Vanguard

Sanon

Yo, long time reader, first time poster. I recently picked up Vanguard after abandoning it back at release, and am now quite surprised at how good of an MMO it is now. Easily the best on the market. I was just wondering what others opinions on the game are, so has anyone here even played it, and if so, what do ya think?

quiksilver

This is the most blatantly obvious shill I've seen on any forum in quite some time.

Accualt

Maybe.

Easily the best on the market?
I've heard it is greatly improved but still not all that great, especially since the player base is hovering around none.

lowlylowlycook

Accualt wrote: »

Maybe.

Easily the best on the market?
I've heard it is greatly improved but still not all that great, especially since the player base is hovering around none.

It always seemed that this was catering to a niche market in the first place. Not the type of game that could survive a rough start.

Accualt

Yeah, there were a lot of bad ideas.
I remember the head dev being, "We're making this for hardcore people. People who like a challenge!" And I'm all, okay I like challenges, lets see. Thing is he didn't understand the difference between challenging and tediously dumb.
It had some cool class abilities and great ideas but, man, they tried to do too much at once. Way too many races for a launch title made it so the worlds weren't as polished as they needed to be. The areas taht felt finished were great, thoguh. really had a sense of a living world to it.

Sanon

Oh, guess the "best on the market" comment was a little pompous, sorry. But I do think it's better than most. The grind is just as tedious as any other mmo, and the solo and party play is well balanced.

reVerse

I don't know much about the gameplay, it was fairly boring when I played. What turned me off the game was that Vanguard has shit for graphics. It was like Plasticmen's Plasticy Plastic Convention (Now With Additional Plastic). Absolutely horrible.

Glal

I enjoyed a lot of it, and hated about as much. Some of the quests and stories behind them were fantastic, and some areas were gorgeous... and then others again looked like they were made by students learning how to model.
The zone loading mechanic was retarded (I don't dare thing how much more annoying it would've been without a 10k RPM drive), likewise the way some factions start as hated by the people who occupy travel zones. Seriously, it would have been nice if someone had told me "you know, if you take race A then in order to travel to another continent you will have to get past see-through-invisibility guards to reach the person that lets you do that". Speaking of, why the fuck could I take quests that were impossible to finish because I needed to talk to a hostile NPC? Stupid stupid stupid.

I hear the bugs are largely fixed, but the once-an-hour crash wasn't really what drove me away from the game in the first place. Does it run at more than 15fps yet? Do zones stream instead of load yet? Did they tweak the faction system so it's not Stupid? How about giving you the ability to know which NPCs will attack you on sight, given that they pretty much one-shot you when they do?

KurnDerak

I continually hear how much of the game has been fixed since initial release. For me however, the game has become unplayable after SOE started "Fixing" it themselves after taking control of it.

The crash to desktops were down to maybe once every week or so. For a game that had that shakey of a start, that isn't too bad. Bugs were minimal, for me atleast. However, late december I decided to try it again and found out that for some people it has become unplayable. I am one of them.

For the first night I was just fine. Though when I decided to play my bard, it all went to hell. If I tried to play a song, I lost all control except typing messages, and then the game crashed without any of the "This game crashed, send an error report" windows. This started happening with a druid I had just made as well, if I tried casting spells. On top of this, the crashing to desktop happened much more frequently. As in, I couldn't play for more than 10-15 min without one.

If I could actually play the game, I'm sure I would have fun, but it got to the point I had to get it off my system before trying it anymore it was irritating me so much.

goodtimes

Glal wrote: »

I enjoyed a lot of it, and hated about as much. Some of the quests and stories behind them were fantastic, and some areas were gorgeous... and then others again looked like they were made by students learning how to model.
The zone loading mechanic was retarded (I don't dare thing how much more annoying it would've been without a 10k RPM drive), likewise the way some factions start as hated by the people who occupy travel zones. Seriously, it would have been nice if someone had told me "you know, if you take race A then in order to travel to another continent you will have to get past see-through-invisibility guards to reach the person that lets you do that". Speaking of, why the fuck could I take quests that were impossible to finish because I needed to talk to a hostile NPC? Stupid stupid stupid.

I hear the bugs are largely fixed, but the once-an-hour crash wasn't really what drove me away from the game in the first place. Does it run at more than 15fps yet? Do zones stream instead of load yet? Did they tweak the faction system so it's not Stupid? How about giving you the ability to know which NPCs will attack you on sight, given that they pretty much one-shot you when they do?

Easily the best on the market.
Easily the best on the market.
Easily the best on the market.
Easily the best on the market.
Easily the best on the market.
Easily the best on the market.
Easily the best on the market.

meatflower

The sad thing is that even if they did fix all of the problems Glal and others mentioned, it's still doomed.

