Vanguard
 

Anyone else getting this game? I just finished playing the open beta of it and its the first mmorpg thats impressed me at all since the first year or so of DAOC being released. I tried Wow and EQ2 but didnt see anything new or worth while in them. Vanguard on the other hand Seems to have much more to it. much more intresting classes and alot more abilitys. Oddly enough even crafting seems intresting. I really suggest anyone that likes mmorpgs takes a look at it. After playing beta on all the other mmorpgs i have tried i never liked them enough to want to get it and pay for it monthly but this one seems to have so much more to it. Its being released on jan 30th .

I'd be interested in trying it out, but I don't know how I would be able to get a key. Do you know any way?

the beta just ended so now you need to buy it to play. I would of posted about it earlier while beta was still open but i was busy playing.

lame. I do not really want to buy a game thats a monthly subscription if I do not know if I am going to like it.

I am more than likely getting it at some point. The only problem is that my system just refuses to get a decent frame rate in the game even on the lowest settings. Even with the horrible rate, I was having so much fun with the beta that I am getting all sad knowing I can't play it tonight.

Im still downloading the prebeta.. yep for us that preordered you got to play today .. friday.. me i had to get the email verison so im having to download it.. i got a fast connection and im still looking at 5 hours sigh.

my friend is in and playing a dark elf necro.. guess what.. you can move and cast but you walk slowly. if your running and cast you slow to a crawl but you keep moving woot

even when in combat.

thats a plus

if your into pvp two options.. pvp ffa (free for all) and team pvp.. ffa yep its death match city where if you die the winner gets 10% of the coins on your corpse. ouch .. banking a must

pvp team is faction based by races.. much like wow was but this time its three factions instead of two. not bad.

the pvp servers came up later though .. guess they were making last min changes or such


woah preorder gets to play friday - tuesday and when you get the game all you gotta do is set up a subscription and the inclosed cd key that comes with the game. not bad.

NOTE: we didnt have to have anything special to play just a soe account (free) and just log in and use the preorder key to do it.

I've heard good things about this game. I may give it a shot if it gets good reviews. I hear it's better for "die hard" MMORPG fans.

I wonder if they will have free trial things at some point. It sounds interesting!

I don't think it is only for die hard gamers. I am only a casual gamer for the most part and I was having a blast in beta. I didn't try crafting but the diplomacy sphere (there are three "spheres" adventuring, crafting, and diplomacy) kept me entertained for hours and hours.

I played in Vanguard beta, and it was alright. The interface borrowed heavily (very heavily) from world of warcraft, but was very customizable without requiring any addon downloads. I didn't make it past level 12, but what I played just really reminded me of WoW. The whole quest system is basically identical to wow, down to the design of the quest window. The skill trainers were also identical to wow. The intentions of the developers is obviously to assimilate a chunk of WoW players into their own game.

The gameplay itself, i.e. combat and stuff, felt like its own game. Even if the interface and controls felt like WoW, the combat felt more like Everquest 1 than WoW. Slightly slower paced combat, but more difficult and much more at stake. I think the penalty for dying (exp loss, corpse running) is a good thing, since it gives an actual reason to try and stay alive. It seems like you can have an IQ of 50 and still make it to level 60 in WoW because the game is just too easy and doesn't punish you for being a terrible player. Vanguard kind of fixes this problem, but in this age of MMO's, I think that feature is going to hurt the game more than help it.

hehehe borrowed the interface from wow huh?? um.... yeah they borrowed it from wow wow borrowed it from daoc daoc borrowed it from eq1 and the same people that made eq made this. so yeah i dont think they really borrowed it at all. wow was nowhere near the first to use this setup. just happens to be the most popular at the moment that does.

Ill be playing here shortly finally my god with out beta.. i didnt play beta.. and not having a store to walkinto to preorder.. i had to amazon preorder it and download the client.. little over 16gb. thought it would never finish

gonna play a dark elf cleric.

cleric you say? yeah nice non cloth armor, big pwn hammers and throwing hammers and yes i can use a shield.. goodbye idoit heal bots from wow.. this priest

GOT A WHOLE NEW BAG!!!!!!!!! wewt

I tried it, but I'm gonna hold out for 6 months to buy it to see if they can get it out of pre-beta playability and make it run smother on settings that look worse than wow.

Samcol,

I think that's my biggest issue with VG. In order to play it smoothly, it honestly looks like Everquest circa 2003. I don't get it.

im wondering if they actually have.. well lets start another way...

