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[Column] Vanguard: Saga of Heroes: Wayback Wednesday: Vanguard Saga of Heroes
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In our latest Wayback Wednesday, we take a look at perennial favorite, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. We've got a terrific in-game video, members of the dev team on hand and some thoughts about the game itself. Check it out and then tell us about your experiences with Vanguard in the comments.
We started the evening off talking about one of my favorite topics in MMORPGs: Crafting. While not entirely unique, Vanguard has a very robust crafting system. It is so in-depth that it is almost a game unto itself. There are multiple stages to crafting to Vanguard and at each stage you are provided an opportunity to increase the quality of your output. You harvest materials, refine the materials, and then finish your item. While you are adventuring through the world, you can have fellow adventurers assist you in harvesting a node and increase the amount of materials that you receive and increase the chance you will receive a high quality item. While you are forging your base materials to create a finished item you can add components that will add resists or stats to your items as well as increase the quality of the item. During the finishing process you will again be presented the opportunity to increase the quality of your output.
Read more of Rob Lashley's Wayback Wednesday: Vanguard Saga of Heroes.
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Comments
Vanguard was / is a really awesome game. The world is truly immense, and my favorite part is some dungeons are really unknown to most people. They're way off the beaten path, and because there are far more dungeons than are needed for the 'level grind' you can almost always find a new one you haven't been to.
I spent a lot of time tabulating a giant list of all the dungeons in the game, and there are something like 50 in total. Check that list out here if you're interested. The list also shows players exactly where to find the dungeon. http://dungeonguru.net/index.php?title=Category:Dungeons
... You know I might actually play this game again it's so good compared to newer games like Neverwinter. lol
nethervoid - Est. '97
[UO|EQ|SB|SWG|PS|HZ|EVE|NWN|WoW|VG|DF|SWTOR|SotA|BDO]
24k subs YouTube Gaming channel
Vanguard to me is what I always saw as what should have been EQ2. It's a shame it got so neglected as it did because I think this game would have been nr 1, easily, if it had been shown a lot of love from the beginning when SOE bought it.
I'm about to start playing again myself. Starting fresh. (It's been a long time)
while im sure the filming software eats a lot of resources up, it would be great if either a higher end computer was used so that the graphics could be really shown off or a disclaimer made with each video.
Vanguard looks far better than what has been presented here.
"There are at least two kinds of games.
One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning,
an infinite game for the purpose of continuing play."
Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse
Twitter Facebook RantOnRob Youtube
This guy speaks the truth. I'm not sure why there is such a big push to paint this game in an overwhelmingly positive light, but this game is not any better than it was a few months after launch. It has it's good points, but performance is garbage on an i7 with a 660ti. Given the leaps in technology since it launched, it should pretty much run on an iPhone at this point. This tells me that the programming is terribly flawed, and let's not forget that there is almost NO development team. Game is dead. Move on.
I assume you mean it got neglected by the players, because it most definitely did NOT get neglected by SoE after they acquired it. They spent 18 months or so trying to fix it before they threw in the towel.
The people that act like SoE didnt put forth a pretty big effort are either liars or ignorant of history. Considering by the time they acquired it the game had under 50k players and how vastly improved it was (plus end game content added) 18 months later blame cant be put on SoE for this. Sigils pathetic coders and the players who abandoned the game long before SoE did are the real culprits.
[mod edit]No one forced $oe to take over from microsoft nor to buyout sigil. They took responsibility by forcing sigil to release early and then taking over the game entirely. It was 100% their responsibility to do the due diligence required to know if the game was worth investment and/or buying. It is 100% their fault for the current state of the game 6 years after release, to suggest otherwise is moronic.
SoE put this game on autopilot. Brad McQuaid came back only to realize the game was unfixable shortly after and instead moved to EQ1.....EQ1!!!! If that doesn't tell you this game is far beyond dead nothing will.
It deserves it's stellar 6.5 rating and will forever be a gleaming example of what not-to-do in the MMO hall of shame.
This game was a busted game when it was released. It was about as bad as SWG was, but the difference was that SOE always had SWG so they knew it inside and out.
When they got their hands on Vanguard, there were things that made them scratch their head. I remember when they changed the graphical wire mesh of the characters. They had to throw out what the original designers put in simply because it was such a hog on resources and slowed the game down. That took a lot of time and money. There were other problems inherent with the code that could not be fixed. The game still has a ridiculously short draw distance for objects, so they pop into view when you are really close by making the game just look bad. Don't forget the bizarre "chunking" of the smaller squares of the zone. That could not be fixed as well.
