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Another Review Thread: Warning! Very Long Read
Alexis101
Member Posts: 31
Hopefully, this serves more as an unbiased review of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. I previously posted on another thread as a reply post, but seeing as how lengthy this is, I decided to move it to a separate thread. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, at its core, is not a bad game. It has so many good things going for it. Most people can argue that this game offers nothing new, and they are right on most part. The basic user interface seems to be the same as any previous MMOs that were released. Combat feels the same, and many quests seem to be the standard Fed-Ex quests or Kill X and Bring Y number of Z.
But it is hard not to notice how much ambition the developers at Sigil had for this game. The world is huge, and you can feel it when you are out in the wilderness. I, personally, play MMOs because I want to get away from the reality and bring some imaginations in me while being entertained at the same time. The vast world not only helps me feel immersed in the world, it makes me more excited to find out just what other stuff or content might be waiting for me across the other side of the horizon.
Diplomacy system is also something new that Sigil introduced. Sure, it feels like a simple mini card game, but the point is that this mini card game works quite well. I personally got bored with it after a while, but if one spends considerable amount of time to keep track of the city status, he/she can contribute to the community by providing civic buffs for people. More success at diplomacy means more advanced cards, better diplomacy clothing, and whatnot.
Speaking of clothing, I liked how this game had different sets of clothing for different occasions like combat or harvesting or diplomacy. It really makes it easier for people to give boosts to the necessary stats for each and every spheres in this game. By spheres, Vanguard has 3 different main spheres: Adventuring (combat), Crafting, and Diplomacy. Harvesting will probably go with crafting, but you do get a different set of clothing for harvesting. And of course, if you experiment with all of the spheres available in the game, then you will change your clothes more frequently too, so it reduces the boredom of staring at the same gear for a given period of time. And kudos to Sigil for making it quite easy to switch your gears on the fly, if the situatiion calls for it.
I also liked how the combat, despite its slow pace and dullness, nevertheless featured some interesting features such as counterspells, chain attacks, counterattacks, and whatnot. And despite the fact that many people have complained about the difficulty of leveing their characters due to harsher death penalty and slower leveling curve, it seemed that many classes seemed more than capable of holding out on his/her own. Bard, which I played extensibly, wasn't just a buffbot or a songbot as it felt like to me in Dark Age of Camelot. Rather, it had lot of utilities that provided very useful buffs to the player and the group, such as faster run speed, ability to give group stealth, ability to breathe underwater, and the ability to fall slowly off the cliff, largely negating the need of grinding safefall. And this version of bard can actually dish out some damage too! The only disappointment that I had with the bard was the lack of showing the instruments you carried if you had it equipped (kinda like the helmet graphics not finished and not showing). But nevertheless, I liked the fact that I could still play my songs and have them active while I am fighting with my weapons.
Crafting is also quite interesting as well. I really liked the fact that you didn't have to harvest vast amount of resources to use plainly for leveling in crafting, like it was in Everquest 2 or World of Warcraft. Rather, you ask an NPC to give you a set of work orders, which gives you the option to use your own harvested resources (which at refining stages, gives you a slight boost in quality) or use the provided resources. And as long as you did not utterly fail your work orders, you were given some sort of reward for your trouble. You do not need to be rich to start crafting at all, and one can easily spend the entire game session doing nothing but crafting, and make some levels and decent rewards on top of that.
Having said this, Vanguard also has many problems, mostly because the developers were too overly ambitious with this game.
I mentioned earlier about the sheer vastness of the world. It is all good, but due to the fact that Sigil ran out of money and released the game earlier than it wanted to, many of the contents seem to be unfinished. It is much easier to put small details into every bits and parts of the world had it been smaller, but with Vanguard, it is so big that I am sure the developers were overwhelmed. I did not find the intricate level of detail that I saw with World of Warcraft. In fact, the world looks quite good from the distance, but up close, the detail level is not as good, if not ugly at times. And many times, you will see barren lands, with no mobs and no NPCs for long stretches.
And with that comes graphics. I thought the graphics in Vanguard was okay. Not fantastic but quite good. The problem is that the game is an extreme system hog, and even if you exceed the recommended system requirements indicated on the box, you will encounter some performance issues. My system is a pentium 4 3.2 Ghz with 2 GB RAM, NVidia GeForce 7800 GTX, Soundblaster Audigy with 300 GB of free hard drive space, running in Windows XP Service Pack 2. This is not the top of the line system by any means, but it performed very well with virtually zero graphical hitches or stuttering while playing other more graphically intensive MMOs like Everquest 2. With Vanguard however, at high performance setting, I more than often encountered severe stuttering and hitching, especially in towns or any areas that had good number of players or NPCs. Some towns like Hathor Zhi for the Dark Elves or Khal, the starting town for the Qalia humans, were worse than Cae'lal Brael, starting town for the Wood Elves and Raki. In those two bad towns, I more than often encountered FPS as low as than 10 FPS, making it very unenjoyable to move around and play. In the wilderness by myself though, my FPS was good, sometimes going over 60 FPS and running very smoothly.
