To the OP - well written and I look forward to reading all of your future posts. In my opinion 10 days in game is not going to provide enough time for you to really get to know what VG has to offer in terms of gameplay. But please, press on and I enjoy your writing very much!
Well, they decided how much time it SHOULD take to hook you with their free play pass. Now, did they fail in getting you a good enough feel in 10 days of play or fail to give enough free time to make the decision? They were able to pick more than 10 days of free time it they wanted that...
Diplomacy is pretty easy. i suggest not to read. just play the card game it is fun at first then it gets tedious. Reading it just kills it hehe
it is kinda like playing war with a deck of cards, except there are a few things taht are different. but yea it is not too fun. i like dum mini games like that :P
Crafting is not as random as it seems. Wether you get Excellent or poor is determined by your skill in that particular action (ie. sculpting), and the difficulty of the workorder. It may seem random at first but when at lvl 5 crafting you can see the difference. You may have noticed that the workorders have different difficulty, easiest being in the bottom of the workorder list.
I won't say it's completely random but the better you are at a certain crafting action and the easier workorder is, the bigger is the chance to get an excellent action.
You can't get an A quality item on a difficult workorder, atleast not on early lvls. If you're extremely lucky maybe you can get B.
I know, I know-- I’m a few days behind on posting, but I’ve still been playing and writing down my impressions. They’ll all be posted as I finish editing each entry.
Day 5
Today (Saturday) was a half-day of gaming for two reasons: 1. It was gorgeous outside, and 2. I had plans to hang out with friends that night.
Living in Austin, the climate around here is generally pleasant, apart from a couple of weeks of winter. And today was beautiful. Sunny and breezy, it was perfect hike & bike trail weather, so I spent most of my morning outside at a local park.
On top of that, I had plans to go hang out with some friends I haven't seen in a while. With SXSW's music festival starting on Wednesday, and the film and interactive stuff going on now, plus everyone having work and other commitments during the week, we settled on Saturday night, because once the tourists really start pouring in for all the bands, traffic, parking, and the clubs themselves will all be a crowded mess.
Knowing that my game time will be limited between now and the end of my trial, I’ve decided that I would spend my remaining game time going into the spots that gave me the most problems back when I played in Vanguard's beta just to see how things have changed, and how my computer would perform now.
The Raki are fun and all, but truth be told, I’m not seeing anything as I progress in Telon that will keep me here once my time is up. There’s very little in this game that I haven’t already done before in other MMO’s, at least with the exception of Diplomacy, which I didn’t find interesting at all, and the seemingly random complications in Crafting, which end up making the whole process tedious over time instead of challenging. And the environments still don’t awe me, or make me want to spend long hours on a quest, or going through dungeons. Still, I’ve made a commitment to play this trial, and I’m going to see it through to the end.
Since Saturday would only give me about 2 hours of play time, I would only have time for one place, so I went for the Dark Elves, putting the Gnomes and Half Elves off until Sunday or Monday.
For the most part, I wasn't as concerned about doing any of the quests (since I’d done them before) as much as I was wanting to see if many of the graphical glitches, and performance issues that plagued my time in beta had been resolved, or at least improved.
Back in beta, my time in the Dark Elf area was plagued with warping or disappearing mobs, massive amounts of lag, moonwalking NPC’s (i.e., they’d stop walking forward, then glide across the screen backwards), horrendous performance indoors, and laughable frame rates.
Outdoor rame rates aren’t as much of an issue now with my new system compared to my old one, but I have noticed that a couple of the same issues I dealt with before are still present in the game. I’ve even discovered a new one—ridiculously fast re-spawn rates.
The very first quest that a Dark Elf is given is to go and kill eight feeble elves in order to prove your blood superiority and your worth. Thing is, once I walked a few feet forward and found a feeble elf, that was it. He re-spawned in the same exact spot so quickly I didn’t even have to move in order to finish the quest. I’d kill him, loot, and before I’d even stood up, there he was again. Now, I don’t mind fast re-spawns on mobs, simply because the opposite—spawns that take an age and a half—are a pain in the ass. But seriously…I’d just finished looting the guy’s corpse and he was right there in front of me again. All of the challenge was completely removed.
Yes, I know. My character was only level 1, so why complain? Because not having to put in any effort at all in the beginning takes the fun out of things. I don’t mind having to move around, or work a bit for experience, even at that level.
As I leveled up, finishing the first yard trash quests, and moving on to some of the bigger newbie quests, I took a look around. The warping, disappearing and moonwalking mobs have largely been fixed since beta, which is a good thing. But I did have a rather interesting encounter with a pack camel in a small area full of traders and vagrants.
After finishing a quest to infiltrate their camp and find out the name of a traitor, the next part was to slaughter the vagrants and traders. Somehow, I ended up aggroing a pack camel that was not only offscreen and out of my line of sight, but he attacked me ass first, after sliding across the screen and doing a few twirls.
I have to admit that the sight made made me laugh, but at the same time, it’s a sign that not everything in this game is exactly polished, and that there are things that still need work.
Another thing is that the same issue I had with the dryads in the Raki area—specifically, the lack of death animations—is also present in the Dark Elf area. The humanoid mobs will stand there taking a beating, and might even react to being stunned, but at death, it’s the same issue as the dryads in that they abruptly fall over and die. It’s rather anti-climactic.
Frame rates inside the city area were much lower than the 30's-40's I was getting outdoors at Highest Quality, and there were times that I fell into the single digits simply because of the sheer number of NPC's, objects and areas being rendered at the same time:
Compared to performance I was seeing in the Raki area, even around other NPC's, there were many moments like this one, where the game would lock up and lag as it struggled to account for things that I couldn't even see, but which the engine sees fit to render anyways.
All in all, while the overall area for the Dark Elves has improved since I saw it in beta, there are still issues to be resolved, and things that need to be looked at. Up next: either the Gnomes or the Half Elves, depending on who I'm in the mood to try out.
Many people seem to experience problems with some of the nvidia 8800 cards.
I have the same CPU as you (but overclocked to 3Ghz, 1560fsb), 2 Gb ddr2 667 Mhz ram clocked at 750Mhz and an ati x1900xt-512, Audigy 1 sound card.
I'm running the game with all the settings maxed out and anisotropic 16x, on Vista 64.
My average FPS is always around 25 FPS. It can go as high as 40fps, but can drop to 18FPS very rarely. Overall I'm always at 24-27FPS. I never get such low FPS as you seem to sometimes get in your shots.
It seems there is still something wrong with the nvidia 8800 drivers or with how the game handles some of these cards. This can only improve in the future.
The more I play this game, the more I realize there really isn’t anything here.
Sure, there are a lot of races and classes, and a lot of starting areas, but beyond that, what does this game really have? I’m just not seeing it at all. It’s a very lifeless, soulless world, with NPC’s that spawn and re-spawn in the same exact spot every single time, and at a rate that takes all the challenge out of the game. Adding insult to injury, the combat is uninspiring and dull.
Yes, I know there are the two other spheres in this game. Crafting is more involved (and ultimately more tedious) than in other games, and you can advance in skill by filling work ordres for NPC’s (shades of DAoC—I seem to remember a similar system of crafting in their game as well) instead of just making things to advance and trying to sell them to players. And Diplomacy is where all the lore in the game is, which, based on my experience, takes an extraordinary amount of patience for the reams of bland text that you have to read in order to accomplish anything. Kudos to anyone who can do it, since you’ve got tons more patience for that sort of thing than I do.
But let’s not BS ourselves. The real meat and potatoes of the game—the Adventuring sphere—is the one that most people will focus on, since, for most gamers, it all ultimately comes down to combat, and the experience you have traveling through a world, slaughtering monsters (and other players, if PvP is your thing), and gaining loot and levels. Adventuring is also the sphere that needs a fair amount of work. Combat animations, spell effects, death animations, etc…..every single one of these things is stuck in 1999, and it shows.
Today, the boyfriend and I went into the Half Elven area of Tanvu, because for me, it was the absolute worst area in beta, and it would be the best test of how this game has improved since.
Back in beta, my frame rates in the Half Elf starting area were laughably bad. We’re talking Anarchy Online at launch bad. I don’t think I ever got over 5 FPS the entire time, and that was with me playing at the Balanced setting. Of course, my system during beta was also older, and not nearly as powerful as the one I’m using now, so it stands to reason that performance would suffer as a result.
Today was Me vs. Tanvu, Round 2.
Now that I have a much more powerful computer than before, I’m able to functionally play in the area, and at Highest Quality. On the whole, performance has improved a great deal, but I don’t know how much of that is hardware related and how much they actually changed in the world since I first played. In any event, the area is largely stable, with playable framerates in the 30’s-50’s, depending on how much was on my screen at any given time.
I won’t go into quest details at all for one simple reason—the quests you do when you first log in into the Half Elf area, and the quests that you end up really leveling up on as a newbie are two different things entirely, and are story driven. Going into any detail would spoil the entry area, and I won’t do that.
Still, some of the same issues that plagued other areas are here as well. Re-spawns are so fast as to remove all challenge from killing anything. For some quests, my Ranger could simply find one spawn and fire arrows repeatedly, loot, back up a few feet, then start all over again a few seconds later, since the mob I’d just killed was back again.
