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.
Not quite. This blog used to be dead, though, not only because I haven’t written anything in almost a year but also because it got hacked by a bunch of Kurdish hax0rz who, apparently, think that they can gather sympathy for the plight of their people by pissing people off. Since I’m a complete retard when it comes to webservers, php and all that crap, it took me a while to rebuild things.
Anyway, it’s time to resurrect this blog. No particular reason, I simply feel like it. My command of the English language is getting worse by the hour and writing again might help. Plus, I’m bored.
Future updates will mainly focus on Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. It’s the only MMORPG I am currently playing and everyone and their dog seem to write about LotRO these days. Vanguard is an interesting case study for how MMORPGs can go horribly wrong. It’s a dying game and I fully intend to stick around molesting its rotting corpse.
My female Halfling Rogue (cute, eh?) just ding’ed level 50, so I might be the only MMORPG blogger who actually knows what the fuck he is talking about when it comes to Vanguard.
It’s clear that the game has some huge problems but most of the things that I’ve been reading have either been commentary on some news blurbs or bullshit by people who know very little about the game as of May 2007.
I’ll try update this weblog at least once a week, twice if time allows. Let’s see how long it’ll last this time.
If anyone should wonder why there haven’t been any updates recently (yah, fat chance) – I have been in crunch mode for a bunch of tough university exams. Anyway, I’ll be back with more useless drivel in maybe two weeks. One thing I’d like to share is how much I fucking hate guild drama. Cooperative gameplay and the social structures that emerge as a result are an essential part of the MMORPG experience but sometimes, just sometimes, I wish it was possible to strangle people through the Internet.
More on that later.
Vanguard Beta has been plagued by a number of NDA breaches, most of them distinctly negative. Some of the juicier details that have leaked in the past are the low beta attendance numbers (100-200 players at peak times, out of several thousand testers) and word of a huge 130+ questions survey that Sigil sent out to inquire why nobody wants to play their game. Ouch.
The most recent NDA breach, to my knowledge, was the posting of a number of screenshots on the FOH Forums. The screenshots were taken on a mid-range PC and are probably indicative of the level of visual quality most players who don’t have high-end hardware can expect.
What I found most disheartening about these screenshots is the apparent blandness of the landscape. It’s all rolling hills as far as the eye can see, there are very little distinguishing features. The landscape looks like it has been created with the help of some sort of middleware for algorithmic terrain generation. It all looks rather sterile and objects like trees and structures look oddly out of place. The most horrible part of it is the combination of low-res landscape textures and bump mapping, which can best be seen on this screenshot. Apparently, the bump-maps are supposed to make up for the fact that the textures lack in detail and diversity. It doesn’t work. The result looks like a moon landscape.
Bump Mapping everything doesn’t magically make a game look good. There are good uses for bump maps and then there are cases in which the technology doesn’t really offer anything in terms of visual quality. I feel that someone at Sigil called some really bad shots with regard to technology, artwork and visuals. Besides the ugliness of the terrain when viewed from a distance, Vanguard’s bump mapping approach also breaks down horribly when viewed from up close. This screenshot is a good example. The road textures look OK when viewed from a steep angle but as the angle of view gets flatter it all turns into one distusting grey/brown low-res mess. Bump Mapping is no substitute for good texturing.
I find Vanguard’s graphics rather unappealing but that’s something I could live with if the game had kick-ass gameplay and great content. Problem is, the information from the beta leaks doesn’t really reinforce my confidence in Vanguard’s gameplay or the quality of its content. I’ve compiled some of the more interesting postings by beta testers that can be found in public forums. The comments are predominantly slanted towards the negative, probably because beta testers who actually like the game won’t risk getting kicked out of beta for breaching the NDA. Keeping that in mind, I still think these postings offer an interesting insight on the current state of Vanguard’s beta.
I’m on a 7800 GTX, 3.7 AMD 64 bit with 2 gigs of ram – the game runs consistently at under 20fps. I don’t mind that, it’s in beta and I’m sure it’ll be optimized, but a prerequisite for me not minding about shitty frame rate is if the game has jaw dropping visuals, it doesn’t.
The characters are ugly, they’re not especially detailed, totally bland with terrible hair – these characters are sub par to Galaxies, and in fairness Galaxies had a better customization system.
The environment is bland, the tree’s jut out awkwardly from the landscape, none of it really blends together, sure it’s big but there’s nothing of any interest, and lets not mention the water. NPC’s, enemies, armor, weapons – there’s no imagination here [...]
Having played this game I would definitely put my money on Microsft being able to see how big a stinker this game is [...]
They just recently sent out a survey to beta testers asking why they don’t play the game and what they should do to improve it and make it fun. 9 months into beta. They don’t know how to make their game enjoyable.
The truth is they have had no direction or concept beyond “make Everquest again” and not only did they fail in doing that, even if they manage to succeed through some divine miracle it will still suck because it’s a horrible idea to simply copy one of the first generation MMOs with gameplay that no one in their right mind enjoys anymore.