Those are just two of the myriad of problems that game had on just a technical level. When you got to gameplay, they had to fix a lot of things that were flat out broken. Not just quests and such, but entire skill sets AND they had to try to balance them. Then they had to redo a lot of the loot, as well as put IN stuff like mounts and housing all in a timely manner.....for a game that no one played.
And no one plays it to this very day. They tried to take it F2P, put in a starter island thing like and tried to "EQ" it up.....still no one played it.
Vanguard became a junior designer game. Developers that needed some experience were put on this game, so they could grow and eventually move on to the real SOE projects.
SOE has done some crappy things in their past, but they actually tried to make Vanguard a success but too many people left with such a bad taste in their mouth that no amount of fixing could bring them back to the game.
They didnt force sigil to release early. Sigil was out of money. Its not the publisher's responsibility to finance a game.
The only reason Vanguard even exists is because of SoE. It was an awful investment, but it was also throwing the guy that made them big a bone. they lost millions of dollars trying to polish a turd, but Brad had made them millions more in the past.
But blaming a company for halting development after 18 months on a game with 20k players by that point is pure stupidity. SoE has *none* of the blame for Vanguard. Zero. Its not dead because they stopped supporting it, it was dead *LONG* before they stopped supporting it. Sigil just sucked, horribly.
I am playing this now on a laptop that struggles to run many games, and Vanguard runs pretty well on it without a lot of tinkering (I would actually like to scale the ui to a lower resolution, to get bit more fps, but i'm fine at my desktop resolution with shadows off and a couple of bells and whistles muted). Honestly, it's much much better than it used to be, where it would crash randomly and on this same laptop would be an unplayable sideshow. So, in my opinion game is going good in the performance department. Now, if I had a beast of a machine, and it still ran like it does now, I would be critical too, so there's that.
The rest of the game has a lot of brilliant immersive qualities to it and challenging combat that does often necessitate grouping. It seems that there is a bit of a population now. I wouldn't say it was a humongous population, but I see people running around almost all the time, and although I just started again, I've joined a few groups. I am not sure how good the community is or anything, but I've not seen any assholery in chat and grouping has been generally pleasant.
There are flaws, yes. Object loading in the distance is of the popping variety that can be distracting, some ui elements are confusing, character models are weirdly ugly, animations are generally stiff. And there are lockboxes.
Still, it's a good game, and this from someone who stopped playing three times out of frustration.
went back a few months ago to try this out again and there was enough people active to play through all the lower end content..
With all the graphics maxed out it actually looks pretty decent as well.. sure its no age of Conan but its still up there with some of the recently released games..
Anyway I might spend a bit more time playing this.
They spent a couple of months not implementing the right features like the PvP system or the naval combat system, and getting rid of key pieces of the game. They mismanaged it and drove off the population.
Why would they try to implement new features when the features the game had didn't work. If anything drove the population a way it was the slow response to fixing bugs.
Falling to death whenever you're on a flying mount and you hit a chunk line is only fun for so long.
They were constantly fixing bugs as fast as they could. It was hard to do after SoE fired almost everyone who had a working knowledge of the game. Hard to complete a puzzle when some people left with the pieces.
They were fixing bugs as fast as they could, but they were also trying to WoWify the game, and that drove off their core audience. Without that, the game had nothing.
It's just easier to blame SoE than to think "the little guy" could have possibly bitten off more than he could chew.
Or to admit that without Smedley to kinda reel in that "visionary" Brad Mquaid and bring him down to earth EverQuest 1 might have ended up exactly how Vanguard launched. It takes more than just vision and grand ideas to make a successful product.
Vanguard has gone down the path of pay2win with the introduction of the new marketplace(The marketplace allows you to trade ral money for in-game items or "services").
Best in slot items are now available only through the use of store credit, and these items are also tradeable, making the aquisition of in-game currency very easy, if you're willing to pay real money for it.
Furthermore, crafting has become pointless with the addition of the most sought after craftable items to the marketplace.
Diplomacy is a simple grind, achievable with a G15 keyboard, and has not been worked on for years.
Exploiting, botting, basically all forms of cheating, has become the norm, SOE has demonstrated time and again that they are unwilling to enforce any part of their so called "code of conduct".
But the adventuring part is still good right? Wrong! Levels are now so easy to acquire that they lost all meaning, raiding has seen only a couple of new encounters during the past few years, all of which are buggy, laggy and poorly designed. The two new high level group areas are equally bugged, and offer little for the average end-game player. Gear acquisitions are equally pointless, as the marketplace items are far superior, and basically only requires you to open your wallet.
My advice? Stay far away, the first impression might be good, but the game is rotten to the core, and you will end up leaving with a very bad taste in your mouth.