If an MMO doesn't retain it's launch base it's really hard to keep the population at a decent size. The game was broken to a point being nearly unplayable at launch which led to a mass exodus of launch purchasers. Thankfully they offered a trial version around launch and I was able to save myself $50. Even if it's fixed now, we'd all be going to nearly empty servers which is a bigger problem in an MMO than any bug or design flaw.

Maybe I'm wrong about this though. Perhaps the claims of the servers being deserted are untrue. What say you OP?

edit: According to MMOGCHART.com they're at 40,000. Well...that's 10,000 more than The Matrix Online had before it was canned so...uh... >.>

Fryhole

Vanguard® now with 5 players!

Pb

The big killer in that game was the horrible, horrible burden of traveling. I know it's good to make a game feel big, but holy shit was that boring. Couple that with really annoying placement of harvest spawns (especially for low level people) and it really killed the early game for me.

Xabora

Plant? Maybe... I played that game hard when it first came out for about 5 months...
I would NEVER touch it again. Plus www.mmorpg.com has a few people talking about how the game engine issues were pretty much the same as before.

Glal

You played it for 5 months? Good lord. What's it like at higher levels?

Shadowfire

Pb wrote: »

The big killer in that game was the horrible, horrible burden of traveling. I know it's good to make a game feel big, but holy shit was that boring. Couple that with really annoying placement of harvest spawns (especially for low level people) and it really killed the early game for me.

Traveling is always my #1 complaint in every MMO, and Vanguard just made it worse.

The diplomacy game was the shit, though.

Arkady

My mom loves Vanguard.

If that isn't a damning accusation, I don't know what is.

Bullfrogof7272

my wife's friends mother and her creepy live in boyfriend are the only people i know that play vangaurd. My wife and i play wow and they laughed at us saying how much better vangaur was going to be (once they worked out a few problems) well 6 months later someone sent me a tell in wow asking for a Ginvite turns out its my wife's friends mother who just started playing wow...

Wren

I warned my friend not to get vanguard, at least not at release. He didn't listen though, and he regretted it.

thats my vanguard story

Tav

I know more people who play The Matrix Online then who play this.

Draeven

now thats pretty bad, cause i don't know a single person who played or has tried the matrix.

INeedNoSalt

I tried the Matrix trial.

So bad.

meatflower

I bought The Matrix Online at release. I took that proverbial launch day leap of faith. And I fell into a pit of rusty spikes.

I remember when I cancelled it after the first month and you couldn't do it online, you had to actually call a phone number and talk to a real person. The nice lady asked me why I was cancelling.

Me:"To be quite honest, the game sucks"
Her:"I've been hearing that a lot today."

Seriously though, I thought they shut it down a while back.

Back on topic though....

I feel like Vanguard is in the place now that Hellgate will be in six months to a year. A couple hanger on's still waiting for the devs to fix issues and make improvements they said would happen the first month. Though that one guy got infracted for his post...the best MMO on the market? I think this thread alone proves that no, no it is not.

Pb

meatflower wrote: »

Though that one guy got infracted for his post...the best MMO on the market? I think this thread alone proves that no, no it is not.

That infraction is pretty much crap.

Accualt

Thread shitting is an infractable offense.
Even if the thread is a toilet bowl.

Smashism

Accualt wrote: »

Thread shitting is an infractable offense.
Even if the thread is a toilet bowl.

Hahahaha, oh man. that was great

Wren wrote: »

I warned my friend not to get vanguard, at least not at release. He didn't listen though, and he regretted it.

thats my vanguard story

so was this.

Vanguard, not so interesting. Jokes at Vanguards and OP's expense, very interesting.

-SPI-

The most interesting thing about vanguard for me was when one of the people who worked on it wrote this post on a message board:

You know, as much as I hate having to carefully craft (AKA, lie through my teeth) an answer to "What was Vanguard's biggest failing?" in job interviews, I realized after reading that rather disappointing article how proud I am of it.

Know why? Because I can honestly say with 100% validity: I'm a big reason for Vanguard's failure. Not Brad Mcquaid - not Microsoft. Me. And Guess what? I'm really kind of proud of it.

Brad Mcquaid didn't do shit. (News Flash?) He's had an opiate addiction for years now, which only got progressively worse as the project failed. His cumulative face time with sigil designers in the most crucial final years of development? Approx: 15 minutes. And some of the time was spent begging for legitimately acquired narcotics (Or in times of desperation, jacking them from people's desk).

The lead designers didn't do shit. (News Flash?) Sigil fired all of their golden-boy, EQ-Genius designers (Save some who would walk away in disgust) who this board once speculated simply "left." It wasn't even secretive. It all happened on the same day.

