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pleasantly surprised with vanguard
Bladestrom
Member UncommonPosts: 5,001
Hi decided to give vanguard a whirl when i saw it on steam for £7 and it is actually really fun so far, and well worth a punt if anyone is looking for something to play for a while until the next gen mmorgs come out. I have played rpg/mmorgs for about 20 years, last 6 in wow then rift so pretty jaded, but still its grabbing my interest so far 
just hit the main world after doing the trainer isle of dawn, and I have a whole world to explore and it jingled those old' huge world in front of me to explore excitement' feelings that I have not encountered for many a year. decent gfx too. Recommend it to anyone looking for a mmorg at the mo that is tired of the wow/rift/GW routes.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
Comments
ya i thought the same thing at first. then i got bored really fast after 2 weeks with hardly anyone on or anything to do to be honest.
the classes-awsome
races-awsome
community*once you find it* - very helpfull and awsome
quest-good but boreing some times.
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Which FF Character Are You?
I've had a love/hate relationship with Vanguard for a couple years now - I have nothing bad to say about the developers behind it though. Some things simply can't be helped when it comes to when you release a game and how many features you are allowed by publishers/costs to cram into it. It is a surprisingly decent game experience overall, although the loss of dedicated organized pvp and rp servers has been a blow to many.
Greystaff Legends RPG
I enjoyed the true successor to EQ1 ala Vanguard when it first came out. I would start playing again but I refuse to play a game not being updated or supported for the most part.
As with any real mmo, the game eventually lives or dies on not playing alone and then who you play with. Get a decent group willing to play at your level and there's few better than VG.
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
Yeah Vanguard turned out to be surprisingly fun, consdering how succesfully their dev team chased me away with all those "omg we're so hardcore" mumuring near release. Didn't keep me hooked for too long, but I enjoyed my time.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Good game, shame it's as dead as a dodo.
If everyone who said that started playing. It would be crowded.
And there are a lot of people playing since SOE gave 45 days playtime. Many of them left a buggy game back in 2007 and are surprised to see how good the game is today. Im sure many of those will stay.
I am one of those that has returned courtesy of the 45 days playing time and am very pleasantly surprised with what I've seen. It's a far cry from the buggy mess I saw at release.
100% concur with what you said -- by all measure Vanguard seems to be the game that could satisfy the wants of so many I've seen posting lately. I've been in a bit of an MMO slump myself for the past month or so and dabbling in anything with a free trial or "come back and check us out" offer. As good as some of the games and communities are out there I just haven't found anything that grabbed me. And then there was Vanguard.
There are a lot of topics I would like to go into as to why Vanguard is great and deserves a harder look from the community of veteran and newer games who, likely myself, may have started in the "glory days" of EQ and UO (I believe almost all MMOs have gone down-hill since these games in most regards save for graphics and UI design). However, for the sake of not wanting this to turn into a TL;DR post I'm going to list my personal pros/cons:
PROS:
Fantastic class/race system. All your staple classes are here, with a few others I really enjoy that you don't find in every game such as Monk and Bard. The Blood Mage is a very interesting twist on healing. Psionicist is another interesting class. Character customization is limited but you can go back and customize your character any time, even after you're created the character.
Huge, open and seamless world. No loading screens. No instances. It really adds to the sense of immersion. I feel like I'm in another world, and not in a game with a series of lobbies. Some may see the lack of instancing as a con, and that's fine. Personally I think instances are a big contributor to a loss of immersion and breaking up the sense of community in games today.
Graphics. They are slightly dated but still look great. The subtle things like movement of grass are a great touch. The viewing distance is phenomenal and I can run everything on max settings and it runs like butter.
The interface is very functional and includes most of the modern elements I've come to expect. There are a few custom UIs available on vginterface.com. The only thing I find a little lacking is the map/minimap but it's functional.
The game is challenging. This is really a huge factor and something I miss tremendously from the EQ era. Easy games are good for developing a large audience but personally I really miss feeling a sense of danger and accomplishment in my MMO.
