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Role Playing (Games)

Vanguard - Saga of Heroes Released 72

Posted by Zonk from the mcquaid-does-the-happy-dance dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After years of promises and fan hype, Sigil Games Online and SOE has released Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. I've been playing the pre-release the last few days and I've been really enjoying it. I scoffed at the idea of diplomacy in a MMOG, but Sigil has done something with it I've never seen before. They made it a card game...within a game. MMORPG.com has a preview of the Beta game, and Gamespy offers up out of the box impressions of the game on Launch day. GameTrailers has a launch day trailer and dragon mount video to give you an idea of what it looks like in action. Whether the game turns out well or not, the fans are happy that it is finally on the shelves."
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Vanguard - Saga of Heroes Released More

Vanguard - Saga of Heroes Released

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  • Diplomacy?! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 )
    I scoffed at the idea of diplomacy in a MMOG...

    This is someone who never played TradeWars [wikipedia.org] back in the day.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by User 956 ( 568564 )
      This is someone who never played TradeWars back in the day.

      Or Eve online, back in today.

      • Re:Diplomacy?! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Lotvog ( 1034852 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2007 @06:54PM (#17834702)
        To clarify on the parent post as well as my own post below, diplomacy in EVE-Online manifests itself just as it would in the real world: - Alliances and wars spanning dozens of different factions, encompassing tens of thousands of players - Non-Aggression Pacts and mutual defense treaties - Issuing of temporary hunting passes, rights of safe passage through space - Alliance membership conditions requirement corporations to patrol the claimed region(s) of space - Defections, "corporate" secrets, and espionage, etc. All of of the above were once generated, applied, and enforced by players, without any in-game mechanics. Since then, Alliances exist in an "official" capacity, though many of the required provisions rest solely in the hands of the players. Oh, and lest I forget, there's also the incredible wealth of lore and intrigue added by the developers since the game's launch, which is another game in itself.

        • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Of course EVE-Online players don't get to enjoy any of this because they have to spend all their time spamming slashdot on behalf of their game.
        • I just quit after playing Eve-Online for half a year. Yes, all of that stuff you said is actually in the game. If you enjoy those business management games like Rollercoaster Tycoon or whatever, I can see you enjoying that type stuff. However, alot of the diplomacy aspects are broken. I was in a corp/alliance that would make fake corp and Alliance and declare a war on oursleves, this would make it more expensive for other corps to declare war on us. I would say probably half of Eve-online player are in

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Lotvog ( 1034852 )
      Not to mention that diplomacy in EVE-Online is at an entirely different level compared to any other game I've ever played - particularly before Alliance controls were implemented in the game. When you get into the thick of things in wild space, the sheer amount of player-managed organization and politicking was, and still is, unlike anything I've ever experience in any game.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Barny ( 103770 )
      Yup, they did of course take all the GOOD bits out of the diplomacy system early in the beta (i managed to have a quick play with it, between crashes).

      This game is released unfinnished and pre-nerfed from what it could have been, by a company that cares nothing for its customers beyond their CC details month-to-month.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by lymond01 ( 314120 )
        I picked your post to remind everyone what Brad McQuaid (owner of the Vanguard project). I paraphrase:

        The game isn't done yet, but if it's going to be released at all it needs to be now to generate revenue to continue development. We feel it has a lot of potential but we're out of funds. The game is playable and will only get better, as is the case with all MMORPGs, though we freely admit this is not to launch specs.

        So sure they're concerned about their credit cards but it's their credit cards, not their

        • Sure, muddy the picture with your "quotes" and "facts"

          The fact is the world runs on the grumbles and fumes of players living in their parents' basements. When will the world wake up and realize that Sony is quickly cornering this market. Soon we will all be forced to play unfinished games and gripe and moan about it. It will be our duty, it will be the law, the world would end if we didn't.

          • You say that jokingly but there always seems to be room for what we want beside what is. Cheering or moaning is integral to the success of most things, in this case the MMORPG. Without the passion of the audience or participants, for better or worse, your product will fail. There's this ridiculously poorly programmed game called Horizons. Changed companies (at least in name to avoid legal issues) three times, billing canceled accounts all the while. People still play it because they want it to be bette
          • Considering All of SOE's MMO's combined don't have the subscriber numbers WoW has, I don't think SOE is in the position to corner anything.

  • It's decent (Score:5, Informative)

    by aafiske ( 243836 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2007 @06:48PM (#17834602)
    I've been playing very late beta and pre-release. I've played EQII, WoW and Eve. I still play Eve.

    On the whole, it's pretty fun to play. It is less simplistic than WoW. It is less ugly than EQII. Personally, I always found the low-poly high-quality art direction in WoW to look better than EQII, which just looked ... wrong. Sterile. Vanguard seems to do it better. Things look reasonably realistic and pretty. I have it on super-high quality (8800gtx, FX-60, 2gb ram), and I get good FPS most everywhere. The worst is the stuttering/slowdown when you go indoors or cross a chunk, but it's not a big deal. Those with less beefy computers may have more complaints.