And moving up a little bit further to a Jin monastary of sorts brought out the warping, bad pathing, and weird glitches that existed before launch. One guy was permanently stuck in a corner, walking at top speed into the wall over and over and over, while the mobs that I was supposed to fight were warping and running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Curiously, this was the only part of the entire newbie area that had anything like this, but it was pretty bad.
We played for several hours, finishing a fair amount of quests and leveling up nicely, but ultimately, the experience left me cold. I quickly got the hang of the Ranger class, and we were able to duo effectively without any hassle or deaths, but the overall sterile feeling of the world, and the creeping sense that something is missing, and that so much is still unfinished just kept nagging at me. To my surprise, even the boyfriend expressed a similar opinion without my even saying a word.
I’m not sure what will happen, since it seems that even he is starting to see that Vanguard just isn’t the game he thought it would be. The bugs, glitches, lag, and overall dead, cardboard world are starting to get to him. It’s an odd thing for me to watch, since he is such a McQuaid fanboy, and he’s been championing this game for ages, long before I ever gave it more than a passing thought.
Days 7 & 8
I had two separate entries for these days, but upon reflection, I realized that they were essentially the same, so I’ve consolidated them into one.
The boyfriend, who had once been a fanboy of Vanguard, is now avoiding the game world altogether. Between the two of us, I’m the only one who has logged in at all in the last 48 hours, and most of that time has been spent doing Crafting work orders with my Raki, or spending time with the Dark Elf trying to give Diplomacy another go, and failing miserably.
Honestly, it’s all starting to feel like a death march, my time in Vanguard inexorably sliding to its final conclusion. But what is surprising me the most is the boyfriend.
He followed Vanguard from the very beginning. He’s the one who got me interested in the original EQ, and he’s been a big McQuaid fan for years. He was looking forward to what Brad would come up with next, and would have easily fit in among the cheerleaders of the game on these and other forums. Hell, before even getting his beta invite, he’d already set aside money for the big Collector’s Edition of the game, and had gotten many of our fellow guildies from CoH interested in giving the game a try.
Now, he doesn’t even want to play the game at all, and mentioned last night that even though his free month expires in two weeks, he’s going to cancel his account at the same time that my trial ends.
Of course, from his perspective, none of the game’s flaws or bugs are due to Brad, or Sigil, or anyone else other than Sony. Now, he’d fit right in with the folks in the “Angry at SOE” threads around here, because he blames them for forcing an early release, and, in his words, killing a game that could have been phenomenal, and condemning it to an average existence.
I don’t argue with him over it, simply because after all this time together, I know it’s a debate that will go nowhere. As far as he is concerned, it’s all on SOE for the failures of Vanguard, and if I suggest otherwise, we’ll just end up going ‘round in circles.
As for me, I think it’s a combination of things—too much ambition, too many changes to a game engine that wasn’t designed for MMO’s, and too much nostalgia for the way things were in 1999. Throw in a clear case of some sort of mismanagement of time and/or resources, due to the sheer amount of money and time spent in development compared to the end result at launch, and things were bound to get well and truly FUBAR’d. It’s a shame, really. This game could have been amazing. It could have been a lot of things. Instead, it’s turned out to be mediocre at best.
I’ve been trying to figure out what my general take on Vanguard is, and the one thing that keeps popping up in my mind is disappointment. The potential for the game was huge. The execution, on the other hand, left a lot to be desired.
Day 9
Well, it’s over a day ahead of schedule.
I got home from work with the intention of creating a Gnome, or some other character, just to try and squeeze out another night of play before my trial expires, only to find out that the boyfriend didn’t want to wait anymore, so he’d already cancelled his account and uninstalled the game.
It’s a sign to me of just how bummed out he is over the state of Vanguard, because I was sure he’d want to at least play for the last couple of days of my trial, but I guess I was wrong. And since we game together, one of us quitting or cancelling a game typically leads to the other doing the same. It happened in EQ and most of the other games we’ve played, and it’s happened again here in Vanguard.
I look at the screenshots I’ve taken one last time, try and figure out what the hell I’m even going to write here that would be any different. I then turn and uninstall the game from my hard drive.
I wanted to like Vanguard. I really did. I liked the original EQ, and like the boyfriend, was open and willing to give Brad’s new Vision a chance, but unfortunately, the Vision got buried under all the ambition, and the game has suffered for it.
Maybe someday, Vanguard will be a great game. Maybe in a year or so, they’ll get everything irorned out, add in new animations and effects, fix the voice overs, and give the game a new coat of paint. Mabye they’ll fix all the issues that exist in the world, and make the game more dynamic, and alive.
Maybe then, I’ll come back for another trial to give it another go.
Adding insult to injury, the combat is uninspiring and dull.
First of all you have a very professional, albeit calculatedly verbose, writing style. It's nice to read a post that is spelled correctly with grammar that won't lower my IQ.
That having been said, could you be more specific about the combat? How does it differ from other MMO's you have played? I hear the words uninspiring and dull used a lot in derogatory posts about all games, and I think personally they are a cop out from objectivity.
I find Vanguard's combat engaging and exciting compared to other MMO's of my recent memory such as CoV, WoW, Guild Wars and LotRO. I find Vanguard's combat extremely vital compared to these games where you really don't have to play close attention when soloing, at the very least in consideration of their death penalties.
Just speaking as a warrior, the plethora combat moves coupled with finishers and rescues make things very interesting. An easy fight can turn into a corpse run if you aren't making the most out of your attacks and the circumstances that you fall into during the fight.
Anyway looking forward to hearing some specifics, thanks for your time and posts.
Adding insult to injury, the combat is uninspiring and dull.
First of all you have a very professional, albeit calculatedly verbose, writing style. It's nice to read a post that is spelled correctly with grammar that won't lower my IQ.
That having been said, could you be more specific about the combat? How does it differ from other MMO's you have played? I hear the words uninspiring and dull used a lot in derogatory posts about all games, and I think personally they are a cop out from objectivity.
I find Vanguard's combat engaging and exciting compared to other MMO's of my recent memory such as CoV, WoW, Guild Wars and LotRO. I find Vanguard's combat extremely vital compared to these games where you really don't have to play close attention when soloing, at the very least in consideration of their death penalties.
Just speaking as a warrior, the plethora combat moves coupled with finishers and rescues make things very interesting. An easy fight can turn into a corpse run if you aren't making the most out of your attacks and the circumstances that you fall into during the fight.
Anyway looking forward to hearing some specifics, thanks for your time and posts.
For me, it's a matter of the challenge involved.
If all I have to do in order to finish a quest is find one spawn of a particular mob, then just kill him over and over and over because he respawns as soon as I loot the previous body, that's boring. The spawns in this game are largely static, and re-pop about as fast as you can mow through them. There's no challenge in that, and no reason to care about tactics as a result. It just becomes a matter of brute strength, and maybe a well placed spell or two.
Not only are the respawns quick, but in most cases (though I have seen exceptions), the other mobs nearby are either blind, deaf, dumb, or some combination of all three, because I can sit there and beat on their friend, and they'll just walk on by, or act like it isn't even happening. Where's the fun in that?
With a game like World of Warcraft (especially along the Dead Scar and in Deatholme in the Blood Elf starting area, both of which are fantastic for this), the potential for multiple adds, and for chaos is always there. And for me, it's an adrenaline rush. I *like* fighting in a place where I'm surrounded by wandering mobs that will aggro if they get in range, because it keeps me on my toes and it keeps me from getting lazy.
Even CoH/CoV has this potential, particularly on Mayhem/Safeguard missions, Task Forces, and on mission maps spawned in large groups at higher difficulty levels. I can be fighting one group, and have another aggro because of a runner, or because a teammate wandered too closely to the rest, or some other thing. That sort of edge-of-my-seat stuff, where I'm fighting mobs from all sides, and having to work wtih my team so that all of us stay alive is great fun.
I never got the sense of any of that from my time in Vanguard. Nothing gave me that kind of feeling. It all felt rote, like all I had to do was cast that one spell over and over and over, or just shoot arrows at that one spawn until he died 8-10 times in a row. It got very dull very quickly. And when you're fighting things that just abruptly fall over like cardboard standees that have been tipped over, any satisfaction at their death is short lived.
I'm spoiled by CoH/CoV, really. I like being able to send someone flying over a ledge, or knocking them stupid so they wander around dazed, and I like that sort of fast-paced action and chaos that can often ensue. Maybe that stuff exists in Vanguard, but if I have to slog through 30+ boring levels before seeing it, it's not worth it, IMO.
Vanguard is based with the community in mind. To find the fun in 80% of the mmorpgs you need to find yourself a good guild and you will see how the game opens up.
You are playing the game solo minded, duoing with your BF. If I was doing this I would be bored as you are; the same applies to most of the other mmorpgs.
Find yourself a guild, it will change your experience and you will see a different game (at least this is the case for me and so many others). It's such a blast clearing dungeons and stuff with a team on friends; a lot of relationships/friendships a emerging out of this.
There are some mmorpgs, like Wow for example, that are also build with the solo player in mind. If this is what you are looking for, you will have more fun with such games.