Community. Yes, it's small but the people I've encountered thus far have been very friendly and helpful. You won't find much in the way of trolling on the official forums. If you're playing Vanguard at this point you're probably a disgruntled MMOer searching for something engaging or a diehard veteran that refuses to let-go. Either way you have a vested interested in seeing this game prosper. The community is too small currently but smaller, tight-knit communities are preferable in my opinion. Look at Wo* (name of The Beast abbreviated lest I give it power) -- awful community. I've played it off-and-on since release and outside of my guildmates I'd say 90% of my PUG experiences are bad. The forums are filled with wailing and gnashing of teech, Chuck Norris jokes, talk of pie and rampant whining. If you're 12 and find that stuff humorous then right on, I did at one point in life too, but these days I'm over it. I'm rambling but the point is I think you'll find the community in Vanguard to be great.
This may be a stretch but as a new player I can spin the lack of developer support as a good thing. No constant tweaking of class mechanics. Look at MMO-Champion, the class tweaking is constant and rampant. It's in a constant state of upheaval. This happens in other games I've looked at recently as well though to a lesser extent. Also, I'm tired of level cap increases and releasing new content purely for the sake of more gear to grind. I'm tired of the gear grind. REALLY tired of it. I like knowing that if I go get the best stuff out there then that's exactly it, I have the best stuff, I'm Billy Badass now. What I choose to do from there is up to me. I don't need a new raid to go grind new gear. While I certainly wouldn't mind seeing new content, I don't need more purple pixels to chase. I want engaging, interesting gameplay not an endless loot treadmill.
CONS:
Population. This is the #1 criticism I see mentioned over and over. Like the poster above said if all those people gave Vanguard another chance the community would grow. You want developer support? Start playing the game. The current subs are only enough to maintain the costs of running the server. There needs to be enough people playing to justify putting more money back into the game. Accept that. It's a reverse Field of Dreams -- if you come, they will build it.
Lack of developer support. I spin this as a pro for myself (at least in terms of not constantly nerfing/buffing classes and an endless loot treadmill) but this is undoubtedly a big stumbling block for a lot of people. Again, the community has to grow itself. If this happened, you'd see a return of developer support. It's a numbers game.
So this is already a wall of text that will prob be TL;DR for most people, oh well.
I'm disgruntled. I'm disappointed with the state of the industry. The market is saturated with a bunch of games that I have no interest in playing. I miss the good 'ol days of challenging games with a real sense of immersion and adventure. I believe Vanguard can be that game I've been searching for. Only we, as a community, can decide Vanguard's fate. It would be a shame to let such a jewel of a game slowly fade away.
There are some promising games on the horizon (SWTOR, GW2, ArcheAge) but I've been through too many MMO launches to hold my breath. RIFT was the last straw. Most of these games are just more of the same. Everyone wants a slice of the WoW pie. Most of them are fun for the first 30 days or at best, as Keen calls them, a 3-monther.
I want to see Vanguard succeed. I was inspired by the words and actions of Ardwulf here on this forum. Enough so to finally come out of lurking here and finally register an account and make this post. I'm giving Vanguard another chance. I'm accepting some personal responsibility for trying to breathe some life back into what could be an amazing game. Telon is an amazing world, it just needs a few more inhabitants. Maybe this effort will fail. Maybe SOE will continue to disappoint us (it certainly seems to be an art they are perfecting). But maybe not. I'm going to put in some effort and see what happens. At least I will know I tried. If everyone out there who wished or wondered if Vanguard could be good came back and gave it a chance, I think we'd see something awesome and unprecedented: the resurrection of an MMO, and a good one at that. It might also send a message ot the industry that we're tired of current model. Give us EQ with modern graphics and UI elements. Give us a challenge. Make us forget we're sitting in front of a computer and get lost in a game world. Give us Vanguard.
As mentioned previously Ardwulf has been hard at work trying to promote the community. He has setup a Twitter account, Facebook fan page, new Wiki and forums. You can find links to them listed below. Thanks for the read!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vanguard-Forever/231235643557832
http://twitter.com/#!/VanguardForever
http://vanguard.mmoaxis.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
http://www.mmoaxis.com/phpBB3/index.php
Cliffs:
Vanguard is awesome.
Be a part of the change you want to see.
Resurrect this game -- more people will make this a better game, it's a mutually beneficial situation!
Vanguard is a very good game. And, I will also say that SWG is once again a very good game. But, when a company has zero advertising for their products, they are going to suffer. I have not met anyone yet, where I live, that has any idea what SWG is. Sony has take the NGE disaster and made SWG the best it has ever been...yeah I said it. The dungeons, tcg, crafting is good again, and Beast Master is good.