    It's been pretty stable. Very stable considering it just launched, not quite as stable as an established game.

    I think, on the whole, I enjoy it because it feels a little more risky than EQII or WoW. Dying isn't penalty free after level 7. I find myself paying more attention as I wander around, and thinking twice before engaging an enemy.

    I also like the huge world. You can see for miles, and it gives a sense of really being there that I haven't experienced before.

    Crafting is less attention-demanding than EQII, and way more complicated than WoW. It's basically a minigame where you make decisions to spend a pool of action points to buff quality, move along progress, or alleviate problems. But it's not real time, you can sit and think and decide if the complication that popped up is worth fixing, or just living with since you're almost done.

    Diplomacy is an amusing card game that you can get some nice lore/reading from if you look for it.

    On the downside, their door/elevator code is buggy. The door one isn't too bad, but the elevator one is massively frustrating. Anyone who plays and has tried to do the storehouse near the human/halfling lands knows what I mean here. We had to leave and do something else, it was near impossible to get everyone on the same floor.

    There are still some minor clipping problems with the artwork. And lots of features that are 'coming soon'. Despite that, it does feel like a full game. If you want a slightly more challenging mmorpg, this might be it. I think Gamespy's verdict of 'wait and see' is about right. It's not a disaster, it's not an obvious winner. It's a decent entry that, given good continuing support, could turn into something great.

  • It just didn't cut the mustard for me (Score:4, Insightful)

    by garylian ( 870843 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2007 @06:53PM (#17834686)
    I really wanted to like V:SoH. My guild from another game had a really large presence planned for it, and I wanted to finally start a game at the same time they did. I got into the closed beta, and never could get into the game.

    I kinda felt similar to when I first played EQ2 back at its launch. That game made things difficult for the sake of being difficult, and V:SoH appears to have taken the same approach. Tedium summed up my experience the best.

    I'm 40 years old now. I have an infant in the house for the first time in my life. I just don't have the time to dedicate to a game that has so many timesinks built right into it. Corpse Runs? I hope to never see another CR in my life, and certainly have zero plans to stay up til 2AM helping everyone else get their corpse. Oh, I can take an XP penalty, but it's really stiff? No thanks. And CRs were just the first major hurdle I didn't like. There were plenty of others.

    I never thought it would be the case, but I have become a casual gamer. And V:SoH is very unfriendly to the casual player. It's more a raid dependent game, much like EQ1 was. That's fine if you have the time to spare, but I no longer do. And my wife would never, ever go for a game that made things this difficult again. I got her into EQ, and she did ok. Then she tried WoW, and she loved that it was so much more friendly. EQ2 seems even friendlier to her than WoW did, so we're enjoying that.

    I don't see this game making any dent at all in the WoW player base. It may grab some from EQ2 that are looking for more of a challenge, but the WoW folks that decided to give EQ2 a try and have stayed because the game has gotten so much better than release? They aren't going to enjoy V:SoH, either.

    So... What's going to be the next casual gamer friendly release that isn't a WoW or EQ2 title? Until it comes out, I'm sticking with EQ2.
    • I call FUD.... I'm a casual gamer but I can not stand mind-numbingly easy and boring games like WoW. Sorry, but I don't want to play Mario Bros skinned into an MMO. I want a game that has some challenge. Granted, there is too much of an emphasis placed on time played but I dare you to tell me WoW is not the same, especially in the end-game.

      Vanguard is not perfect, not by a longshot but at least it doesn't hold my hand. Sorry, I'm 35 years old and I'm not dead yet. Give me a challenge.
      • Mario Bros skinned into an MMO?

        I get a kick out of people who say that WoW is so ridiculously easy. I really hope you have a rank 14 pvp character, a character with a full set of T3 gear, and have led a guild through encounters in Naxx. Anything short of this and I call FUD on you.

        What % of the user base do you even think has seen the inside of Naxx? What % of the user base would you consider top tier PvP players? If it were as easy as all of you old EQ elitists say that number should be pretty da

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by KDR_11k ( 778916 )
          What % of the user base do you even think has seen the inside of Naxx? [..] If it were as easy as all of you old EQ elitists say that number should be pretty damn near 100... right?

          Keep in mind that difficulty is not the only thing that can prevent a player from reaching the endgame. WoW is hardly a 5 minute game.

          Also keep in mind that it's not the hardest part of a game that defines its difficulty, it's the average difficulty. A few hard parts at the end don't make a difficult game if the day to day combat

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by 0123456 ( 636235 )
          "I ran a guild for casual people 25 years of age and older... and we had a HELL of a time just getting into BWL with our casual playstyle."