Ive yet to see a list of vid cards that work with the game. I know a friend that runs some nice dual pci-e cards and he even has to turn about half the settings down. You have to have the current direct x to play it and all. But for me to play im gonna have to upgrade my vid card.

with wow it was a "cartoon" game. Wow graphics were awesome in itself, but if you stand back and look. Well, its a bit cartoony. Most of SoE games are based mostly on real world 3d effects. Granted its fantasy or scifi in the case of SW:G, but they make the models more of a serious real world look.

Which back to SW:G they released it unfinished, and took near a year for it to run smooth. And I still have nightmares of wow when it first launched. Up, down for the 1st 6 months. The crash popup errors and such.

No mmo starts smooth IMO. Well, none that ive seen anyways. VG seems a bit beta in the extreme though. But then again, I dont have to grind to 60 to experience content like wow was.

with VG you got 3 ways to goof around between 1-50. Already im seeing on gamer sites hardcore players getting ticked that they cant grind out lvls like they want to.

You most likely will not. The game itself is choppy, even on better systems. I have still yet to figure out why, since the game itself is nothing spectacular visually. The characters look akward, their animations arent very smooth(the death animation is a great example), and certain actions lower your fps for strange reasons(opening doors).

The classes have so much in common with classes from EQ1(no surprise Brad) that you could know nothing about the game and almost predict what abilities they will have. Shaman for instance, have DoTs, snares, heals, pets, slows, wear chain armor and have decent melee. The only difference is the ability to specialize in one of three archtypes at level 15. Melee/Spell/Stealth. Otherwise is the same old stuff.

The combat system is alright, with kind of neat reactive abilities and skill chains. NPCs are your basic superman AI, who will hit you from 30 feet away, warp up walls and fly through buildings.



Vanguard seems to have a stalwart fan base already, so it seems the playstyle is attracting someone. Who? I can't say. I've played every MMO out there at least once, and Vanguard dissapointed me from the start.


On the bright side, it's better than Shadowbane.

You know, I was just going to let this slide, but this is the exact same, carbon copy response I got from everybody on the Vanguard beta forums when I pointed this out.

I am not a newbie to online games. I've played most of the subscription MMO's that have been released. I have been playing MMO's since Ultima Online, and played MUDs before that. I've seen many ideas borrowed, recycled, and improved upon. Wow borrows a lot from its predecessors, just like every MMO that has ever been released. When I talk about the interface similarities, I am not talking about the "1-0" hotbar that every MMO since everquest has had, because that is basically the defacto standard of MMO interfaces. I am talking about the more specific areas within the interface that copied from wow.

Developers have a lot of options when taking and improving on an idea, they don't have to directly copy the interface and functionality from the game they're borrowing the idea from. Vanguard's quest and skill training interface is taken directly from WoW. I could find no discernible difference between those two aspects. Of all of the options that Sigil had available to them when creating graphical interfaces for skill training and questing, they decided to steal it directly from Wow, no changes whatsoever.

This just seems lazy and uncreative to me. It feels to me like the main goal of this game is to steal subscribers from WoW by luring them in with an interface and gameplay style that they're already used to. This is understandable considering WoW is by far the most popular MMO ever, but playing a game that only aims to shadow WoW does not sound appealing to me. I think I would much rather play the game that Vanguard is trying to emulate.

Actually, it's even simpler than that. Think about the people getting hired, most of the Vanguard developers are people who worked on Warcraft. It was a requirement and expected to be seen on your resume. I recall back in 2006 PCGamer stating such a thing in one issue.

Most people in the creatives want to work on the latest greatest just like the movies. People move from company to company as projects start and wind down.

didnt like it nuff sed. lol
i just didnt like the grafix. i have a 7950gtx and it still ran crappy..and the gameplay was too stiff... i guess i just fell in love with the "wow" cartoon look.

also, it took about 10gigs!! wow.

I played Vanguard during the "open" beta and I my computer was put to shame. Seriously, I was happy when I had 5 fps. I may buy the game whenever I purchase a new pc because I did have fun as a bard. You could make your own songs and play them to your party.