Vanguard is about friends and community, from your posts I see this is not what you were out for. Give it a try as it is meant to be played, it will be a completely different dimension of fun.
Hell, even the worst grinding games like Lineage 2 can be so much fun once you play them as they are meant to be played. L2 is one of the games with the best communities, I got so many friends and fun with people and clanies there. Of course the game that can be so much fun, sucks, alone.
Great post! It gives a typical view of the game. I agree with most of your points about the game. I think it gives the perspective of those of us that wanted this game to be good but it has fallen short in a big way.
As I sit at my computer for the weekend I simply can not bring myself to hit the Vanguard icon to log on.
I agree with some of your opinions of the game. I had a similar experience when I first started. Unfortunately, you chose to play several characters at low level, rather than concentrate on one character into at least the teens. The game is slow to get started, but your character doesn't really start to flesh out until levels 12-20. As for the fast respawns, you have to consider that newbie zones are notoriously overcrowded at release, they might have made the respawn rate that fast to account for that. It's much better than running around for 20 minutes trying to find mobs because 5 other guys are doing the same quest, most likely twinked as well (now anyways), so they can clear out a decent sized area in a few minutes.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fanboy by a longshot. I hated 90% of Everquest (I was a ranger, that should explain a lot). I absolutely despise timesinks, downtime, and forced grouping. The main reason I'm playing Vanguard is (in my opinion) it's the best new game out right now. I don't expect any big changes, but it'll at least keep me occupied until something better comes along.
(Read the post above, he beat me to it and it says almost the same things (got stuck watching tv!) )
Oh man, I do wish Vanguard was add free! All the adding is killing me. Was slapping some 3 dotted Bloodhowlers with a ranger guildy yesterday (am one myself) and we had to snare and root tons. He was a few levels under so we had to take it slow.
Now if he was a healer it would be more of a CoV/CoH experience as you call it. We could have gone into the camps, run em over, gotten a named or two (if there are any, not sure) . But it won't ever be the kind of action the City games have, mainly cause that all they're focused on.
Of course things are going to repop fast in starter areas. Would be a pain if it didn't. And yes, you just have a few attacks to use at the start (like the other games doesn't!) And clearly if you don't think Vanguard has adds, you haven't been in a full group down in a bigger dungeon. You'll get so many adds the tears will be running. Some cause of bugs, some cause of runners and walkers, and if you had my computer you'd get tons from lag.
But you played it and didn't like it. So it's all good.
I'm not at all impressed by a lot of things. But it's just the type of game I want to play at the moment. It won't be a long stay if they fail to make it more interesting characterwise as it's my biggest concern. If they do I'll probably be around.
Still, I enjoy it more than any other mmo I've played (apart from UO) and will be playing until something better comes along or until I can't stand it anymore.
My system spec is Pentium IV 3.4 Ghz, 2 GB RAM (Corsair brand no less) and an ATI Radeon X1900 GT 512MB (yes, it's that $500 3D card) and I can barely run Vanguard above 30 FPS on medium-low resolution. I tried maxing the graphic bar and the game turned into a slide show. And this is in non-crowded areas. In a crowded town, I can imagine how worse it will get. This alone turned me off the game which I WAS very excited about. I'm running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and Direct X 9.0c. I could run Elder Scrolls Oblivion in maximum settings with 8 x anti-aliasing @ 1320 x 768 like a charm but when it comes to Vanguard my system just fizzles and this is a serious sign of bad game coding.
All is not lost, Vanguard COULD be a good game and it just needs more polish. I'd say give it about 1 year time for the developers to spit polish this game, work out the bugs, optimize the game client coding and this game could be a gem.
Vanguard is based with the community in mind. To find the fun in 80% of the mmorpgs you need to find yourself a good guild and you will see how the game opens up.
You are playing the game solo minded, duoing with your BF. If I was doing this I would be bored as you are; the same applies to most of the other mmorpgs.
Find yourself a guild, it will change your experience and you will see a different game (at least this is the case for me and so many others). It's such a blast clearing dungeons and stuff with a team on friends; a lot of relationships/friendships a emerging out of this.
That's just it. I have a guild. We've been a tight-knit group of players since the CoH closed beta, and many of them are playing VG as well now. And I have the advantage of my guild being mostly made up of players from the same state, so we get together and hang out in real life, and can easily be on at scheduled times for grouping or raids, since we're all mostly in the same time zone.
But for me, the ultimate test of a game is how it handles in a duo, since there are times that the boyfriend and I will come on to game, and no one else is online.
We did the same thing in the original EverQuest. Because the first guild we were in at the time had people scattered across the world, not everyone was on at the same time, or at similar levels, so as a consequence we spent a lot of time kiting things around as a duo. It actually worked rather well until we hit raiding levels, then we had to jump ship to a group that was more centralized here in the States, just so we could get in on raids easier.
In Vanguard, though, the biggest problem is that while many of us were online at the same time, everyone had different ideas of what they wanted to play, so we were scattered to the four winds in different areas with large distances between us. This made grouping together an issue. And it made it everyone's mission to level up to where you could buy a mount, then trying to find a centralized area to meet.
The problem is, in trying to fulfill that plan, we could never find a duo to settle on beyond level 11 (which was, I think, the highest level of all of the toons I ended up playing) simply because the areas we'd play in would get boring very quickly due to the mind-numbing combat, and sterile feel of the world. I'd just get tired of the poor voice overs, static NPC's, and lifeless feel of wherever we were, and would have to go elsewhere.
I'm sure we could have easily gotten a duo into the high teens/early 20's in the time I played, but that would have depended on being able to endure an area long enough to do that. It was never meant to be, I guess.
Vanguard is based with the community in mind. To find the fun in 80% of the mmorpgs you need to find yourself a good guild and you will see how the game opens up.
You are playing the game solo minded, duoing with your BF. If I was doing this I would be bored as you are; the same applies to most of the other mmorpgs.
Find yourself a guild, it will change your experience and you will see a different game (at least this is the case for me and so many others). It's such a blast clearing dungeons and stuff with a team on friends; a lot of relationships/friendships a emerging out of this.
That's just it. I have a guild. We've been a tight-knit group of players since the CoH closed beta, and many of them are playing VG as well now. And I have the advantage of my guild being mostly made up of players from the same state, so we get together and hang out in real life, and can easily be on at scheduled times for grouping or raids, since we're all mostly in the same time zone.
But for me, the ultimate test of a game is how it handles in a duo, since there are times that the boyfriend and I will come on to game, and no one else is online.
We did the same thing in the original EverQuest. Because the first guild we were in at the time had people scattered across the world, not everyone was on at the same time, or at similar levels, so as a consequence we spent a lot of time kiting things around as a duo. It actually worked rather well until we hit raiding levels, then we had to jump ship to a group that was more centralized here in the States, just so we could get in on raids easier.
In Vanguard, though, the biggest problem is that while many of us were online at the same time, everyone had different ideas of what they wanted to play, so we were scattered to the four winds in different areas with large distances between us. This made grouping together an issue. And it made it everyone's mission to level up to where you could buy a mount, then trying to find a centralized area to meet.
The problem is, in trying to fulfill that plan, we could never find a duo to settle on beyond level 11 (which was, I think, the highest level of all of the toons I ended up playing) simply because the areas we'd play in would get boring very quickly due to the mind-numbing combat, and sterile feel of the world. I'd just get tired of the poor voice overs, static NPC's, and lifeless feel of wherever we were, and would have to go elsewhere.
I'm sure we could have easily gotten a duo into the high teens/early 20's in the time I played, but that would have depended on being able to endure an area long enough to do that. It was never meant to be, I guess.
Unless you're actually a newbie, newbie areas will be dull. I can't count the number of mmos and muds I've played/trial/tested. The early levels are always boring. They are usually designed to teach the basics of combat, movement etc. For anyone with any previous gaming experience, we know what we need to know before we ding level 2. But it's not like that for everyone.
Unless you're actually a newbie, newbie areas will be dull. I can't count the number of mmos and muds I've played/trial/tested. The early levels are always boring. They are usually designed to teach the basics of combat, movement etc. For anyone with any previous gaming experience, we know what we need to know before we ding level 2. But it's not like that for everyone.
That's a good point.
I think that's one of the things I like about CoH so much. After you create a character, it's possible to skip the tutorial area entirely and just go straight into the game. I can just create a hero, go in and start leveling up. With any luck, they'll find a way to do that for the villain side.
I wish more devs would make starting areas optional, or at least not so dull. It would be nice.
Edit again: 1 gig isn't 1k megs. I can't remember exactly but I believe it's something around the 800 meg range. If vista is using 600 megs then how far off is it really from a gig? But I guess it's easier to just blame software then to accually trouble shoot hardware to see if maybe there is some sort of incompatability between it and the obviously faulty software.
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No idea if it's been answered yet (I'm reading, but just had to jump in) but 1GB is 1024MB, just as 1MB is 1024KB
So yes, 600MB is a long way off from a gig.
Edit:
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And 1024 is 512x2 and not 1gb. doesn't work that way, never has, and that's information handed down to me from a software programmer.
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Was that a bird that flew by, or any form of credibility you might've had before that little comment?
