Vanguard - maybe... maybe not

2hawks

I was not going to try Vanguard because, frankly, I wasn't overly impressed by what I was reading about it on boards prior to release.  But a friend had been in on Beta for a while and spoke well of it.  So, on release day, I impuslively went and bought it.  No lines at all, plenty in stock but the clerk was happy to see me coming to buy the game becuase he had been playing for a while in beta and said it was 'the best of EQ, WOW and SWG."  I never played SWG, but the others I have.

Admittedly I don't have the uber system : AMD Athlon XP2800, 1GB RAM, ATI Radeon 512MB AGP card...

But I figured it would be enough to play it a a bit below mid-level settings. And it is... sort of.  I can turn it all the way up and not move much but at least get a feel for what the 'good' graphics look like. 

I have made four characters and gotten up level 5ish on them all just to get  a feel for what it is all about. Granted that is just the tip of the iceburg...  but if you try something for a while you can get a basic idea of what the game is like as a whole.  Here goes my summary:

Details:

Tons of bugs:  After having spent some time and effort questing I have, often, crashed and gotten back in the game to find that all my efforts were "reset".  I heard this was supposedly fixed but it still happens to me sometimes.  Critters and mobs dissapear into the landscape while your fighting them so you can't hit them but they can hit you.  I started 'drowing' on dry land a couple of times.  Some npcs I can't target even though they are supposedly the ones you turn quests in to.  Adjusting graphics setting can sometime lead to game crashes but that could be a lot of things.

Graphics:  Set to what I am able to run at the graphics are pretty  drab and even ugly.  Still, when I crank it up (at the expense of being able to play it) the lighting and environment animation seem very nice.  The sky as well.  Character models are substandard.  I hate most of the character animations and the overall feel I get from them is they are mannequins with pretty textures - distracting and contrary to immersion.  Nightime is damn dark - I like that... you need your torch.

Gameplay:  Hmm... well.  I see a lot of posts saying how stupid WOW is with its grind factor.  This game has basically the same early quests - kill 10 buttmuchers and 10 buttmuncher grannies then go back to Schmobie.  It does have the Diplomacy 'card game' which is a pretty clever twist on questing and character dialogue - that is kind of fun.  Other than that I haven't played enough to know much more about the quests. The crafting I have barely touched upon, I thnk chopping the tree down is fun (for a while) and if the crafting is anything like the old EQ I would probably like it a lot.

Audio: Eh, not impressed... at all.  Music is ok.  Environment sounds are beta I think.

Overall:  Save your money unless you want to help them with your $50.00 to keep this pushing through beta - I wanted to help.  At best it seems like it could be a fairly cool game down the road and on a high end system  - loaded with pretty environments as well.   I feel like I have been in this game before which to me is a bit unappealing because it feels a bit stock... that could be mostly because of my system limitations and lack of time playing it though... I am not certain.  I will play out the month I payed for and be done with it for now.  I fear tha many people will be doing the same.  It will likely have a large enough following to keep it going for a while though so if you like the EQ feel with much nicer environments this may be perfect for you.

 

 

 

 

 

RonnyRulz

I have a high-end system, and although the environment is more beautiful with the details turned on, the fact remains the gameplay itself stays the same.

Also, one of the biggest withdrawls to immersion is there is NO OBJECT DRAW DISTANCE. This means that, although you can see out forever, you cannot see the objects until you are closer to them, so objects (as well as characters) "pop" into place, which is horrible.

Nice review though, and very truthful.