          Having raided on MMOGs before, my experience is that the only truly difficult parts are a) finding fifty people of which none are total fucktards who can't do what the raid leader asks and b) managing to stay awake for eight hours to kill the Dropper Of Phat Lewt.

          The whole raiding concept sucks ass and is hardly what I call fun.
          • As I don't think any of the current-generation MMOs even support 50-person raids and there are games out there like EQ2 where the longest raid zones cap off around two or three hours before you've fully mastered it, I'd say your knowledge of raiding is a little outdated.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by KDR_11k ( 778916 )
        Sorry, but I don't want to play Mario Bros skinned into an MMO.

        Oh, if only...

        MMORPG combat is mind numbingly boring and involves no actual challenge at all. Sure, you can die from not using enough healing items or approaching an enemy the wrong way but just because it's possible to fail doesn't mean it's challenging. PvE requires close to zero ability, from what I heard it doesn't get interesting in most games until you've spent a double digit amount of hours and I get bored of these games a long time befor
        • Yeah, most people you'll hear talking about challenge in MMOs conflate challenge with time consumption. There are some legitimately challenging things in MMOs but by and large they're performing easy to moderate tasks over and over again. There is nothing in Vanguard (aside from Diplomacy, which they're alternating between making too easy and borking to impossible hell right now every patch) that requires more skill than in games like WoW and EQ2 -- the time penalties are just stiffer for falling asleep at
      • What Fear, Uncertainty, or Doubt are you calling?

        There is nothing wrong with wanting a challenge. At age 35, I had a lot more free time to handle grind. It's why I was playing EQ1 at the time. I wasn't in an uber-raiding guild, and I took my time to reach 70 before retiring from the game shortly before WoW came out, but I played it for 5+ years. I hit 60 in WoW over the course of 9 months, since my wife could only play so much while working on her masters. And once we hit 60, we were looking at grind-fo

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Grizpin ( 899482 )
      You might want to look into Lord of The Rings Online. It sounds like it would fit your family's play style nicely ;)

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Photon Ghoul ( 14932 )
      Oh yes, forgot to mention that "corpse runs" aren't required in Vanguard. You can always retrieve your tombstone by paying a few measeley copper.
      • Sure, you can buy your tombstone with your stuff back instead of doing a corpse run but you will not recover the experience that you've lost due to death. If you do recover your tombstone "the hard way" you get most of that experience back. It's a choice you get and given that not all tombstones are easy (or even possible) to retrieve, it's a good choice to have.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by casey1797 ( 669151 )
      Personally that is the whole reason that I wanted to play this game. This is not a personal attack on you, just my opinion. I've played eq2, eve, ddo, ultima online, plus some even older than that. All those games did was keep making it easier and easier to play which made it so easy that you didn't even have to think about it(which is why I stopped playing them). I get tired of games that think we are all morons who can't use our brains to figure anything out, or that we need everything spelled out for us
      • Honestly, I have no problem with what you are saying. There are many thousands of people out there that are looking for more of a challenge and/or grind than what WoW or EQ2 offers. And V:SoH will make a good portion of them happy.

        I just think most casual gamers may find it to be more time consuming than they planned for. Some may be converted and will spend that extra time. Many probably won't.
    • Lord of the Rings Online sure looks like it's aiming at the WoW player base. Very familiar interface, easy to get into, very nice graphics, that LOTR world. Nicely done stuff with instances as well.
  • I got burnt on the Saga of Ryzom launch, when they didn't have most of the features implemented that were listed on the box. I won't buy an MMO without having tried it first anymore.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Aladrin ( 926209 )
      I agree that no trial means no customer for me as well, but how did you get burnt on Saga of Ryzom? It was open beta, then free trials for like 2 months. Then a year later, they introduced 2 week trials again and never took them away.

      By the way, you really should have played early Beta. It was an amazing game, even without a lot of the 'promised' features like proper harvesting and clothes dyeing. They ruined it about halfway through beta because they got greedy and felt the need to prevent people from
      • There was no free trial when it was released. They came out with the trial about 2-3 weeks after launch.
    • I would like to say that i agree with you in this instance...but as far as my understanding goes V:SoH does not offer a 'demo'. Which is really annoying.

      That leaves people like you and me over a bit of a barrel. Either buy it...or don;t play it is what they appear to be saying.

      The closest thing I could find to playing it was watching the trailers! OH! i don't know. Maybe i should just go back to WoW.

  • First impressions (Score:5, Insightful)

    by snillfisk ( 111062 ) <mats.lindh@no> on Wednesday January 31, 2007 @07:25PM (#17835182) Homepage
    I've been playing the game for the last four or five days, and my first impressions are that the game could have used quite a more bit of testing before being launched. There are quite a few obvious blunders in the UI and the game itself, and I've not spent much time playing (just getting around level 7).