I think there are 2 different design schools in regards to the newbie areas and your time spent there.
One is to show all you got, and present the best-written, most accessable and varied questlines you can, in the most-polished areas you can, to hook a new player right away and keep them for a few days, till the "crack" effect kicks in, and they keep playing.
The other is to offer better quests and stories as an incentive to level up, and present more detailed and interesting content (and more complex) as you go, not to overwhelm a newcomer.
World of Warcraft goes strictly for apporach No. 1, wheres Vanguard goes strictly for approach No.2. Which leads to the known result of WoW players quitting when they hit the max and end up re-doing content thats not very inspired to begin with over and over, and Vanguard players often not getting beyond the first 10-15 levels and giving up.
Skipping a Tutorial is something I believe should be possible after you've done it once. Lots of people that really need to do a tutorial are going to skip it, cause they think they know games from playing Counterstrike, and you end up with a large base of people not really "getting" the game.
AoConan, from what I heard, is shooting for such an approach. I ll check it out I suppose and see how it works.
In the end, I think Vanguard is not showing enough muscle at low levels for todays crowd thats more in the vein of fast and early gratification. Since I hit 20, all the way to now 39, I have always had a TON of interesting things to do, and often very challenging areas, with fast-paced combat and high risk high reward. However at level 1-14 or so, your class isnt even capable of a third of its final abilities, and frankly doesnt play like it will at 30, or 40, or even 50. So many class-defining abilities come spread over the levels that the juicy stuff is the early mid-game, not the start.
I almost left the game early during a particularly boring stretch at level 12, but now I am happy I stayed. For the amount of content, there is no better deal out there for an MMO. You just have to get to it, and you cant do it all solo.
I think there are 2 different design schools in regards to the newbie areas and your time spent there.
One is to show all you got, and present the best-written, most accessable and varied questlines you can, in the most-polished areas you can, to hook a new player right away and keep them for a few days, till the "crack" effect kicks in, and they keep playing.
The other is to offer better quests and stories as an incentive to level up, and present more detailed and interesting content (and more complex) as you go, not to overwhelm a newcomer.
World of Warcraft goes strictly for apporach No. 1, wheres Vanguard goes strictly for approach No.2. Which leads to the known result of WoW players quitting when they hit the max and end up re-doing content thats not very inspired to begin with over and over, and Vanguard players often not getting beyond the first 10-15 levels and giving up.
Skipping a Tutorial is something I believe should be possible after you've done it once. Lots of people that really need to do a tutorial are going to skip it, cause they think they know games from playing Counterstrike, and you end up with a large base of people not really "getting" the game.
AoConan, from what I heard, is shooting for such an approach. I ll check it out I suppose and see how it works.
In the end, I think Vanguard is not showing enough muscle at low levels for todays crowd thats more in the vein of fast and early gratification. Since I hit 20, all the way to now 39, I have always had a TON of interesting things to do, and often very challenging areas, with fast-paced combat and high risk high reward. However at level 1-14 or so, your class isnt even capable of a third of its final abilities, and frankly doesnt play like it will at 30, or 40, or even 50. So many class-defining abilities come spread over the levels that the juicy stuff is the early mid-game, not the start.
I almost left the game early during a particularly boring stretch at level 12, but now I am happy I stayed. For the amount of content, there is no better deal out there for an MMO. You just have to get to it, and you cant do it all solo.
See, I like approach #1. If a game only has 50 levels total, like Vanguard, hooking me in the first 10-20 levels is vital, since that's anywhere from 20-40% of the total game, at least in terms of levels. The initial rush is the key-- if a player isn't impressed with what they first encounter in a world, particularly in an MMO, that's going to color their perception of the rest of the game.
Approach #2 makes everything in the early game tedious, since you have to slog your way through a bunch of mind-numbing, boring levels in order to get to anything decent, and games really don't work that way anymore. And I don't think that's an effect of World of Warcraft, either. Even before that game ever came out, other MMO's that were trying to compete with EverQuest took great pains to try and move away from the "killing rats in the newbie yard" approach that EQ had. Anarchy Online had its mission terminals, DAoC had its guild system, where you started as a general class, then specialized as you went, etc. They tried to give you enough variety, and enough of a different experience from the start that you became interested in how your character would evolve.
I don't think it's a matter of needing instant gratification, as much as it is a need for games to give players a reason to stick around during the early levels. If the first 20 levels of a 50 level game suck, what makes the other 30 any different? By that point, a player should feel truly connected to both the game and the larger world out there. They shouldn't have to wait for much higher levels before the game world opens up. There should be enough offered at the beginning to make the world feel dynamic and alive, and for that game to sink their hooks into a player.
It's like a good book-- the first few chapters will set up the story, the initial conflicts, introduce the characters and settings, etc., and offer just enough of a hint of the overall plot to keep people reading all the way to the end. But if those first few chapters are pedantic and feel like the author just phoned it in, then most people won't stick with the book long enough to get absorbed by the story.
Because Vanguard has tucked the story away in the Diplomacy sphere, Adventuring suffers as a result. You're not really given any reason why your character matters, or what your part in the overall world really is. And with the early levels amounting to little more than killing rats in the newbie yard, it all feels stale, and like a re-tread of what's come before, at least IMO.
Even a twit knows that any one at the outset of making a game uses an old game engine well people ought to know by know its a twits way of going about making a state of the art game
what you end up with is state of the art piled on a pos which ends up with glitches and makes a finished product look like its in Alpha still
BRAD forget about it its a dead horse
I wont touch it with a ten foot pole its goes in the trash bin along side the DnL disc
While I respect your opinion about where a developer should lay his eggs mostly (yours being early, mine being later on), I think its not fair to say that a game with 50 levels on the normal progression (each level a tad slower than the one before) of MMOs can be summed up as providing 20% of its content at level 10, or that its 20% of the game in terms of gameplay. For example, not only do you spend more time each level, and visit more places each level later on, you also (at least in Vanguard, but its normal in other games too) get more skills per level (or every 2, or 4, or 5, whatever the game uses) later on.
I agree that in an ideal world, the level 1-10 era would be as fun and nice as the 20-30, but fact is, when you spend 1 day in level 1-10, and 10 days level 20-30, its obvious where the limited ressource of development time is getting used better.
I still dont say the "kill rats in freeports frontyard" approach is a good one. I believe in a strong intro if possible, but I also think starting strong and finishing weak is as much a mistake as starting weak and finishing strong. However, I dont know any MMO to date that managed to get both strong, with one singular exception (to me, at least) which is Guild Wars (and thats not a real MMO). But GW is story-driven, not level-driven for the most part.
For example, I was absolutely hooked on WoWs early levels, with the great storylines and well-designed zones on the alliance side, human area.... up to the finishing of Duskwood. From then on, quality dropped like a rock. It seemed, and still seems, as if the devs blew their powder on the initial 20 levels there. I know others felt the same.
In the end, when you hit 14 in Vanguard, things begin to open up a lot. 14 is actually the level at which I would say Vanguard has, the first time, the chance to outshine its competitors. Areas like Khegors End, Lyceum, Temple of Dailuk, Ksaravi Gulch, the bamboo forests and the asylum in Kojan.... they are fun, they are well-written and dont make you feel useless and small. But by then, I think a lot have already given up, wrongly predicting the rest of the game to play like the first 13 levels.
If I have learned one thing in the MMO genre, its that the first 10-20 levels are nothing like the game you bought. Sometimes they are better (WoW), sometimes they are worse (VG), but I dont know a single game where the mainstay of gameplay is like the first 10 levels. I dont know why experienced gamers still judge a book by its cover in that regard.
Or did you raid at level 10 in EQ? Did you skillchain by level 15 in FFXI? Did you siege castles at level 15 in Lineage?
I read up on Conan in that regard btw, and I think we may have a winner there. 20 levels introduction, story-based, and mostly soloable (though the option to group during a very clever day/night cycle) then being released into the world at 20, picking your final class. I believe thats the best way to use limited developer ressources, and still hook a player...... it just doesnt pay spending tons of time on content that people dont WANT to be held up by.
I read up on Conan in that regard btw, and I think we may have a winner there. 20 levels introduction, story-based, and mostly soloable (though the option to group during a very clever day/night cycle) then being released into the world at 20, picking your final class. I believe thats the best way to use limited developer ressources, and still hook a player...... it just doesnt pay spending tons of time on content that people dont WANT to be held up by.
Age of Conan has promise from what little I've read.
I'll probably give the game a go once it gets to open beta and see if i like it, but from the basic idea of working your way through for 20 levels, then joining the game at large is definitely intriguing. It sounds like something I would enjoy.
Because Vanguard has tucked the story away in the Diplomacy sphere, Adventuring suffers as a result. You're not really given any reason why your character matters, or what your part in the overall world really is. And with the early levels amounting to little more than killing rats in the newbie yard, it all feels stale, and like a re-tread of what's come before, at least IMO.
I agree with what Khaunshar posted above. The leveling is slowing down a lot the more you level up. Lvls 10-20 looks more like the 10% of the adventuring game. At level 11 that would mean about 5%. (even less).
