram and it plays flawlessly in 1280x1024 in balanced mode
I'm level 5 now and not much has changed. I would say that some better animations would really beef this game up fast. Also some graphical tweaks would stop people form bitching as well, because to be honest where is all these resources going to? I still don't see it. The only thing that remotely met my expectations per what I heard on these forums was the grass, everything else looks pretty standard to me. Actually if i was bold I would say many of the models look plasticy.
A lot of items I recieve don't change the way I look in the game which is very dissapointing.
The mob dissapearence bug is very annoying I can confirm that, although not gamebreaking like people seem to think.
I would also like to add that after being int he same area for anout 2-3 hours I would expect to see at least 1 other person, this was not the case. I did not see a single player charecter the entire time I was logged in. I did recieve help in shout though.
Some animations and some graphical fixes later and this game could be something. I can say that I won't play the game if it continues to wreck my system like it does. There just isn't enough there to justify it IMO. What games are you guys basing that this is amazing graphics on? I mean its almost comparable to DDO. I don't even see that much in the way of physics, so that can't be it. I mean what ( and i really do want to know ) is wrecking our systems because its not the graphics, they aren't "THAT" good. I can play oblivion on highest settings and that puts this to shame graphiclly, as well as gothic 3, I can also play that on highest settings. You will say those are not mmo's, this is true, but we are talking about graphical rendering not network lag, so we can compare them.
I would also like to add instancing does not change the amount of objects rendered on the screen. Running around antonica looks better to me then running around in this game, and antonica is huge. All zoning/instancing does is help with player grief and lag issues. Just because there is an instance down the road does not mean my polygon count and texture quality drop lol.
I know many people will find me to be negative but I am an aspiring game programmer and i'm writing my own game engine ATM. I plan on making my own mmo someday, and to me it looks like a crappy engine, or crappy coding. In vanguards defense I wanna say its the engine. Also in vanguards defense I am not experiencing memory loss which is very common on releases of games. These are tough issues to fix because they deal with dynamic memory allocation and its hard to track down, but I did'nt notice any increase in RAM usage during play. Significant increase that is.
That being said, i still wish to continue playing later tonight to see whats around the next bend. I'm hell bent on getting some cool lookign armor and bashing so bad dudes.
You are right with the rig. I run our corporate standard system here (have one at home). X2 3800, 2gb RAM. A "slow" GFrorce 7600 GS Extreme from XFX - a tad higher frequency out of the box, passively cooled. Not a low end system, with a medium gfx card (that we use to run dual 1600x1200 screens with DVI - people with one screen use on board graphics). The frame rate is ok, the system is stable.
I agree on the comment with instancing. It may help when you render 5000 pleayers, and only have 10 in the instance, but often there simply are no players when I am around - so no, instances does not make a difference. Network bandwidth and latency should neither - the rendering loop should be independant (and is) from the logic.
I agree, this looks like someone not using proper programming. Rendering too much. I wonder whether we have a real seamless environment (using a quadtree, as it looks), or a portal based system. Portals are a lot better when you talk of caves and buildings. With a quadtree - the effect we get is clearly the one you get from that.
Man, I wish the game was better. SO many good ideas in there. I think I will hang out for half a year :-)
I think the game is fun, it has potential but right now for me is not playable. After a year of patches and engine optimization it will be ready to roll. But in an industry when you have about 20 minutes to prove you are the next big thing, Vanguard is failing or has failed depending on who you talk to.
After an MMO leaves a sour taste in your mouth the chances you will come back 6 months later are slim.
That is wild in my opinion.
I'm sitting with a
P4 3.4 Ghz, Geforce 7600GT 256MB, 2GB DDR2 Ram
and can hardly play on lowest setting. If I increase the settings just a bit, my CPU go nuts and almost overheats.
Was wondering and of course only if you have time, if you could enter Oalia (Mordebi human) and go to Khal (the area I seem to have the biggest problem in) and see how the lag and FPS are working out?
This is not a troll post. Curious, whatever or not it is a problem with the game or just on my end and you seem like an objective poster (tester/gamer).
check the silky venom boards for tweaks they seem to help a lot.____________________________
TheCore
FINALLY!! The hype is slowly subsiding and people are starting to be honest about their opinion. Finally people are able to talk about both good and bad, without one or two fanatics start to throw poo around, insulting PEOPLE and PEOPLES flaws, when those people point out flaws in a GAME.I started beta pretty early.. I played a few weeks with a can made specifically for 3D Studio Max and animation rendering times. I know exactly what rig I have, I built it all by hand, every nut and bolt. Still when I have pointed out that the graphics on highest aint that spectacular compared to what is possible this year (or in fact, anywhere 2k), and especially not when you look at the rig demands, there has been a ton of insults about me, my computer, my personality and my intelligence, hundreds of posts, and not ONE actually talking about the game.
I am glad to see some sense on these boards for once... A few months down the road, and we will finally be able to actually talk about the real issues here.
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force"
Well. I can certainly tell you where all the resources are going to. Vanguard is a seamless game, kind of like WoW. However, WoW has special choke points between zones which is pretty much the same as EQ1 or EQ2 but without the loading screen. It does not even have these. This is precisely what causes the system requirements to soar through the roof while simultaneously reducing graphical quality. Frankly, I like the environments better than EQ2, and especially the dungeons, but I agree with most of you on the character models and animations. Hopefully,at least the animations will imrove. Once the models are clothed and armored their flaws are less noticeable.
As was mentioned by someone, increasing the far clipping plane is a good idea. It causes things to load further away, if your RAM can handle it.
Also, there is an occlusion setting specifically for whether or not to render non-visible things. I would recommend turning that on if it is not. They recommend only turning it off if it causes problems.
I am currently running Vanguard on an ancient (Almost 4 years old now!), but well upgraded PC. I did have to upgrade to 2 gigs of RAM but thus far it runs acceptably.
P4 2.8 Ghz CPU
2 Gigs of Corsair DDR RAM 400mhz
8x AGP GeForce 6800 Ultra w/ 256 MB (Oh how I wish I had a PCI express slot! lol)
I get about 20 frames per second, haha, but it stays steady without too many dips so it is completely playable.
I would recommend playing for more than 45 minutes before being too harsh on the game, however. I am level 12 now after a few hours and having MUCH more fun than I did after my own shaky first 45 minutes.
E8400@ 4.0Ghz ~ Saphire HD 4870 ~ 6GB DDR2@ 860MhZ
I was going to point this out, beat me to it.
It's the AMOUNT of stuff that has to be loaded and processed by your system that is requiring the higher end hardware. It's not really the graphical quality that you need the juice for.
Personally I thihk they made the chunks to large for the amount of stuff they put into them in some areas, like the area around the wood elf city.
I also don't think the shading is that great on the characters; while it looks incredible in the enviroment it doesn't really work well on characters I think.
I state again HUGE difference in graphics with far clipping maxxed. I stillt hink my charecter looks like plastic, especially in darker lighting.
Devs have a whole other concept of time. To them, six months is soon, but me, I'll probably be long gone, looking for a new game to do a better job of hooking me. I'll be jumping over to LOTRO in a little over a month, which I only plan on playing untill WAR comes out.
Maybe while waiting for WAR, I'll get sick of LOTRO and come back to Vanguard, but honestly, it's not likely. A game has to really hook me from the beginning, or I tend to leave and never look back. So, is that just me, or are there a lot of players like me? I don't know who's to blame, if anyone, but I think Vanguard's yet another case of an MMO drastically failing to reach its potential due to premature release. There's no making up for that with patches, when it just isn't a shiny new game anymore.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.