Vanguard: Saga of Heroes open beta

It doesn't grab you because everything you did in VG you have done before in other games a million times. And better, more enjoyable versions of it. The game's a clone of a clone of a clone of a clone.

 

I was in the beta for awhile. They have a lot of work to do on the game yet, but it looks promising overall. Is it ready for a 2007 release? I'd say no, but we'll see.

Try the beta and tell us what you think. I think many of the points above are fairly valid to give you an impression of the game.

 

I've been in beta since very early beta 3 playing as a sorc with a ranger alt. It's too late right now to write a long post tonight, but expect a very detailed one tomorrow afternoon. Just a quick synopsis: L233 is pretty much dead on right about everything. Except not only does Vanguard have no soul, it also makes you sad. Like a cute puppy just died right in front of you. This may sound strange, but I will explain tomorrow.

 

While I haven't played a lot of the beta, I did get a few characters up and running (highest is only level 9, Sorceress). So far I have to say I'm pretty impressed. I lost hope in Vanguard after the SOE conversion, but the beta has really rekindled it. There are definetly bugs (ran into several newbie quests that just didn't work), but overall I think the game design is much better than most MMORPGs I've tried. The fact that its roots seem to be tied to EverQuest more than EQ2 was definetly helps.

They did take a lot of good things from WoW (quest identifiers above NPCs, quest log with tracking toggling, etc.) and other MMORPGs, but quite frankly if they hadn't done that I think most players would wonder why those features were missing. I'm definetly interested enough to pick it up at release and see what the higher level content is like (dungeons, raiding groups, etc.).

 

no ammt of art design keeps wow from looking rly bad graphically imo.

 

i used 3 very common abbreviations, get a grip dude.

while i dont think eq2 looks good, it looks better than wow. ive only seen screens of vanguard, but it seems to look rly good.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/vanguard/screenindex.html

 

it takes u several seconds to determine what rly, ammt, and imo mean? They arent only used by teenagers.

 

graphics only, WoW looks the worst. Unless the devs said they were only issued Crayola products for the engine work, it really is bad, but i think thats the point. They wanted to cater to a wide audience as far as computer hardware goes, and thats what the engine does. Its not garbage but its not beauty either. It just works well for its tone. But saying its better or more polished than EQ2 is foolish. Basically all games can do the barren wasteland, and this doesnt look great, but as far as indoor zones (especially with EQ2 and post DoF expansion), and some large outdoor zones (Rivervale, Antonica, Nektulos) there isnt a comparison at all.

I just flipped through the 400 some odd images gamespot has of BC by the way so i'm really trying to be honest. Doesnt hold a candle to the stuff i saw. EQ2 had an engine where at its launch, if you could ignore the lag, you'd literally go 'holy hell this game looks great'.

I'd like to say Vanguard looks excellent too, but i cant without AA working. Really needs AA to clean up things.

 

Comparing WoW to any other game exclusively on a "best to worst" scale is irrelevant. WoW has its own style. If you are trying to say which one is better on a "realistic" scale, than obviously WoW falls behind here.

As for Vanguard graphics, it does well, but its not that great. The game itself troubles me some, as I find it much too close to EverQuest 2.

 

Vanguard falls flat on its ass when it comes to graphics. Yes, there is tons of normal mapping. Yes, the textures are much higher res than in WoW or even EQ2. Yes, the damn game weighs in at 17 GB so there is undoubtedly a fuckton of artwork assets. Also, on screenshots, it looks great. It's one of these games that has a lot of cool stuff that looks impressive on screenshots but when you walk around in that game, the overall impression isn't all that great, as the cool stuff is overshadowed by the visual flaws.

My biggest gripe with the game is the landscape graphics. It relies heavily on normal mapping, it's what gives the terrain its surface structure. There's isn't really much in terms of textures, it's a basic low-res texture overlayed with a normal map. If you switch off normal mapping, the terrain looks like something you'd see in an early 90s game. This isn't bad in itself but it makes all landscape look virtually identical. It doesn't matter if you're in the desert, grasslands, forrests or mountains. It's always the same normal map bumpiness covering differently colored base textures. It's broadly applied to everything... a road has the same normal map as the grass next to it. Everything just looks the same and it doesn't look like good artwork but like something a tool for procedural landscape generation would shit out. It looks like that because that's what it is.

The same applies to lighting. There seems to be exactly one value for outdoor lighting in a chunk. You're standing at the edge of a forrest and when you enter the forrest, the lighting doesn't change. Things look as bright as they did outside of the forrest. This is one of the reasons why the game never manages to properly capture the mood of an area, aside from the fact that everything landscape-related looks the fucking same everywhere. Even the grass does.

If you have never really gotten out of the newbie zones, you may not have noticed this. One of the most frequent criticisms voiced during Beta 2 was that Vanguard has a poor newbie experience and is missing a "hook". Basically, the game didn't even manage to keep you interesting during the first 10 levels. Sigil, of course, knows that the first impression is crucial so when went ahead and completely revamped the newbie zones. They made things visually more diverse, ramped up content density, gave the zones a certain atmosphere and style. The problem is... once you get out of these customized areas, you'll find the same old shit over and over again.