They touted it as a next generation MMORPG when it is a step backwards in every single aspect.
I think Vanguard is shit. I don’t want you thinking I am a whiner who hates difficult gameplay. The problem with Vanguard is that it tries to keep things like horrible travel times and unforgiving difficulty but DOESN’T keep the charm of Everquest.
The art style is horribly generic, so nothing feels special or interesting. When my Gnome Wizard in Everquest returned to Ak’Anon, it felt like home. There was a certain joy in meeting friends at Kelethin bank. When I played a dark elf, I loved looking at the corpses of idiot ‘good guys’ that got wrecked by Dragoons. Similarly, I loved the danger of trying to sneak through Guk, or finally taking down some great evil like Venril Sathir or Trakanon. I felt GOOD about these things. [...]
Vanguard has no such feeling. Locations serve only as a place to click on people for quests, or click on people to kill. There’s no feeling of accomplishment, just annoyance. Nothing has any personality. The gameplay is nothing special, so it isn’t even fun. I can’t go into specifics for the same reason that others can’t, but I can say that I see no reason to play Vanguard. I’d love for a game to capture the feeling of Pre-Luclin Everquest, but Vanguard is not it.
Vanguard doesn’t have the art style or the humor of WoW. It’s not nearly as optimized (which is fair since Vanguard is in beta), and while it’s much harder, it somehow manages to be less rewarding. WoW may be very close to instant gratification, but sometimes it seems like Vanguard has zero gratification. [...]
It’s not the fun kind of difficult, its the tedious and irritating kind of difficult. [...]
With no personality, no enjoyment, and seemingly no fanbase, this isn’t EQ. This is just a bad game.
It doesn’t attempt anything new, infact it disregards any and every improvement made to the genre since original EQ. It runs like pure shit on every computer, and it’s a mystery why, because it’s ugly, bland and unimaginative. It’s like someone gave a bunch of retards the ability to bump map high resolution textures and let them have at the world.
The models are ridiculously bad. You’d think since they recycled 1 model for every single race in the entire game that 1 model would atleast be decent, it’s not.
This game has no direction whatsoever, if someone told me the developers had been locked away in a basement somewhere since the release of EQ I would believe it. These people simply don’t have it in them to make an entertaining, current mmorpg.
If you pine for the days of sitting with a group killing things over and over in some random, barren location, and wish not only that you could revisit your days of killing wildlife in the karanas, but do it with sub 15 fps, then Vanguard is the game for you.
I really can’t go into depth beyond that because this game is that vapid, it has absolutely no depth to it. I can’t tell you gameplay element x doesn’t work nearly as well in this game it does in WoW, because this game doesn’t have it. It has running around killing things and it has sitting around complaining about how shitty it is.
the most generic korean mmo has more going for it than Vanguard. I can’t think of anything else to say beyond that.
Combat is just reaction not planning. As a melee tank most of my time in combat is spent waiting for certain icons and refresh timers to pop up so I can hit a skill. My skills just seem to do a little more dmg and nothing else. I’ve yet to see the big deal about all the talk of targeting a certain part of an enemy(like an arm or leg) to take advantage of a weakness. [...]
The story arc of the main starting town is help protect the world from the undead forces behind a wall. The wall is about 80 feet long and has less then 10 guards. Your main contribution to this effort is to bring them a sack of food. In 3 quest, including one that just tells you to run up the road alittle further, you cover this whole story arc. The other starting town I tried doesn’t seem to have any type of story. [...]
Most dungeons just have one path through them and no good camp spots. Mobs respawn so fast that you just have to burn through the place as fast as you can. Get 3 groups in a dungeon and it becomes over crowded.
CR’s still suck. If I want to spend an extra hour of my time playing a game its not to recover my body from a dungeon with a super fast respawn rate.
Character creation involves stretching your character out like putty to make it taller or larger. It lookes horrible. [...]
I can’t say strongly enough though that this game just feels wrong and that the design philosphy just seems to be out of touch. Its like something I should have tried in 2000 not 2006. Besides rethinking the whole game I don’t see how they can save it. After putting a week into when I first got into beta and then a few more when the fileplanet relaese hit I just can’t get myself to log on. It just makes me sad after all the hopes I had for this game.
There’s alot of shit in the game that makes no sense, specifically the complete lack of direction at low levels, the terribly bugged animations and…god, lots else. The most amazing thing is the game somehow manages to be so complicated and so mind numbingly simple at the same time. I have 6 buttons to push in a fight, and combined theres something like 30 different effects I can push out as a ranger. Holy shit, that is the most pointless shit I’ve ever seen, and I don’t even want to go into it. [...]
With that said, I STILL have faith in the game for some reason. If made concise the combat system has the potential to be pretty fun, and the non cookie cutter dungeons are pretty good. Of course there’s something like 3? non CC dungeons.
On a related note: Russia plans to build a new pipeline; Poland is pissed.
