How is Vanguard?

Question

Okay, so Vanguard: Saga of Heros was released yesterday. Could anyone who has the game (not just beta testers) please tell me: what are your thoughts? Could you give a quick review and (if possible) compare it to either WOW or EQ1/2 in regards to crafting, combat, questing, and character advancement? Thank you.

Answer 1

I've played for a couple of days, and while it suffers from a number of early-release bugs (broken quests, abilities, and resources) it's really impressive!

It feels a lot like EQ1 with a few concessions to WoW (Quest NPCs with floating icons to identify them, very fast recovery when out of combat so there's really no need for downtime healers. The dynamic combat is a matter of keeping a sharp eye out for special combat options to highlight, which don't stay that way for long.

Skills progress much like they did in EQ1 (with usage) but at a much faster rate. Faction works like EQ1. Graphics are on par with EQ2, but the animations are much better. The physical character customization during character creation is excellent, clearly someone paid attention to City of Heroes.

Corpse runs are back, yes- but since items can be soulbound, it's not that horrible. And retrieving your tombstone offsets most of the experience loss.

My biggest complaint is performance. Frame rates vary drastically depending upon the environment. Enter a camp with several players and NPCs and bang! Lag and stutter. Run into the plains and framerates skyrocket. I don't see how they plan to handle raids unless that's fixed.

The coolest thing is that the world feels HUGE, and the environments for the starting races are quite different. On the downside, the different races are so spread out, there's no way that low-level characters of different races can meet up & adventure together. So if you want to play with friends, you'll have to play the same race, or gain many levels before you begin the treacherous journey into foreign lands. Maybe that's how it should be, but it's a bit of a damper on the fun factor.

Unfortunately while the artwork is better, the underlying concepts for non-human race's architecture seem to fall a little short of EQ1. Primitively rendered Neriak still looks a lot more like a place Dark Elves would live, compared to Hathor Zi. Now I've only checked out 3 races so maybe the Inkies are just the weak link (or I just need to explore more) On the bright side, the Gnome starting city is just *perfectly* done- far better than any other game I've played.

Harvesting makes sense and adds a nice element to the game-crafting is actually fun, to my surprise. The grind has been replaced with a bit of thinking, and the economy seems to work at least for now.

I haven't really delved into the diplomacy yet, but it's essentially a mini-game like Pazzak in Star Wars:KOTOR, you play cards attempting to sway your opponent and direct the conversation to your side. Great potential there- and there's no reason to believe they won't tap more of it over time. Unfortunately this system lends itself to a sort of Magic:the Gathering approach- great stuff in future expansions ad nauseum. I really hope they don't succumb to that $iren $ong...

Advancement? We'll have to see how bad the grind becomes, it's way too early to tell. Like all games, the early levels go fast.

Answer 2

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Answer 3

Well, best I could say is test it yourself by grabbing the demo.
I think fileplanet ( http://www.fileplanet.com ) has it.