Vanguard: Saga of Failure
Before I dive into any specifics about the game itself, let’s have a look at where Vanguard stands three and a half months after release.
The game hit the market amidst a torrent of really bad word of mouth from beta testers, shortly after Blizzard released their Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft. Bad timing. Negative game magazine and website reviews followed soon. Brad McQuaid had hoped for 250k – 500k subscribers but only slightly more than 150k signed up. Since then, player numbers have been in steady decline. I’d be surprised if Vanguard has more than 100k subscribers at the moment.
Gelenia, the server with the highest population (because most of the European player base is crammed into it), can sport a mere 1800 players during peak hours. Considering the enormous size of the world, 1800 not a very large number. From what I’ve gathered, most US servers don’t fare nearly as well. EverQuest had higher population servers eight years ago.
People quitting left and right makes it hard to find groups in Vanguard’s already oversized world, which drives even more people to cancel their accounts. And those who remain are constantly asking themselves if the game even has a future. Vanguard needs server mergers ASAP.
The situation seems dire. My ex-guild disintegrated a few weeks ago when the number of active guild members fell to 5, down from 25 two months ago. The release of LotRO was the final death blow. Most of my former guild mates never made it past level 30. My new guild seems to be hemorrhaging high level players at an alarming rate, so far six level 40+ members have been AWOL for more than two weeks despite that fact that raid content is being pushed onto the test server.
Looking at my ‘friends’ list is even more depressing. Virtually all the people I’ve met leveling from 1 to 30 seem to have quit the game. Fortunately, the static group I’ve been leveling with to 50 during the past few weeks is still largely intact, though we did lose our second rogue. Every time someone unexpectedly doesn’t show up I’m worried that he might be gone for good. Playing a dying MMORPG isn’t fun.
Vanguard is a very flawed game but it’s far from being horrible. Pre-WoW it would have been considered a solid MMORPG release. Yes, it still has some major bugs, the system requirements are insane and there is a whole slew of other issues but the game has shaped up considerably during the past three months.
Vanguard deserves a chance and I hope that subscriber numbers stabilize sufficiently for developement to continue.