Then comes the sound. It seems like the game performs much better if you turn your sound off. It is at a degree that I have not encountered in any MMOs that I have previously played. And you won't really miss the sound too much at all, if you want to consider that a positive. The background music is a mixed blessing, as some areas feature very well orchestrated music like the ones being played in the Wood Elf/Raki area, or the kind of music that you can live without, like the ones I encountered in Martok, starting area for the green people on the continent of Kojan. And combat sounds were just okay, nothing special. It wasn't anything like Lineage2, where I absolutely had to turn the music on when fighting in the dungeons, because even though it was repetitive, it was blood pumping and gave some excitements to the whole combat.
And sometimes I encountered some very bad hitches with the sound as well. When I was doing this quest called "The Taint of the Yukionna" in Kojan with a full group, I encountered numerous bad experiences with sound, the ones that sound like an untuned FM radio station that you will hear if you are in the remote area that is too far away to receive good FM signals. It did that continuously as I toggled the sound on and off, desperating trying to keep the sound on as much as I can tolerate. And with that experienece, the performance also seemed to take a slight dive, decreasing my average FPS by an average of about 5 to 10.
Now as for combat animations, they were okay, but nothing to be excited about. The best melee combat animations that I personally have experienced was in Dark Age of Camelot, where the game offered numerous different styles with cool animations that can be used in different situations. Spell effects are generally consistent with what I have seen in other MMOs. But the animation isn't so bad as to make you feel completely bored with fighting mobs. It just could have been better.
One could easily argue as to why this game is such a system hog if it does not offer a revolutionary quality graphics. From reading numerous forum posts, it seems that the game is, at the current state, not fully, or well optimized. There are many suggestions to tweak your .ini file to boost performance and whatnot. There are also numerous posts about Sigil's use of the Unreal 2.5 engine, which was not tweaked efficiently to run this game. I am sure, with time, that the developers will work on this issue to make the game run more stable. I do not think that it will happen overnight, and I believe that this will take months, if not a full year.
As far as the bugs go, I did expect to see bugs, as most MMOs always have to combat this problem. Some games do better at presenting themselves as polished as possible. That was one aspect that I enjoyed World of Warcraft the most, as that game seemed to have very little performance issues or game-breaking bugs. In Vanguard, I did not encounter any severe bugs like the ones that were reported by other players in which they lost a whole level due to lag. However, I did encounter some annoying bugs such as the teleporters in Kojan porting me to the middle of the bay in Khal, Qualia, where I could not swim out of the water to set my foot on land. I had to constantly issue a command to get myself unstuck. There were more instances, such as when I turned on Anti-Aliasing (which the game does not support by the way) or made some suggested tweaks in the .ini file or with my Nvidia driver setting, that my screen either went blank or just showed plain jibberish that made everything in game unrecognizable. I do not think that I have encountered this degree of performance issues when I first played other MMOs. The only other game that I can compare to, at this point, is Anarchy Online. But since its troublesome launch, Anarchy Online is now a much better game.
And then there is the grouping issue. Since the world is so large with numerous different starting areas for the game's numerous different races (which is a big plus and a nice addition by the way), it seemed a little more difficult to find groups easily. As I got higher and higher in adventuring levels, I noticed that most of the quests were better served in a group rather than solo. Often times, even if I used every LFG tools(if somewhat limited due to sheer size of the world and population spread) at my disposal, I simply could not get a group going. Of course, that was when I just went back to crafting to work on my work orders, but I wish the game featured a more advanced form of LFG tools, a simple yet quick way of traveling (like World of Warcraft and Everquest 2's flyers), and/or more teleporters that work within the continents, not just limited to intercontinental travel.
Speaking of races, I was very pleased with the number of different races available, let alone the numerous different adventuring classes as well. The races all seem to have different purpose too, as they each had unique racial bonuses. Despite the disadvantage in having a huge world with races starting in many different starting areas, I feel that it is also positive to offer different kind of playing experience if you choose a different race, rather than say like Everquest 2, where the choice of starting city was just two, before the recent Echoes of Faydwer expansion.