Now, take the part I quoted from you: the 100% of the game is 3 spheres (adventuring/diplomacy/crafting). If you are only adventuring you are missing the 2/3rds of the game. Myself, I enjoy taking breaks from adventuring/grinding to do some diplomacy and some crafting. I play the whole game, not only the 30%.
So, I adventure, then I get some lore with the diplomacy which will later on become even more interesting with faction plays, do some crafting and increase my skills which will later lead me to building houses that are part of play run cities (-> how will the faction plays of the adventuring and diplomacy spheres play out with those ^^ hehe)...
This will be even more interesting when the 3 spheres become more interwoven later on.
Of course with the diplomacy lore I still don't really know WHY I am adventuring in this world, but I know what the world is about and once I know this it changes the picture (my perception of the world) completely. When I then go on adventuring quests or some dungeons I feel that this world exists and it somehow all feels connected.
So this game is a whole with 3 spheres. As I said above, at lvl 11 you have done maybe 5% of the adventuring part, which itself is about 33.... lets say 40% of the game.
You have played 40% of 5% = 2 or 3% of the game.
Of course, you can discuss these numbers. But you get the picture of what the point here is.
That being said, I agree with you when you say that the game should do a much better job of capturing your interest in the early levels.
Nice post Lidane. I enjoyed the reading. I built a new comp also for the game. e6400, 965-ds3 board, 2 gigs Buffalo Firestix ddr2 800, ATI x1950xt video, 200 gig Maxtor sata HD. Was gonna buy a 8800 but my friends who have them were having problems running Vanguard, sometimes running good sometimes bad. They are running Vista and xp pro. The 2 guys with Vista are having more problems than the friend with XP pro. Seems the vista Nvidia drivers were hurried and not that good. Seems to me that the Radeons run smoother at slow frame rates than Nvidia cards. I get anywhere from 35 to 70 in the sticks on High Quality but when Im in town, Tanvu, I switch to balanced. I agree that there are some problems with chunking and some mobs acting goofy, but nothing there thats gonna make me quit . Logged onto EQ2 and got a bug at log in, lol. The guy giving you tips on setup was correct too. This isnt a console game. We have computers and we can tweak em, thats a great thing sometimes. On my old comp I was using 1 gig of ram using Freeram xp program to keep track of my ram usage. It ran usually in game at about 250 mb free. Now on my new comp with 2 gigs I get about 350 mb free so this game like some others are a ram hog. Vista does take more of your ram to run that xp thats a fact., and all the sites that I seen that tested Vista against XP saw drops in frame rates for Vista in every game they tried. I learned awhile back if something is brand new dont but it till it gets the chance to be used and people find the weak points of it. Vista will prolly rock once service pack 2 comes out . Every windows that has launched was just a work in progress. I am not ragging on your system or anything like that just wanted to share what I have seen. Gonna order a 8800 next week Newegg has em for 279 the 320 version right now. I want one to try for 10000 on the futuremark 06 test. The x1950xt is capped at 7080.
From some of your comments, I would guess that you might like Lord of the Rings Online. Open beta coming up.
I beta'd VG for a while, stopped playing, retried in late beta and found it considerably improved. I bought the box, but only lasted three weeks post-release. At that time my LotRO beta invitation arrived, and it was like a breath of fresh air. I'd never quite fit in VG, (somehow the game and I were just on different wavelengths) and my system is not that great. In LotRO, I found the art direction outstanding, the geographical density a welcome change (it is very dense), and my system runs it well. Their use of instancing in special quests (as well as the usual dungeons and such) seems to be new and unique, and it is very effective.
As you've probably heard, the game is already polished well; final economic and class balancing is underway.
Whether or not a game hits the spot is very individual, so all I can suggest is that you try it.
Oh, and VG was just too dark for me too. With a good CRT with deep blacks, properly adjusted gamma and older eyes, it was just too damn dark at times!
Comments
it is kinda like playing war with a deck of cards, except there are a few things taht are different. but yea it is not too fun. i like dum mini games like that :P
I won't say it's completely random but the better you are at a certain crafting action and the easier workorder is, the bigger is the chance to get an excellent action.
You can't get an A quality item on a difficult workorder, atleast not on early lvls. If you're extremely lucky maybe you can get B.
I know, I know-- I’m a few days behind on posting, but I’ve still been playing and writing down my impressions. They’ll all be posted as I finish editing each entry.
Day 5
Today (Saturday) was a half-day of gaming for two reasons: 1. It was gorgeous outside, and 2. I had plans to hang out with friends that night.
Living in Austin, the climate around here is generally pleasant, apart from a couple of weeks of winter. And today was beautiful. Sunny and breezy, it was perfect hike & bike trail weather, so I spent most of my morning outside at a local park.
On top of that, I had plans to go hang out with some friends I haven't seen in a while. With SXSW's music festival starting on Wednesday, and the film and interactive stuff going on now, plus everyone having work and other commitments during the week, we settled on Saturday night, because once the tourists really start pouring in for all the bands, traffic, parking, and the clubs themselves will all be a crowded mess.
Knowing that my game time will be limited between now and the end of my trial, I’ve decided that I would spend my remaining game time going into the spots that gave me the most problems back when I played in Vanguard's beta just to see how things have changed, and how my computer would perform now.
The Raki are fun and all, but truth be told, I’m not seeing anything as I progress in Telon that will keep me here once my time is up. There’s very little in this game that I haven’t already done before in other MMO’s, at least with the exception of Diplomacy, which I didn’t find interesting at all, and the seemingly random complications in Crafting, which end up making the whole process tedious over time instead of challenging. And the environments still don’t awe me, or make me want to spend long hours on a quest, or going through dungeons. Still, I’ve made a commitment to play this trial, and I’m going to see it through to the end.
Since Saturday would only give me about 2 hours of play time, I would only have time for one place, so I went for the Dark Elves, putting the Gnomes and Half Elves off until Sunday or Monday.
For the most part, I wasn't as concerned about doing any of the quests (since I’d done them before) as much as I was wanting to see if many of the graphical glitches, and performance issues that plagued my time in beta had been resolved, or at least improved.
Back in beta, my time in the Dark Elf area was plagued with warping or disappearing mobs, massive amounts of lag, moonwalking NPC’s (i.e., they’d stop walking forward, then glide across the screen backwards), horrendous performance indoors, and laughable frame rates.
Outdoor rame rates aren’t as much of an issue now with my new system compared to my old one, but I have noticed that a couple of the same issues I dealt with before are still present in the game. I’ve even discovered a new one—ridiculously fast re-spawn rates.
The very first quest that a Dark Elf is given is to go and kill eight feeble elves in order to prove your blood superiority and your worth. Thing is, once I walked a few feet forward and found a feeble elf, that was it. He re-spawned in the same exact spot so quickly I didn’t even have to move in order to finish the quest. I’d kill him, loot, and before I’d even stood up, there he was again. Now, I don’t mind fast re-spawns on mobs, simply because the opposite—spawns that take an age and a half—are a pain in the ass. But seriously…I’d just finished looting the guy’s corpse and he was right there in front of me again. All of the challenge was completely removed.
Yes, I know. My character was only level 1, so why complain? Because not having to put in any effort at all in the beginning takes the fun out of things. I don’t mind having to move around, or work a bit for experience, even at that level.
As I leveled up, finishing the first yard trash quests, and moving on to some of the bigger newbie quests, I took a look around. The warping, disappearing and moonwalking mobs have largely been fixed since beta, which is a good thing. But I did have a rather interesting encounter with a pack camel in a small area full of traders and vagrants.
After finishing a quest to infiltrate their camp and find out the name of a traitor, the next part was to slaughter the vagrants and traders. Somehow, I ended up aggroing a pack camel that was not only offscreen and out of my line of sight, but he attacked me ass first, after sliding across the screen and doing a few twirls.
I have to admit that the sight made made me laugh, but at the same time, it’s a sign that not everything in this game is exactly polished, and that there are things that still need work.
Another thing is that the same issue I had with the dryads in the Raki area—specifically, the lack of death animations—is also present in the Dark Elf area. The humanoid mobs will stand there taking a beating, and might even react to being stunned, but at death, it’s the same issue as the dryads in that they abruptly fall over and die. It’s rather anti-climactic.
Frame rates inside the city area were much lower than the 30's-40's I was getting outdoors at Highest Quality, and there were times that I fell into the single digits simply because of the sheer number of NPC's, objects and areas being rendered at the same time:Compared to performance I was seeing in the Raki area, even around other NPC's, there were many moments like this one, where the game would lock up and lag as it struggled to account for things that I couldn't even see, but which the engine sees fit to render anyways.
All in all, while the overall area for the Dark Elves has improved since I saw it in beta, there are still issues to be resolved, and things that need to be looked at. Up next: either the Gnomes or the Half Elves, depending on who I'm in the mood to try out.
Nice reviews.
Many people seem to experience problems with some of the nvidia 8800 cards.
I have the same CPU as you (but overclocked to 3Ghz, 1560fsb), 2 Gb ddr2 667 Mhz ram clocked at 750Mhz and an ati x1900xt-512, Audigy 1 sound card.
I'm running the game with all the settings maxed out and anisotropic 16x, on Vista 64.