Sony didn't do shit. The extent of sony's help was 2 designers who ended up writing some diplomacy quests in Tanvu and some adventuring quests in Tursh. I think there was an artist that came in 2 days a week or something for about a month also. Thom Terrasas (sp?) is the only Sony employee that ever directly affected the direction of that game.

The only part Sony really played in Vanguard's destiny was to let its life unnaturally and undeserving-ly continue. And apparently, it's simply because they were naive enough to think this project was worth their cash. Hah! Even the staff at sigil was left wondering why the hell Sony would buy us. Dozens of lunch hours were spent trying to figure out why.

"What profitable web of intrigue and mystery was big'ol Smed spinning with this crazy move(????)," we'd often cry

It was pretty shocking (and just lame) to hear John Smedly actually get angry and complain to people after the layoff's that he, "didn't know what he was buying." He even expressed anger at Jeff and Brad for bamboozlin' him. Poor guy. Maybe next time tough-guy Smed decides to spend several million dollars on something he'll expend some brain power figuring out what it is first.

Dave Gilbertson DID do some shit. (News Flash!) But this guy? Man, so much stuff I could say about this guy. He was truly unbelievable. Even when you thought his insanely unprofessional antics couldn't get any more outrageous, he'd go and do something like tell everyone they're getting a raise (to keep crunching) and then one by one call people into his office who WERE actually getting raises (but would never actually get them), how much they were going to get (VERY, soon). Unfortunately he would move through desk rows one by one and simply skip over the unlucky ones. It took a whole 5 minutes for the office to see through his brilliantly laid out scheme. He used the same plan for the lay-offs too. Classy huh?

He's literally never played a video game in his life, yet when Brad died off and Dave inherited the position of Vanguard Jesus, he decided he must be the final call on every design decision. I guess if you ride dirt bikes with a gamer god, his genius just wears off on you.

Fortunately, sometime this would result in getting played like a fiddle by whoever happened to be lovingly pulling the strings that day. But more often than not, this just meant people had to go around him to get something in, only without the help of (Place whatever department here) that was necessary for a game feature to actually turn out right. Imagine for a second people at Sigil actually knew how to do something right? (Believe it or not, we did on occasion) this guy would become the bottleneck to prevent that from happening.

If there was a ceremony for the Gamespy award, Dave would be accepting. For the sake of all our future video game consumer habits, let's hope this guy goes back to the only thing he's qualified to do, whatever that might be.

Anyway, enough of my blabbering. The most shocking reality that I don't think anyone really ever understood is that Vanguard was made (exclusively the design staff, I should say) COMPLETELY by amateurs. People who had been hired less than a week with 0 prior experience were tasked with designing entire newbie areas that shipped. People who had never produced a game in their life were asked to fix a 40 million dollar fuck up. People with no experience were asked to fix the item, diplomacy, ability, content, quest and pretty much every system in the game.

The game that exists now was designed in a single year by people with 0 experience. If that sounds too vague think of it like this: about 1 year from release we had 0 quests in the DB because the tool didn't exist yet. When I decided to split the team there was over 30,000 quest object entries. Yeah, explains a lot doesn't it?

What a huge let down indeed.

Oddly enough, the whole situation was probably a bigger let down to the designers than the consumers. I accepted a position thinking I was going to work with a bunch of experts - Masters of their craft - and really learn the ropes of game design. Instead, my fellow design associates and I were unwittingly tasked with trying to fix a failed video game that had literally been canceled twice before any of us were even hired. So in retrospect, despite everything, I guess I'm still pretty proud of vanguard. Every team member should be proud in spite of a truly pitiful and pathetic waste.

Wren

jawesome

Xabora

Glal wrote: »

You played it for 5 months? Good lord. What's it like at higher levels?

I made it to about 30... got the heroic or legendary hellwolf thingy.
Was kinda neat... but painfull annoying to do.

Pretty much a day or two after I got it. I quit. XD


Mind you at the time there was BARELY any content past 35. The number of quests seem to have faded around mid 20s.

Glal

Any screenshots? The chances of me actually picking it up again are nil (I realized the things I liked most about it were the things I liked about EQ2... so I resubscribed to that instead), but I'd like to see what could have been.

Had my friends not left the game, and I weren't playing a gimped class of gimpdom that required more work to solo than what I get paid to do at work. But still. It had its moments.

Accualt

That is one damning developer rant.
I've got to say, though, what I played of Vanguard is incredibly impressive if everything that dev post said is true.

Smashism

So can we have the OP try to recover this one?
Or did another PR dude learn where NOT to troll?
At least our interest was sparked....

in how shitty the game is