I thought cleric was really fun. They can wear plate armor and can actually do some decent melee damage. It was a good vacation from playing my healbot on WoW... :(

I bought the game and installed it on Saturday, very choppy running.
my system is very new and even with turned down graphics it was hard to enjoy.
I dont like the idea that sony is making players pay to play the final beta, because vangaurd definatly was rushed it to market.
I am looking for something to get me away from the basic kiddie game of wow.
DAOC was the best mmo out there till mythic destroyed it by not fixing class balance issues.
Well hoping sony fixes it soon as i will try and play it then

Clerics are by far the most fun class I played in VG. They have good enough melee/spell damage to solo very efficiently, and their healing/buffing power is awesome.

While I think most of the game is just terrible, clerics were very addictive to play.

pretty much everyone is a cleric. Lots and lots of clerics in Vanguard right now. I myself play a Dread Knight, and I'm loving it.

Anyone else on the Hilsbury server?

Sigh one of the latest patches in the game turned the game into a very slow very dull grind. they killed a good game. Quest xp rewards are basicly zero after level 20 or so. I dont reccomend trying this game anymore. one level in the mid to high 20s takes about 8 hours of hardcore nonstop grinding with a very good group. questing isnt a way to level anymore. If that wasnt enough they nerfed the droprate by alot. and increased downtime. The higher the level you get the less creative the quests seem to be.

I'm interested in this game, but I'm worried about several of you saying it's really only playable on low settings. What type of systems are you guys running? Anyone know the min requirements?

i have a amd 3700+ 2 gig of ram and a 7800gt nvidia card and it runs like pure crap on low settings. out in the open its not too bad but in the towns and stuff it can turn into a slideshow. Thats with all the latest drivers and a freshly defragged hard drive.

My setup is slightly better than that, I'm running a 4600+ and Radeon X1300 Pro . From what I've seen on the net I think I'll pass on this for now at least. Sounds like it's real system hog and bad mixture of FFXI and WoW.

Btw, I found the Requirements on yahoo games.



Minimum System Requirements
* CD-ROM: 0X CD-ROM
* CPU: Pentium IV 2.4 GHz
* Hard Drive Space: 20000 MB
* DVD-ROM: 16X DVD-ROM
* Other: Vertex and Pixel shader 2.0 compatible hardware
* RAM: 512 MB RAM
* Video Memory: 128 MB VRAM

Recommended System Requirements
* CD-ROM: 0X CD-ROM
* CPU: Pentium IV 3.0 GHz
* Hard Drive Space: 20000 MB
* DVD-ROM: 16X DVD-ROM
* Other: Broadband Internet connection
* RAM: 2048 MB RAM
* Video Memory: 256 MB VRAM

Bump. I started playing this last month and have a level 42 Dark Elf Psionicist on Varking (the PvP teams server) now. Video/graphics performance issues aside, a lot of the bugs are typical of a new MMO being released a few months too early. The launch was nicer than WoW's (anyone remember loot lag?) and Sigil has already improved performance in some areas a bit. I have a fairly low-end system these days and can scrounge out 20fps with 2gb of RAM and a Geforce 7800gs (but only 1.8ghz P4.)

The game reminds me a lot of EverQuest -- moreso than it reminds me of WoW -- though the interface certainly was liberally borrowed from WoW. I don't really have an issue with that, as they did not copy it directly, but made improvements upon it. The quest log has "locations" which you can toggle. The targeting system has offensive and defensive targets. The encounter pane is entirely new to MMOs as far as I know. Sigil seems to be learning from their past mistakes with EQ to some degree, and not being shy about using what works from other MMOs. This is a good thing, as long as they don't compromise the game in order to please a majority of people who can't hack the difficulty level like Blizzard did over and over again.

Sere,

I think your assessment is spot-on. It definitely feels like EQ all over again, and in some ways, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Are the former VZ-ers playing on Varking? How is the pvp balance? I just recently picked VG up and rolled on a pve server in order to get some familiarity with the game before I go to the beatdown that is pvp.

I remember leveling up on RZ and VZ, God, that was miserable, until I had half a clue how to control my mage.

Varking has dozens of old VZers. Many are in Xanit K'ven (Tipp, Isys, myself, Sinklar, Creedence, Keaki, Valthar/Drahzarius, Spookey and Groglar Moncha, etc.)

PvP is certainly not balanced right now. There are some retardedly overpowering bugs which need to be fixed, and some classes seem weaker than they should be atm. I am sure that those issues will get ironed out a bit with both gear and some time. There are a couple of PvP bug fixes with each patch, so there is certainly promise.

I used to play it on my friend's Atari all the time. It was OK, but I prefered Defender.

http://www.consoleclassix.com/info_i...creenShot2.jpg