My average FPS is always around 25 FPS. It can go as high as 40fps, but can drop to 18FPS very rarely. Overall I'm always at 24-27FPS. I never get such low FPS as you seem to sometimes get in your shots.
It seems there is still something wrong with the nvidia 8800 drivers or with how the game handles some of these cards. This can only improve in the future.
Day 6
The more I play this game, the more I realize there really isn’t anything here.
Sure, there are a lot of races and classes, and a lot of starting areas, but beyond that, what does this game really have? I’m just not seeing it at all. It’s a very lifeless, soulless world, with NPC’s that spawn and re-spawn in the same exact spot every single time, and at a rate that takes all the challenge out of the game. Adding insult to injury, the combat is uninspiring and dull.
Yes, I know there are the two other spheres in this game. Crafting is more involved (and ultimately more tedious) than in other games, and you can advance in skill by filling work ordres for NPC’s (shades of DAoC—I seem to remember a similar system of crafting in their game as well) instead of just making things to advance and trying to sell them to players. And Diplomacy is where all the lore in the game is, which, based on my experience, takes an extraordinary amount of patience for the reams of bland text that you have to read in order to accomplish anything. Kudos to anyone who can do it, since you’ve got tons more patience for that sort of thing than I do.
But let’s not BS ourselves. The real meat and potatoes of the game—the Adventuring sphere—is the one that most people will focus on, since, for most gamers, it all ultimately comes down to combat, and the experience you have traveling through a world, slaughtering monsters (and other players, if PvP is your thing), and gaining loot and levels. Adventuring is also the sphere that needs a fair amount of work. Combat animations, spell effects, death animations, etc…..every single one of these things is stuck in 1999, and it shows.
Today, the boyfriend and I went into the Half Elven area of Tanvu, because for me, it was the absolute worst area in beta, and it would be the best test of how this game has improved since.
Back in beta, my frame rates in the Half Elf starting area were laughably bad. We’re talking Anarchy Online at launch bad. I don’t think I ever got over 5 FPS the entire time, and that was with me playing at the Balanced setting. Of course, my system during beta was also older, and not nearly as powerful as the one I’m using now, so it stands to reason that performance would suffer as a result.
Today was Me vs. Tanvu, Round 2.
Now that I have a much more powerful computer than before, I’m able to functionally play in the area, and at Highest Quality. On the whole, performance has improved a great deal, but I don’t know how much of that is hardware related and how much they actually changed in the world since I first played. In any event, the area is largely stable, with playable framerates in the 30’s-50’s, depending on how much was on my screen at any given time.
I won’t go into quest details at all for one simple reason—the quests you do when you first log in into the Half Elf area, and the quests that you end up really leveling up on as a newbie are two different things entirely, and are story driven. Going into any detail would spoil the entry area, and I won’t do that.
Still, some of the same issues that plagued other areas are here as well. Re-spawns are so fast as to remove all challenge from killing anything. For some quests, my Ranger could simply find one spawn and fire arrows repeatedly, loot, back up a few feet, then start all over again a few seconds later, since the mob I’d just killed was back again.
And moving up a little bit further to a Jin monastary of sorts brought out the warping, bad pathing, and weird glitches that existed before launch. One guy was permanently stuck in a corner, walking at top speed into the wall over and over and over, while the mobs that I was supposed to fight were warping and running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Curiously, this was the only part of the entire newbie area that had anything like this, but it was pretty bad.
We played for several hours, finishing a fair amount of quests and leveling up nicely, but ultimately, the experience left me cold. I quickly got the hang of the Ranger class, and we were able to duo effectively without any hassle or deaths, but the overall sterile feeling of the world, and the creeping sense that something is missing, and that so much is still unfinished just kept nagging at me. To my surprise, even the boyfriend expressed a similar opinion without my even saying a word.
I’m not sure what will happen, since it seems that even he is starting to see that Vanguard just isn’t the game he thought it would be. The bugs, glitches, lag, and overall dead, cardboard world are starting to get to him. It’s an odd thing for me to watch, since he is such a McQuaid fanboy, and he’s been championing this game for ages, long before I ever gave it more than a passing thought.
Days 7 & 8
I had two separate entries for these days, but upon reflection, I realized that they were essentially the same, so I’ve consolidated them into one.
The boyfriend, who had once been a fanboy of Vanguard, is now avoiding the game world altogether. Between the two of us, I’m the only one who has logged in at all in the last 48 hours, and most of that time has been spent doing Crafting work orders with my Raki, or spending time with the Dark Elf trying to give Diplomacy another go, and failing miserably.
Honestly, it’s all starting to feel like a death march, my time in Vanguard inexorably sliding to its final conclusion. But what is surprising me the most is the boyfriend.
He followed Vanguard from the very beginning. He’s the one who got me interested in the original EQ, and he’s been a big McQuaid fan for years. He was looking forward to what Brad would come up with next, and would have easily fit in among the cheerleaders of the game on these and other forums. Hell, before even getting his beta invite, he’d already set aside money for the big Collector’s Edition of the game, and had gotten many of our fellow guildies from CoH interested in giving the game a try.
Now, he doesn’t even want to play the game at all, and mentioned last night that even though his free month expires in two weeks, he’s going to cancel his account at the same time that my trial ends.
Of course, from his perspective, none of the game’s flaws or bugs are due to Brad, or Sigil, or anyone else other than Sony. Now, he’d fit right in with the folks in the “Angry at SOE” threads around here, because he blames them for forcing an early release, and, in his words, killing a game that could have been phenomenal, and condemning it to an average existence.
I don’t argue with him over it, simply because after all this time together, I know it’s a debate that will go nowhere. As far as he is concerned, it’s all on SOE for the failures of Vanguard, and if I suggest otherwise, we’ll just end up going ‘round in circles.
As for me, I think it’s a combination of things—too much ambition, too many changes to a game engine that wasn’t designed for MMO’s, and too much nostalgia for the way things were in 1999. Throw in a clear case of some sort of mismanagement of time and/or resources, due to the sheer amount of money and time spent in development compared to the end result at launch, and things were bound to get well and truly FUBAR’d. It’s a shame, really. This game could have been amazing. It could have been a lot of things. Instead, it’s turned out to be mediocre at best.
I’ve been trying to figure out what my general take on Vanguard is, and the one thing that keeps popping up in my mind is disappointment. The potential for the game was huge. The execution, on the other hand, left a lot to be desired.
Day 9
Well, it’s over a day ahead of schedule.
I got home from work with the intention of creating a Gnome, or some other character, just to try and squeeze out another night of play before my trial expires, only to find out that the boyfriend didn’t want to wait anymore, so he’d already cancelled his account and uninstalled the game.
It’s a sign to me of just how bummed out he is over the state of Vanguard, because I was sure he’d want to at least play for the last couple of days of my trial, but I guess I was wrong. And since we game together, one of us quitting or cancelling a game typically leads to the other doing the same. It happened in EQ and most of the other games we’ve played, and it’s happened again here in Vanguard.
I look at the screenshots I’ve taken one last time, try and figure out what the hell I’m even going to write here that would be any different. I then turn and uninstall the game from my hard drive.
I wanted to like Vanguard. I really did. I liked the original EQ, and like the boyfriend, was open and willing to give Brad’s new Vision a chance, but unfortunately, the Vision got buried under all the ambition, and the game has suffered for it.
Maybe someday, Vanguard will be a great game. Maybe in a year or so, they’ll get everything irorned out, add in new animations and effects, fix the voice overs, and give the game a new coat of paint. Mabye they’ll fix all the issues that exist in the world, and make the game more dynamic, and alive.
Maybe then, I’ll come back for another trial to give it another go.
We’ll see. For now, my time in Telon is done.
First of all you have a very professional, albeit calculatedly verbose, writing style. It's nice to read a post that is spelled correctly with grammar that won't lower my IQ.
That having been said, could you be more specific about the combat? How does it differ from other MMO's you have played? I hear the words uninspiring and dull used a lot in derogatory posts about all games, and I think personally they are a cop out from objectivity.
I find Vanguard's combat engaging and exciting compared to other MMO's of my recent memory such as CoV, WoW, Guild Wars and LotRO. I find Vanguard's combat extremely vital compared to these games where you really don't have to play close attention when soloing, at the very least in consideration of their death penalties.
Just speaking as a warrior, the plethora combat moves coupled with finishers and rescues make things very interesting. An easy fight can turn into a corpse run if you aren't making the most out of your attacks and the circumstances that you fall into during the fight.
Anyway looking forward to hearing some specifics, thanks for your time and posts.
First of all you have a very professional, albeit calculatedly verbose, writing style. It's nice to read a post that is spelled correctly with grammar that won't lower my IQ.
That having been said, could you be more specific about the combat? How does it differ from other MMO's you have played? I hear the words uninspiring and dull used a lot in derogatory posts about all games, and I think personally they are a cop out from objectivity.
I find Vanguard's combat engaging and exciting compared to other MMO's of my recent memory such as CoV, WoW, Guild Wars and LotRO. I find Vanguard's combat extremely vital compared to these games where you really don't have to play close attention when soloing, at the very least in consideration of their death penalties.