Vanguard's approach to world design works something like that:
1. create a huge ass landmass with some sort of technology that makes everything look the same
2. throw in some trash mobs in a predictable pattern
3. add 2-5 points of interests per chunk (towns, guard towers, tent camps and such)
4. place content some content in the chunk (a cave with mobs, quests and a big dungeon every 10 chunks or so)
5. repeat until you're done with all 150 chunks of your boring-ass game world

WoW has evidently taken a very different approach. They set the tone, mood and theme of a zone and then handtailored everything to match it. The textures, the lighting, the trees and vegetation... a desert in WoW feels like a desert, a jungle feels like a jungle, a haunted forrest feels like a haunted forrest and so on. In Vanguard everything leaves a stale taste of sameness in your mouth.

The world is completely drama-free. There are no raging volcanoes, no blizzard zones, no swamps with belching gas bubbles, no huge waterfalls with caves behind them. Vanguard went with the realistic look and ended up looking merely mundane.

Aside from the ubiquitous graphical glitches in Vanguard, there are a lot more things that simply tick me off about the visuals. The poorly done humanoid body models, the total lack of flavour of the animal races in terms of anatomy and animations, the repetitive and unexciting combat animations, the underwhelming and sometimes glitchy spell effects, the partially ugly and inflexible UI, the obtrusive target rings...

To sum it up: Vanguard is graphically bland, uninsipiring, boring, generic and unoriginal. There is nothing that captivates you and pulls your right in.

 

I'm finding it highly fascinating that during the month or so that I've now spent with the game, they've basically revamped classes and experiences rates left and right. A week or so from release, the Necromancer pets are still utterly broken, half of Qalia is down or locked (and I assume it's the same with the other continents), the major cities are more or less empty, there are still broken/unfinished quests, and so on. I sort of wish that I'd gotten into beta earlier just to see what exactly they've been doing with their time. I've sort of gotten used to the fact that most of the environments looks like they're covered in acne-scars, but especially Qalia just looks so extremely bland.


Also, I'm betting 2 bucks that L233's handle on the Vanguard forums is 'Kiste'.

 

I've been in beta since April '06 and I am puzzled by that questions as well. 4-5 years of developement, 2 years of beta testing and what the fuck in this? During Beta 2/2.5 the game was bad. Really bad. There seems to be some sort of Beta 2 nostalgia thing going on among the veteran testers who have been around for some time but seriously, the game sucked even worse in Beta 2 than it does now.

I think they assumed that they could simply dump the player into a world devoid of content and life and people would keep up with it until level 25 or so when dungeon content begins to appear. It didn't work. They invited thousands of people into Beta 2/2.5 and player numbers peaked at like 120-180. Most people played a few days and then couldn't be arsed into logging in again.

If you think the current combat system is bad, you should have seen the abortion that was their initially planned "tactical" combat system. Oh my. It seems clear to me that the early Vanguard design documents were written by people who had no clue whatsoever what makes MMORPGs fun.

Towards the end of Beta 2 they began to heavily revamp all low level content. They released Qalia, which was a huge improvementover Beta 2 Thestra and locked down all of Thestra to revamp the newbie zones. They completely changed the combat system. They changed the basic concept of several classes like the Sorcerer (which is now little more than a gimpy WoW Mage / D&D Wizard mongrel).

They basically redesigned a large part of their game at the onset of Beta 3 because most of the stuff they had come up with at that point sucked so badly that people wouldn't even playtest their game for free. And that's why they aren't even close to being finished 10 days prior to the official release date.

It seems that all it takes to impress the average gamer is a huge draw distance and some normal mapping. I can't help staring in disbelief every time someone who actually plays beta raves on about how amazing the game looks. The Tanvu area looks nice but that's it, pretty much.

It is, and yes, I am aware that I sound like a broken record.

 

Picked up the pre-order version of VG a few days ago. Rolled a gnome sorcerer, and been having a ball. Very EQ like (which is a good thing in my opinion).

Wish they'd hurry up and patch in AA support though

 

I leapt in whole, which is something I haven't done in a MMO for a while. There are some things Vanguard does very well right now, which is encouraging (like, making me really enjoy levels 5-8 in one creative early "dungeon" that isn't your typical "find cave, wander down it to the bottom, killing mobs all the way. Granted other areas have THAT instead... Heh.) but--as usual--we'll have to see if it holds out.

One thing I'm really loving right now, though, is Diplomacy. It may get tiresome and/or relatively pointless in the long run, but right now it's just plain an excellent side-game in general, not to mention a great way to get story and clever quests in chunks you won't be continually wanting to skip through just to grind out XP and "get to that next level" (since adventuring, diplomacy, and crafting are all separate spheres). Just pure fun!

The game also just feels hard-line and challenging right now, which is good, in the wake of carebearing since WoW's popularity surge.

It'll be nice to see how long it takes to get some of their other ideas implemented, like mounted and ship-to-ship combat, and whether it's handled remotely well. The game seems like it can get caught up in the convoluted, and it is certainly not without bugs.