Of course, the character's physical customization could have been better. I liked the fact that there were lot of different physical features that you can adjust and change using the simple slider functions, but they didn't seem to make much difference once I was in the game. Furthermore, the lack of hairstyles were very disappointing, as I feel the hair styles is one of the most noticeable physical feature that can easily be distinguished from one to another. I do not expect the kind of customization that City of Heroes offered, but I did not want something as limited as Lineage2. However, despite the awfully simple and limited choices of character customization in Lineage2, its character models were at least, more beautiful than Vanguard's in my opinion. (Not simply because their character models were inspired from Asian Anime)
My last gripe is with crafting. Positives were many, as I have indicated above. The fact that it actually required me to plan my strategy and adjust according to the numerous different complications made things more exciting too. I did mention about not having to harvest resources just to gain crafting levels previously, which is also good. But the complications seemed a little, too much random at times. I can understand getting lots of poors or moderates rather than seeing more excellents, but sometimes the randomness was a little too random for me to bear. I often encountered situations where certain complications that had nothing to do with a certain section of crafting, still resulted in poor progress for that section. For example, if I was already in stage 3 of the crafting session, where I was only working on utilities, why would a complication that penalizes tool progress and action point penalty result in poorer utility progress regardless? Why would some poor progress actually give me more progress than some moderate progress? I thought that didn't make sense at all.
I am sure that all this difficulty and challenge of the crafting sphere become all worthwhile for people who have, or will put considerable amount of time and effort. There were some posts that I have read, which stated that the lack of complete item decay will eventually make crafting worthless. The items do decay with use, (even crafting armor takes some abuse after a while), but it was just a matter of going back to a general merchant to have it back at 100% with a nominal fee. My main effort was in trying to level up in carpentry and mineralogy to make boats and houses, and I hope that, at least for these professions, the demand will always be there. Speaking of housing and boats, that was also one of the things I really liked about this game. Being able to build your own house in the game seemed like an immersion booster, similar to how it was in Star Wars Galaxies. If the developers can deliver the sea content with possible sea monster encounters, than boats will serve much better purpose than a simple means of transportation.
There is one small detail that I did not mention yet. Vanguard requires at least 17 GB of hard drive space to install. It seems a bit steeper than most MMOs out there currently, but with the vast size of the world that Vanguard is, I am not surprised.
The absolute last part that I wlll cover is the in-game community. Needless to say, the community was, for the most part, very mature and very helpful. There were some instances where the general chat was filled with gripes about some bugs or how some other MMOs in the future will destroy Vanguard, etc. But they were only minor occurrences. Generally speaking, the community was very responsive, if there seemed to be enough people around. Speaking of player population, towards my last day of playing Vanguard, it seemed to be less populated than when I started. I do not have any sound evidence to back this opinion of mine, but it was just a general feeling I got. The guild that I belonged to, which consisted of people from many different parts of the world, had almost half of its rosters completely inactive for more than 3 weeks.
In closing, I think Vanguard is an ambitious project that really needed more time in development. The room for growth and improvement are definitely there, given the huge size, 3 spheres, numerous different races and adventuring classes. It just seemed to be too much for Sigil to completely finish the content for all of them, on top of the graphic engine optimization that didn't seem to work out too well. I myself do not play this game anymore, as I was frustrated with the game performance and the fact that it was getting more difficult to easily hook up with groups. Perhaps I was too spoiled with the ease of finding groups in World of Warcraft or City of Heroes. But my stance is that, if the game is an MMORPG, driven and focused heavily on grouping dynamics, it should have offered much better choices and options to find people to group together.
In my opinion. Vanguard is not a bad game, but it is not great either. What makes a great game is, without a doubt in my mind, a game with little to no enjoyment-squashing bugs and the contents / features that should have been there to begin with at release. Nevertheless, if the developers deliver what they have promised down the line, Vanguard is an ambitious project that just might well pave the way for the next generation MMORPGs. (But please do fix the game performance issue! WIthout that, there is no chance at achieving this goal!)
My final score on Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is 7.0.
Thank you for reading and any feedback or criticism is all welcome, as long as it is free of personal flaming.
Comments
I give your review of the game a 9/10.
C
indeed by far one the best reviews i have read so far, straight to the point, honest and not exaggerated.
to bad, for me, the grouping combined with the performance issues make this game unplayable. Hence i cancelled after my first month.
how is this not an unbiased review is beyond me
vg is the best mmo ever created. it rocks and simply puts all other mmos to dust.
the op obviously has no idea what he is talkin about. this is another attempt at spreading downright false information on these public boards.