Just speaking as a warrior, the plethora combat moves coupled with finishers and rescues make things very interesting. An easy fight can turn into a corpse run if you aren't making the most out of your attacks and the circumstances that you fall into during the fight.
Anyway looking forward to hearing some specifics, thanks for your time and posts.
For me, it's a matter of the challenge involved.
If all I have to do in order to finish a quest is find one spawn of a particular mob, then just kill him over and over and over because he respawns as soon as I loot the previous body, that's boring. The spawns in this game are largely static, and re-pop about as fast as you can mow through them. There's no challenge in that, and no reason to care about tactics as a result. It just becomes a matter of brute strength, and maybe a well placed spell or two.
Not only are the respawns quick, but in most cases (though I have seen exceptions), the other mobs nearby are either blind, deaf, dumb, or some combination of all three, because I can sit there and beat on their friend, and they'll just walk on by, or act like it isn't even happening. Where's the fun in that?
With a game like World of Warcraft (especially along the Dead Scar and in Deatholme in the Blood Elf starting area, both of which are fantastic for this), the potential for multiple adds, and for chaos is always there. And for me, it's an adrenaline rush. I *like* fighting in a place where I'm surrounded by wandering mobs that will aggro if they get in range, because it keeps me on my toes and it keeps me from getting lazy.
Even CoH/CoV has this potential, particularly on Mayhem/Safeguard missions, Task Forces, and on mission maps spawned in large groups at higher difficulty levels. I can be fighting one group, and have another aggro because of a runner, or because a teammate wandered too closely to the rest, or some other thing. That sort of edge-of-my-seat stuff, where I'm fighting mobs from all sides, and having to work wtih my team so that all of us stay alive is great fun.
I never got the sense of any of that from my time in Vanguard. Nothing gave me that kind of feeling. It all felt rote, like all I had to do was cast that one spell over and over and over, or just shoot arrows at that one spawn until he died 8-10 times in a row. It got very dull very quickly. And when you're fighting things that just abruptly fall over like cardboard standees that have been tipped over, any satisfaction at their death is short lived.
I'm spoiled by CoH/CoV, really. I like being able to send someone flying over a ledge, or knocking them stupid so they wander around dazed, and I like that sort of fast-paced action and chaos that can often ensue. Maybe that stuff exists in Vanguard, but if I have to slog through 30+ boring levels before seeing it, it's not worth it, IMO.
Vanguard is based with the community in mind. To find the fun in 80% of the mmorpgs you need to find yourself a good guild and you will see how the game opens up.
You are playing the game solo minded, duoing with your BF. If I was doing this I would be bored as you are; the same applies to most of the other mmorpgs.
Find yourself a guild, it will change your experience and you will see a different game (at least this is the case for me and so many others). It's such a blast clearing dungeons and stuff with a team on friends; a lot of relationships/friendships a emerging out of this.
There are some mmorpgs, like Wow for example, that are also build with the solo player in mind. If this is what you are looking for, you will have more fun with such games.
Vanguard is about friends and community, from your posts I see this is not what you were out for. Give it a try as it is meant to be played, it will be a completely different dimension of fun.
Hell, even the worst grinding games like Lineage 2 can be so much fun once you play them as they are meant to be played. L2 is one of the games with the best communities, I got so many friends and fun with people and clanies there. Of course the game that can be so much fun, sucks, alone.
Great post! It gives a typical view of the game. I agree with most of your points about the game. I think it gives the perspective of those of us that wanted this game to be good but it has fallen short in a big way.
As I sit at my computer for the weekend I simply can not bring myself to hit the Vanguard icon to log on.
I agree with some of your opinions of the game. I had a similar experience when I first started. Unfortunately, you chose to play several characters at low level, rather than concentrate on one character into at least the teens. The game is slow to get started, but your character doesn't really start to flesh out until levels 12-20. As for the fast respawns, you have to consider that newbie zones are notoriously overcrowded at release, they might have made the respawn rate that fast to account for that. It's much better than running around for 20 minutes trying to find mobs because 5 other guys are doing the same quest, most likely twinked as well (now anyways), so they can clear out a decent sized area in a few minutes.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fanboy by a longshot. I hated 90% of Everquest (I was a ranger, that should explain a lot). I absolutely despise timesinks, downtime, and forced grouping. The main reason I'm playing Vanguard is (in my opinion) it's the best new game out right now. I don't expect any big changes, but it'll at least keep me occupied until something better comes along.
(Read the post above, he beat me to it and it says almost the same things (got stuck watching tv!) )
Oh man, I do wish Vanguard was add free! All the adding is killing me. Was slapping some 3 dotted Bloodhowlers with a ranger guildy yesterday (am one myself) and we had to snare and root tons. He was a few levels under so we had to take it slow.
Now if he was a healer it would be more of a CoV/CoH experience as you call it. We could have gone into the camps, run em over, gotten a named or two (if there are any, not sure) . But it won't ever be the kind of action the City games have, mainly cause that all they're focused on.
Of course things are going to repop fast in starter areas. Would be a pain if it didn't. And yes, you just have a few attacks to use at the start (like the other games doesn't!) And clearly if you don't think Vanguard has adds, you haven't been in a full group down in a bigger dungeon. You'll get so many adds the tears will be running. Some cause of bugs, some cause of runners and walkers, and if you had my computer you'd get tons from lag.
But you played it and didn't like it. So it's all good.
I'm not at all impressed by a lot of things. But it's just the type of game I want to play at the moment. It won't be a long stay if they fail to make it more interesting characterwise as it's my biggest concern. If they do I'll probably be around.
Still, I enjoy it more than any other mmo I've played (apart from UO) and will be playing until something better comes along or until I can't stand it anymore.
My system spec is Pentium IV 3.4 Ghz, 2 GB RAM (Corsair brand no less) and an ATI Radeon X1900 GT 512MB (yes, it's that $500 3D card) and I can barely run Vanguard above 30 FPS on medium-low resolution. I tried maxing the graphic bar and the game turned into a slide show. And this is in non-crowded areas. In a crowded town, I can imagine how worse it will get. This alone turned me off the game which I WAS very excited about. I'm running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and Direct X 9.0c. I could run Elder Scrolls Oblivion in maximum settings with 8 x anti-aliasing @ 1320 x 768 like a charm but when it comes to Vanguard my system just fizzles and this is a serious sign of bad game coding.
All is not lost, Vanguard COULD be a good game and it just needs more polish. I'd say give it about 1 year time for the developers to spit polish this game, work out the bugs, optimize the game client coding and this game could be a gem.
But for me, the ultimate test of a game is how it handles in a duo, since there are times that the boyfriend and I will come on to game, and no one else is online.
We did the same thing in the original EverQuest. Because the first guild we were in at the time had people scattered across the world, not everyone was on at the same time, or at similar levels, so as a consequence we spent a lot of time kiting things around as a duo. It actually worked rather well until we hit raiding levels, then we had to jump ship to a group that was more centralized here in the States, just so we could get in on raids easier.
In Vanguard, though, the biggest problem is that while many of us were online at the same time, everyone had different ideas of what they wanted to play, so we were scattered to the four winds in different areas with large distances between us. This made grouping together an issue. And it made it everyone's mission to level up to where you could buy a mount, then trying to find a centralized area to meet.
The problem is, in trying to fulfill that plan, we could never find a duo to settle on beyond level 11 (which was, I think, the highest level of all of the toons I ended up playing) simply because the areas we'd play in would get boring very quickly due to the mind-numbing combat, and sterile feel of the world. I'd just get tired of the poor voice overs, static NPC's, and lifeless feel of wherever we were, and would have to go elsewhere.
I'm sure we could have easily gotten a duo into the high teens/early 20's in the time I played, but that would have depended on being able to endure an area long enough to do that. It was never meant to be, I guess.
But for me, the ultimate test of a game is how it handles in a duo, since there are times that the boyfriend and I will come on to game, and no one else is online.
We did the same thing in the original EverQuest. Because the first guild we were in at the time had people scattered across the world, not everyone was on at the same time, or at similar levels, so as a consequence we spent a lot of time kiting things around as a duo. It actually worked rather well until we hit raiding levels, then we had to jump ship to a group that was more centralized here in the States, just so we could get in on raids easier.
In Vanguard, though, the biggest problem is that while many of us were online at the same time, everyone had different ideas of what they wanted to play, so we were scattered to the four winds in different areas with large distances between us. This made grouping together an issue. And it made it everyone's mission to level up to where you could buy a mount, then trying to find a centralized area to meet.
The problem is, in trying to fulfill that plan, we could never find a duo to settle on beyond level 11 (which was, I think, the highest level of all of the toons I ended up playing) simply because the areas we'd play in would get boring very quickly due to the mind-numbing combat, and sterile feel of the world. I'd just get tired of the poor voice overs, static NPC's, and lifeless feel of wherever we were, and would have to go elsewhere.
I'm sure we could have easily gotten a duo into the high teens/early 20's in the time I played, but that would have depended on being able to endure an area long enough to do that. It was never meant to be, I guess.