Rabid hatred of SOE has always been part of the Vanguard fan community identity. Apparently, Brad McQuaid is seen by some as an impeccable knight in shining armor whose strong sense of integrity prompted him to leave that den of nefarious money grubbing that is SOE and set out to build a better company that would redeem his Vision and restore balance to the Force, or some gay shit like that. SGO became some sort of Anti-SOE in the minds of many Vanguard fanboys. Until now.
If there is one thing you can always rely on it’s the self-aggravating nature of internet community drama. Once the negativity bandwagon starts rolling, everyone wants on. Things that are barely relevant are inflated to epic proportions. A couple of years ago, one of the writers of IGN’s Xbox sub-site made a humorous remark in one of his articles that likened the exuberant Nintendo fanboyism at E3 to “skinheads cheering at a Nazi rally”. Granted, as a metaphor for “ridiculous fanaticism without substance” this statement was probably a bit ill-concieved but what’s the big deal? It’s not like anyone had implied that Nintendo fanboys actually were Nazis.
The Nintentards at the IGN web forums went completely bonkers over this. Hundreds of postings demanded the blood of Brandon Justice. Nintentards were acting like they were incredibly insulted. Internet community drama was taking its course, everyone suddenly turned into an oversensitive pussy so they could pretend to have a reason to join the lynch mob. There was even a poll in which 2/3 of the respondents demanded the guy to be fired. Eventually, Brendon Justice was forced to quit his job. Yup, fucking web forum drama forced a guy out of his job. This was one of the archetypical showcases for how trivial things can develope into retarded mass-outbursts of exaggerated emotions, as the members of an internet community whip each other up into some sort of pathetic simian frenzy.
I think the extreme expressions of hatred towards Smed and SOE are the result of a similar process of internet group dynamics. Every time someone brings up anything even remotely SOE-related, someone else feels compelled to chime in with a burst of vitriolic anti-SOE rhetoric and others are soon to follow. The discussion degenerates into a repetitive SOE hatefest. Smed is the focal point of all anti-SOE sentiment. It seems that the guy, who may very well be a complete jackass for all I know, is personally responsible for every shitty business decision, every misguided gameplay change and the personal frustrations some people may have developed about SOE games over the years. Smed, so it appears, is the Satan of MMORPGs, a fiendish creature who made it his personal agenda to ruin everyone’s fun and cheat gamers out of their money. Um, okay.
Sure, SOE is known for rather questionable business practices and Smed is likely responsible for some of them. It’s perfectly understandable that some people may not want to buy a SOE product again and are distrustful of everything related to SOE. But why the intense hatred? I mean, most people shrug it off when they hear news of yet another terrorist attack in Iraq or a hundred people getting killed in a plane crash. Yet, if SOE cheats them out of a few bucks by releasing an unfinished expansion they go completely apeshit. I find that fairly ridiculous and it’s sure as fuck not rational. Under normal circumstances, no reasonable person would react so strongly.
The sheer amount of hysteria over the SOE/SGO co-publishing deal at the official Vanguard forums is astounding. People seem to be more worried about a SOE logo on Vanguard’s retail box than about the reason why MGS and SGO ended their business relationship in the first place. The details of the SOE/SGO deal are sketchy but shouldn’t people worry about the current state of the game rather than the hypothetical possibility that Smed himself waltzes into SGO’s office and personally makes sure that the game will suck and the subscribers are milked for all they’re worth? That seems to be the common sentiment: SOE will make the game suck, somehow.
I can’t help but feel a certain degree of Schadenfreude towards the relentless SOE-bashers that make up a large share of Vanguard’s fan community. I found reading through the discussion threads at the official forums rather entertaining. Exaggerated pessimism, desperate optimism, outright hysteria, anger, resentment, pretend rationality and oodles of SOE-hatred. And on top if it, McQuaid desperately trying to do some damage control. Good stuff.
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO No NO!!!!! NOOOOOOOO!!!!
I will never EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EEVERRRRR play another game where John Smedley and the ************EVIL************** SoE
people are involved in ANY FORM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Vangaurd can crash and burn for all I care if SoE and John Smedley is involved.
There is evil, then there is SoE and John Smedley! They are a whole new form of evil.
Oh but it’s just business… NO! These are the same people that PRE-SOLD copies of the Obi-Wan expansion for StarWars Galaxies to SWG fans telling them that there would be big upgrades in the expansion for the Beast Handler class. Then they announced ON THE SAME DAY THAT THE OBI-WAN EXPANSION SHIPPED THAT THEY HAD REDONE THE WHOLE GAME AND THAT IN TWO WEEKS THE BEAST HANDLER CLASS WOULD BE REMOVED FROM THE GAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Did they offer refunds to all the hundreds of thousands of pre-orders? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
They were working on the “NGE” release for many months before it’s release. They KNEW the beast handler class would not exist when the “NGE” came out. Yet, they advertised the new Beast Handler class upgrades TO SELL PRE-ORDERS OF the OBI-WAN EXPANSION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!That’s technically a scam and as such John Smedley and his crew of evil people should be in jail right now!
Do not associate yourselves with criminals!
Sigil + SoE = BAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