    The diplomacy idea is nice, but it gets a bit tiresome after doing one round of cards after another. The quests for getting started is probably my biggest grief so far, as they're not as tailored and adjusted as was the case in WoW. The same is the case for the user interface and the game environment in itself, and some places it just shines through that they're attempting a bit too much at being WoW (at least that's the way it feels, although you can argue otherwise).

    The gameplay is a bit more advanced than WoW, in particular the diplomacy aspect of the game which is completely lacking other places. The crafting is far more advanced, but not on the level of Star Wars Galaxies (which still is my fav when it comes to crafting and resources). A cross between the easy-to-use interface of WoW and the more advanced form in Vanguard (possibly by starting people out with the easy version and incrementing it along to where Vanguard stands today) could have worked better. I see great potential here, but I'm getting a bit tired of reading conversations and doing tutorials just to understand the concepts that are basics of the game. The learning curve is simply a bit too steep when concerned with the fact that I can't sink that much time into a mmorpg any more, and I'm afraid that it may alienate potential customers.

    To sum it all up: it could have used a couple of months more of closed / open beta testing and adjusted both the UI and the structure of the game. It's not as polished as one could wish. The concepts that separates the game from WoW (as this is what most people know) is interesting, but the execution could probably be timed better.

    Running the game in 1920x1200 on a GF 7800GT, had to turn off hardware occlusion and are having quite a few issues with game objects (stones, npcs, close objects) popping out when they arrive within the first LOD-distance.

    • To sum it all up: it could have used a couple of months more of closed / open beta testing and adjusted both the UI and the structure of the game. It's not as polished as one could wish. The concepts that separates the game from WoW (as this is what most people know) is interesting, but the execution could probably be timed better.

      Agree 100%

      And that was my verdict already a week or two before the beta ended. Had two lvl 10, 1 lvl 8 and 2 lvl 5 chars. Not much, but it let me see the aspects of the game. Two of them was crafters, and one was diplomat. The diplomat looked the most promising / fun part.

      But the overall polish and execution need some serious work. And the game should have had at least a month extra before release.

      Interesting game, could have been damn good, but lack the sparkle.

  • So, being a EQ, EQ2 and Planetside on-again off-again player, I went out and picked this up. Figured, why not, got the Station Access account anyway.

    It looks good, it plays ok, but I feel it is Beta 3 quality. I was hit with a few bugs, most minor, all annoying, within minutes of playing.

    Now, I don't have the fastest system out there (P4 3Ghz, 2GB RAM, ATi Radeon 9800 Pro, if you care), but geez, audio should not go skipping at the 'design your character screen'.

    Give them a few weeks to work the bugs out, t
    • Yeah. The word on the street is they ran out of investor money and had to push the product to market a little early. That being said, I still enjoyed the (closed) beta I participated in and will probably pick the game up soon myself.
  • This is off-topic, but don't MMOs deserve their own slashdot "section icon" by now? I can't be the only one who's tired of seeing Tellah and Gilbert associated so closely with "role"-playing games like WoW.

    And, yeah, I understand that, going by my definition of role-playing games--ones where you play a role besides healer, nuker, or tank--Final Fantasy doesn't technically count, either. Considering the number of games articles that seem to pop up on slashdot, perhaps it's time to reorganize that section
  • From the GameSpy article:

    "Vanguard makes use of Epic's Unreal 3 engine, and if you have a high-end system, you can really see what this allows for. There's so much that can look spectacular here, when all the settings are raised, like cobblestone path textures, volumetric clouds that float like puffy cotton balls across the sky, and trees that are so finely detailed you can count individual leaves on their gently swaying branches."

    Ok, so I played in late beta and umm..it looks like Unreal 2 at best to m

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by LabRat ( 8054 )
      It's not Unreal 3..it's a *heavily* modified Unreal2 engine (some call it 2.5...semantics). Totally agree with you on the performance issue...I beta tested it since August and quite a number of us have been screaming about that for months. Only to be shouted down by the Vanbois in a chorus "It's only beta!". Well, it's now released..and it still sucks sweaty donkey balls. I wont' even go into the gameplay itself...suffice it to say that I haven't been impressed with the "Vision" that has been implemente
  • "They made it a card game...within a game."

    I guess you never played Knights of the Old Republic.
  • Since the last stage of beta they've been stomping out lots and lots of bugs lately but there are still some left. Those who think it needs another 6-8 months should see all the progress they made just in the last two weeks. Most of the really annoying ones are video-related (like the way it insists on setting my screen to 1600x900 in size no matter how often I tell it 1680x1050, thus killing the frame rate). The bugs aren't show-stoppers and they'll probably have all the worst fixed within days. To tho

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