7.0? lmao.. it is more like 9.5. i have no performance issues and it is so much fun. if wow kind of kiddie fun is what is fun to you, then go play it. obviously you don't know anything about mmo.
lol don't listen to these garbage posts. buy vg, play it, love it.
that's all i gotta say now.
i pwn j00 all.. ktx bai
argh...
eqnext.wikia.com
argh...
typical vg hater. if u dont like my post don't read it
k thx bai
argh...
typical vg hater. if u dont like my post don't read it
k thx bai
Dude you make me laugh. Hard. Take a look at my sign again. Yeah... Now turn around and walk away.eqnext.wikia.com
First of all, many thanks to all the posters for your comments.
As for you Hero, I would much rather discuss this game with more specifics and examples. You had zero examples and you resorted to personally attacking me, which isn't too nice.
Please give your version of examples as to why this game simply puts all other mmos to dust.
Thank you.
As opposed to you, whose posts are so rich and full of factual information, and completely bare of any opinions that lack explanation and reasoning.
i don't feel like reading your sign. the only thing that matters is that vg is great and i can't stand people spreading false information about this game. flame me all you want but i win
kk thx bai
First off the game is not great, you may find it enjoyable but there are many flaws with it. Your ignorance is shining through every single time you post. Just because somebody has a different opinion does not mean it is false information.
In fact the game is in trouble, even the devs realise that.
tsk tsk.. i lack complete explanation and reasoning? then let me give you some.
firstly vg's graphics are nice. much better than wow or eq2 or any other garbage out there. if u say graphics sux then u have horrible system. go upgrade it or something. if u don't have the rig to run it and complain that graphics sux then u got a problem
secondly who the heck gives a darn about sound in mmo. i turn mine off and listen to my music all the time.
thirdly op seriously needs some cheese to go with his whine because he is frustrated that he cannot get uber crafting results when he crafts. it so obvious. d00d if u wanna make uber items u have to grind and get high levels. vg is for the hardcore and nothing is g0nna be ez. take it or leave it.
fourthly i have no problem finding groups. maybe op is playing at a wrong time of the day or his guild must sux so bad. my guild is alive and kicking and there are plenty of people everywhere.
op says his review is unbiased i say it is biased of a person who wants to promote his anti vg agenda on this forum. if u all just stop posting so many downright false negative posts about this game then it will make things so much simple and easier. if u don't like vg then stop trolling here and go to whatever game it is that you play.
k thx bai
the game is not in trouble. the only trouble that this game possibly has are you people who keep posting this and that how this game sux. that's not true. it is the greatest mmo i ever played.
as for your insult on calling me ignorant, at least i am not someone who posts some super long boring whiny post of a review that is more than redundant at this pt.
k thx bai
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
the game is not in trouble. the only trouble that this game possibly has are you people who keep posting this and that how this game sux. that's not true. it is the greatest mmo i ever played.
as for your insult on calling me ignorant, at least i am not someone who posts some super long boring whiny post of a review that is more than redundant at this pt.
k thx bai
Just to make you life more enjoyable. I have, according to my x-fire signature, 192hours in VG since release.
Does that qualify me as a whiner, hater or troll?
eqnext.wikia.com
what lack of content? care to explain?
oh yeah every single complaint about some mmo is always about lack of content. d00d you can go craft if you want. is that not content? you can go do diplomacy if you want. is that not content? you can go do literally hundreds of quests. is that not content? if u in pvp server u can go kill someone. is that not content? do i have to list every single thing that u can do in this game and would you be happy to at least agree that this game has content?
i bet u didn't even play the game properly. if u just grind on the mindset of leveling then u get bored fast. and then come to these forums complaining about content.
this game is full of content and lots of things to do.
k thx bai
now someone flames me for lack of intelligence. great. when does this ever stop
and no i have played plenty of pay to play mmo and vg is the best i have played. simple. if u didn't like vg then fine. but don't post something that is not true or utter bs. just go play your game. if u not playin why are you here anyway?
k thx bai
more like someone who never even bothered to check out the numerous features and contents vg offers. only thinking about your stupid leveling exp bar. no wonder u get bored and start trashing this game.
k thx bai
hey dude what do u expect the game company to do then? if the world is too small, people complain it is too small. if it is big, people complain it is too big. what can they do? it's like nobody can be satisfied at anything.
as for healers overpowered, all mmos go through this balance issues. but if u aren't so worried about being so uber in pvp and care more about having fun, then u will realize that eventually class balances will come.
and i don't know what other game out there that is not tank and spank. it is all the same thing. combat in mmo is all the same thing. and as far as plastic barbie doll characters, all other mmos out there all have plastic barbie doll characters. plz name one that had so realistic looking characters that did not look like barbie dolls.
k thx bai
my main is now level 31 ranger and i have few alts in their teens.
and i played so many mmos i don't wanna list them. but if u insist on seeing them all, i might put them on my sig or bio. MIGHT.
only if i have enough time to justify the need for it. otherwise take it as is.
k thx bai