Unless you're actually a newbie, newbie areas will be dull. I can't count the number of mmos and muds I've played/trial/tested. The early levels are always boring. They are usually designed to teach the basics of combat, movement etc. For anyone with any previous gaming experience, we know what we need to know before we ding level 2. But it's not like that for everyone.
I think that's one of the things I like about CoH so much. After you create a character, it's possible to skip the tutorial area entirely and just go straight into the game. I can just create a hero, go in and start leveling up. With any luck, they'll find a way to do that for the villain side.
I wish more devs would make starting areas optional, or at least not so dull. It would be nice.
Edit again: 1 gig isn't 1k megs. I can't remember exactly but I believe it's something around the 800 meg range. If vista is using 600 megs then how far off is it really from a gig? But I guess it's easier to just blame software then to accually trouble shoot hardware to see if maybe there is some sort of incompatability between it and the obviously faulty software.
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No idea if it's been answered yet (I'm reading, but just had to jump in) but 1GB is 1024MB, just as 1MB is 1024KB
So yes, 600MB is a long way off from a gig.
Edit:
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And 1024 is 512x2 and not 1gb. doesn't work that way, never has, and that's information handed down to me from a software programmer.
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Was that a bird that flew by, or any form of credibility you might've had before that little comment?
One is to show all you got, and present the best-written, most accessable and varied questlines you can, in the most-polished areas you can, to hook a new player right away and keep them for a few days, till the "crack" effect kicks in, and they keep playing.
The other is to offer better quests and stories as an incentive to level up, and present more detailed and interesting content (and more complex) as you go, not to overwhelm a newcomer.
World of Warcraft goes strictly for apporach No. 1, wheres Vanguard goes strictly for approach No.2. Which leads to the known result of WoW players quitting when they hit the max and end up re-doing content thats not very inspired to begin with over and over, and Vanguard players often not getting beyond the first 10-15 levels and giving up.
Skipping a Tutorial is something I believe should be possible after you've done it once. Lots of people that really need to do a tutorial are going to skip it, cause they think they know games from playing Counterstrike, and you end up with a large base of people not really "getting" the game.
AoConan, from what I heard, is shooting for such an approach. I ll check it out I suppose and see how it works.
In the end, I think Vanguard is not showing enough muscle at low levels for todays crowd thats more in the vein of fast and early gratification. Since I hit 20, all the way to now 39, I have always had a TON of interesting things to do, and often very challenging areas, with fast-paced combat and high risk high reward. However at level 1-14 or so, your class isnt even capable of a third of its final abilities, and frankly doesnt play like it will at 30, or 40, or even 50. So many class-defining abilities come spread over the levels that the juicy stuff is the early mid-game, not the start.
I almost left the game early during a particularly boring stretch at level 12, but now I am happy I stayed. For the amount of content, there is no better deal out there for an MMO. You just have to get to it, and you cant do it all solo.
Approach #2 makes everything in the early game tedious, since you have to slog your way through a bunch of mind-numbing, boring levels in order to get to anything decent, and games really don't work that way anymore. And I don't think that's an effect of World of Warcraft, either. Even before that game ever came out, other MMO's that were trying to compete with EverQuest took great pains to try and move away from the "killing rats in the newbie yard" approach that EQ had. Anarchy Online had its mission terminals, DAoC had its guild system, where you started as a general class, then specialized as you went, etc. They tried to give you enough variety, and enough of a different experience from the start that you became interested in how your character would evolve.
I don't think it's a matter of needing instant gratification, as much as it is a need for games to give players a reason to stick around during the early levels. If the first 20 levels of a 50 level game suck, what makes the other 30 any different? By that point, a player should feel truly connected to both the game and the larger world out there. They shouldn't have to wait for much higher levels before the game world opens up. There should be enough offered at the beginning to make the world feel dynamic and alive, and for that game to sink their hooks into a player.
It's like a good book-- the first few chapters will set up the story, the initial conflicts, introduce the characters and settings, etc., and offer just enough of a hint of the overall plot to keep people reading all the way to the end. But if those first few chapters are pedantic and feel like the author just phoned it in, then most people won't stick with the book long enough to get absorbed by the story.
Because Vanguard has tucked the story away in the Diplomacy sphere, Adventuring suffers as a result. You're not really given any reason why your character matters, or what your part in the overall world really is. And with the early levels amounting to little more than killing rats in the newbie yard, it all feels stale, and like a re-tread of what's come before, at least IMO.
Even a twit knows that any one at the outset of making a game uses an old game engine well people ought to know by know its a twits way of going about making a state of the art game
what you end up with is state of the art piled on a pos which ends up with glitches and makes a finished product look like its in Alpha still
BRAD forget about it its a dead horse
I wont touch it with a ten foot pole its goes in the trash bin along side the DnL disc
where it belongs
helmets anyone
I agree that in an ideal world, the level 1-10 era would be as fun and nice as the 20-30, but fact is, when you spend 1 day in level 1-10, and 10 days level 20-30, its obvious where the limited ressource of development time is getting used better.
I still dont say the "kill rats in freeports frontyard" approach is a good one. I believe in a strong intro if possible, but I also think starting strong and finishing weak is as much a mistake as starting weak and finishing strong. However, I dont know any MMO to date that managed to get both strong, with one singular exception (to me, at least) which is Guild Wars (and thats not a real MMO). But GW is story-driven, not level-driven for the most part.
For example, I was absolutely hooked on WoWs early levels, with the great storylines and well-designed zones on the alliance side, human area.... up to the finishing of Duskwood. From then on, quality dropped like a rock. It seemed, and still seems, as if the devs blew their powder on the initial 20 levels there. I know others felt the same.
In the end, when you hit 14 in Vanguard, things begin to open up a lot. 14 is actually the level at which I would say Vanguard has, the first time, the chance to outshine its competitors. Areas like Khegors End, Lyceum, Temple of Dailuk, Ksaravi Gulch, the bamboo forests and the asylum in Kojan.... they are fun, they are well-written and dont make you feel useless and small. But by then, I think a lot have already given up, wrongly predicting the rest of the game to play like the first 13 levels.
If I have learned one thing in the MMO genre, its that the first 10-20 levels are nothing like the game you bought. Sometimes they are better (WoW), sometimes they are worse (VG), but I dont know a single game where the mainstay of gameplay is like the first 10 levels. I dont know why experienced gamers still judge a book by its cover in that regard.
Or did you raid at level 10 in EQ? Did you skillchain by level 15 in FFXI? Did you siege castles at level 15 in Lineage?
I read up on Conan in that regard btw, and I think we may have a winner there. 20 levels introduction, story-based, and mostly soloable (though the option to group during a very clever day/night cycle) then being released into the world at 20, picking your final class. I believe thats the best way to use limited developer ressources, and still hook a player...... it just doesnt pay spending tons of time on content that people dont WANT to be held up by.
I'll probably give the game a go once it gets to open beta and see if i like it, but from the basic idea of working your way through for 20 levels, then joining the game at large is definitely intriguing. It sounds like something I would enjoy.
I agree with what Khaunshar posted above. The leveling is slowing down a lot the more you level up. Lvls 10-20 looks more like the 10% of the adventuring game. At level 11 that would mean about 5%. (even less).
Now, take the part I quoted from you: the 100% of the game is 3 spheres (adventuring/diplomacy/crafting). If you are only adventuring you are missing the 2/3rds of the game. Myself, I enjoy taking breaks from adventuring/grinding to do some diplomacy and some crafting. I play the whole game, not only the 30%.
So, I adventure, then I get some lore with the diplomacy which will later on become even more interesting with faction plays, do some crafting and increase my skills which will later lead me to building houses that are part of play run cities (-> how will the faction plays of the adventuring and diplomacy spheres play out with those ^^ hehe)...
This will be even more interesting when the 3 spheres become more interwoven later on.
Of course with the diplomacy lore I still don't really know WHY I am adventuring in this world, but I know what the world is about and once I know this it changes the picture (my perception of the world) completely. When I then go on adventuring quests or some dungeons I feel that this world exists and it somehow all feels connected.
So this game is a whole with 3 spheres. As I said above, at lvl 11 you have done maybe 5% of the adventuring part, which itself is about 33.... lets say 40% of the game.
You have played 40% of 5% = 2 or 3% of the game.
Of course, you can discuss these numbers. But you get the picture of what the point here is.
That being said, I agree with you when you say that the game should do a much better job of capturing your interest in the early levels.
From some of your comments, I would guess that you might like Lord of the Rings Online. Open beta coming up.
I beta'd VG for a while, stopped playing, retried in late beta and found it considerably improved. I bought the box, but only lasted three weeks post-release. At that time my LotRO beta invitation arrived, and it was like a breath of fresh air. I'd never quite fit in VG, (somehow the game and I were just on different wavelengths) and my system is not that great. In LotRO, I found the art direction outstanding, the geographical density a welcome change (it is very dense), and my system runs it well. Their use of instancing in special quests (as well as the usual dungeons and such) seems to be new and unique, and it is very effective.
As you've probably heard, the game is already polished well; final economic and class balancing is underway.
Whether or not a game hits the spot is very individual, so all I can suggest is that you try it.
Oh, and VG was just too dark for me too. With a good CRT with deep blacks, properly adjusted gamma and older eyes, it was just too damn dark at times!