Some Things Vanguard Did Right
Posted by ze Kranky Kraut on August 2, 2007.
I cancelled my Vanguard subscription a few days ago, I’ve rarely been playing in recent months anyway. Despite the flaws, Vanguard had kept me entertained for for about four months of intensive gaming and then some, which is more than the combined time I spent during my three stints in EQ2 and about half the time WoW managed to keep me interested. Despite of all the game-breaking flaws, the game isn’t all crap.
In retrospect, I think there are a bunch of things Vanguard does better than or at least as well as other MMORPGs. It’s not enough to gloss over the fact that the game is essentially an unfinished, bug-ridden and conceptually failed abomination but there are some things I wouldn’t mind seeing in future MMORPGs. That’s not to say that there isn’t anything else that’s worth a damn in Vanguard, this list of far from exhaustive.
Character Classes
Vanguard features 15 character classes: 3 heavy fighters, 4 light fighters, 4 healers and 4 casters. It’s an archetype system, not unlike EQ2’s. All classes are designed to fulfill a core functionality. Vanguard does it rather well. The classes aren’t equal in power or usefulness, far from it, and there are plenty of class-defining abilities, but all classes can get the job done.
While there is a certain degree of overlap in mechanics and functionality (it’s hard to come up with radically different implementations of tanking), it is camouflaged well. The classes feel sufficiently different from each other. Certainly not all of them and maybe not to the extend that WoW’s classes do but it works for me.
Vanguard successfully pulls off what EQ2 never could: a functional archetype system that allows all classes to fulfill their core roles without becoming virtually indistinguishable from each other. Even after EQ2’s radical class system revamp, their classes stink. Vanguard has interesting classes that aren’t revolutionary but well implemented, bugs notwithstanding.
Targeting
In Vanguard players can have two targets, an offensive target (mobs and NPCs, usually) and a defensive target (group members, pets). What sounds like a small evolutionary step actually makes a world of a difference. It reduces a lot of UI usage tedium, especially for healers who can now keep their party alive without having to detarget the mob and stop doing damage.
Besides being convenient, Vanguard’s dual-target system is also the enabler of classes like Disciple (heals by performing melee attacks) and Blood Mage (a life-tap based healer) and interesting combat mechanics like Rescues and Intercepts.
Equipment Expertise
EE is an interesting little game mechanic for restricting twinking. An item’s EE is expressed as a percentage value that depends on character level, item level, item type and rarity. The Übersword of Assrape +4 may have an EE of 34% for a level 20 character and 15% for a level 30 character. The combined EE of all items on a character cannot exceed 100% and there is also a cap of 20% maximum per item that can be equipped.
The degree of flexibility offered by the EE system is certainly nice, compared to the hard caps in games like WoW. Equipping one or two items that are of significantly higher level is possible, but it comes with a trade-off, as they use up a good amount of EE. The system could use a few tweaks but I like the fact that I am given a choice - within certain boundaries, of course.
Music
Todd Masten’s music is one of the high points in Vanguard. While the main theme isn’t all that great, pretty much everything else is. Vanguard’s in-game music isn’t big on instantly recognizable themes but the few themes that exist are outstanding. The ambient music is also good. It’s unobtrusive, diverse and it usually fits the mood of the zones very well. Some samples from the official website:
Aghram Theme, Shensho Ni Theme, Cobalt Deep.
User Interface Icon Art
Vanguard’s user interfact is bog-standard, similar to WoW’s UI. It could be a bit more customizable like EQ2’s UI, it could use better mod support and a better quest log but it’s functional as it is. What stands out are the beautifully drawn UI icons. I don’t think I’ve seen better icon artwork in any other MMORPG so far. It looks much better than the amateurish icons in EQ2 and LotRO, that look like they were ripped from an early 1990s shareware game.
Some Aspects of the Graphics
I’ll discuss Vanguard’s graphics in-depth in the near future. Visually, Vanguard is a very mixed bag, there is a stark contrast between stuff that looks stunningly beautiful and things that don’t work at all. The Human and Wood Elf areas of Kojan, for example, look amazing. Large parts of Thestra, on the other hand, look dreadfully boring. Qalia can impress with incredible long-distance views but most of the landscape looks like an acne-scarred mess due to the bad use of bump-mapping. Individual objects are often modeled in detail (compared to the low-poly models of other MMOs) but more detailed objects also mean less objects on the screen. The water looks nice but the line where water meets land looks pretty horrid. The dagger and martial arts combat animations look great, the combat animations for spears and two-handed hammers look retarded. And so on.
Mob, weapon and armor models are among the best in any MMORPG, though there could be more diversity. There are so many great pieces of artwork, it’s a shame that all is glued together by a horrendous fractal landscape that makes everything look disjointed because nothing really blends into it.
What’s definately well done are the proportions of characters, buildings and objects in relation to each other. A castle actually looks like a viable castle when it comes to size, unlike these tiny little castles in EQ2’s Antonica zone that look like they couldn’t even withstand an assault by a bunch of geriatric Orcs. The city of New Targonor is a towering bulwark of walls and fortifications. The strange geologic formations in Thestra’s southern swamp lands make players feel tiny and the Infineum Sanctuary, perched atop a mountain surrounded by steep cliffs, can be seen from miles away.
