Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

So, every now and then since beta and launch times, I've occasionally peeked in on Vanguard whenever my Station Access account has been active, which has been the case the last week or so.

Up until now, I've always played Vanguard on a dual-core Pentium 4, GeForce 7950, 4 gigs of memory, Windows XP machine that ran it decently on Balanced settings. The only problem was the hitching issues and performance drops in places like Khal. 

One of my chief complaints has always been the animations, but I reserved complaining about the graphics all together due to never being able to crank the settings all the way up at a higher resolution, and using external software to force antialiasing on the client.

Well in anticipation of Age of Conan, wanting to play Lord of the Rings with DX10 enabled, run The Witcher smoother, and Crysis on higher settings (i.e. I don't upgrade for any one single game), and SP1 for Vista having finally released, I shelled out for a new rig; 3.0 ghz core 2 extreme, 4 gigs of memory, a GeForce 9800 GX2 and two 10k RPM raptor harddrives with Vista as the OS. 

I've been able play Vanguard with Ultra High settings and all the sliders pushed up at a 1680x1050 resolution...and I'm utterly unimpressed.

You know, its not that Vanguard's graphics are all entirely bad, its just that the featureset seems incomplete. No water reflections, the terrain looks plastic, the avatars look plastic; everything looks randomly generated and sterile.

'course, all of this has been said before, and more articulately and eloquently than I can put it. I'm no technical artist, so I can't explain what a full featureset of graphic technologies in modern games is comprised of; but I do know there's a huge gaping hole in what Vanguard's engine accomplishes. What's missing goes beyond mere things like antialiasing.

There are some things impressive in Vanguard; voluminous storm clouds in the distance that appear to actually fill the sky, and the detail in textures on things such as bone corpses with dirty nooks and cranies when one zooms in. But, everything in-between the large and small details are very subpar and unimpressive. 

As for the animations, they're unchanged and as terrible as before. Some things like the Charlie Brown clouds of the Druids' Lightning Bolt casts don't bother me so much; since its a matter of preference if a person likes spell animations small in scope or over the top. 

What does bother me though is that most of the combat animations and spell effects aren't at all telling of what the hell is happening. 

I'm used to my character falling asleep on his feet or stumbling around dazed in City of Heroes if he suffers a status effect. I'm used to an arrow appearing in my character if he's shot, or his shield shrugged up to defend against a blow if he's blocking in Dark Age of Camelot. 

In Vanguard, I'm forced to look at the combat log if I care to know everything thats actually occuring. So its not so much the quality or scope of the animations, its more that they don't serve their purpose. 

The spell effects are terrible as well. There's entirely too many generic bursts of color sprays and sparkles in lieu of animations that actually visibly represent the flavor text of the spell. Swap a frost and fire spell animation in any other MMO and there's a visible change; swap any two animations of most spells in Vanguard and who cares; except those who've trained themselves to know a blue firework is actually a bone projectile.

Anyway, I originally planned to tough Vanguard out a good two weeks or so, and give it a review. I can't bring myself to play that long though, the graphics are too incomplete, and animations too terrible for me to enjoy. 

So I have to say, my number one wish for Vanguard during my time usin' and abusin' Age of Conan and Warhammer like I do every other MMO, is that SOE overhauls the animations as planned, but go beyond that to enable more of, or add to the engine's graphical capabilities. It's simply terrible as is.

On some miscellaneous notes, I hitch as much on this rig as I did on my last. By "as much", I mean as frequently, the pauses are actually shorter, and chunking takes only 2-3 seconds, but hitching is still an issue. I'd say if they managed to squash hitching all together, they'd  be well off performance wise. I don't mean the game is good to run on 6 series GeForces as advertised, infact I still think performance blows on 7 series cards; but at the rate they're churning out performance boosts, a lot more incentive will hit the gaming industry for people to go ahead and upgrade before they make this game perform better on earlier cards. 

Also, I don't much mind all of the facial customizations being removed. I haven't gotten to a level where I've gotten to experience a whole lot of different helmets; so its not that I favor those or anything, its just that I believe the facial skins have more of an impact on how a character appears than modifying facial dimensions. The problem is, there seems to only be four faces and four hairstyles per race still. Ontop of that, they're mostly ridiculous and bland. I'd much rather they add more faces and hairstyles than try and reimplement dimensional facial adjustments. 

As for bugs, patching took a good dozen attempts before it finished, I crashed to desktop my first time ingame, and while I didn't "fall" through the world, I damn sure swam through it a few too many times. The game is still buggy, but not unplayable. I can't say I've encountered a bug in-game that I've encountered twice, unless I purposefully recreated it or reapproached a plot of bugged terrain. 

On my most positive note, I have to say I believe the server population on at least Seradon has improved a good deal since I played last. Now I say server population because a game-wide growth in population would probably mean the other three servers fairing well alongside Seradon. Considering the game is down 4 servers from 13, I doubt I'd even be impressed if it grew enough to warrant the opening of three new servers, so one server's population cannabilizing three others isn't much to brag about.

It is good though that I'm able to log on 2 a.m. in the morning, find 3-4 other people in newbie zones and a good 30+ people in Khal. Not a whole lot of people, but enough to get newbie questions answered, two- and three-man groups for "Small Group" quests. I actually saw more people that time of night than I did early on in the Christmas playtime event.

So my thoughts of Vanguard nowadays in short: 

1. The graphics and animations are terrible, my only gripe that renders the game personally unplayable (not for any technical reasons).
2. Hitching is performance issue numero uno; remove it and I'd say Brad's prophecy of Vanguard being "fixed" by people upgrading their PC is realized.
3. There's still bugs, but nothing gamebreaking.
4. Seradon's population is decent, less ghost town prone than months ago. 
5. I don't think the customization changes are all that terrible; but rather they reveal the lacking of facial skins and hair options that've always existed. 

Should I conclude and say Vanguard has "potential"? Yeah it does, but it seems the more potential that's realized, the more daunting it seems for its small staff to ever realize any of it. Unlike most people that admit Vanguard has potential, I don't believe it'll ever be realized; or rather it won't be in any reasonable amount of time. 

I'll check Vanguard out again after a year or so, but i'd bank on 2-3 years before it's resolved my personal gripes with that small staff it has.

I actually preferred Vanguard in Beta 2 over the final product, for a number of reasons, but I always find distaste for Vanguard's art and graphics interesting, because I have higher praise for it in that area than any other game save perhaps EVE, although EVE gets off easy by rendering far less than any terrestrial setting demands.

Out of curiosity, which MMO do you favour visually? I mean it sincerely, not suggestively.

You refer to LOTRO, which I also play besides Vanguard, and this makes me a little puzzled.  The advantages of LOTRO over Vanguard Graphics are for me (my personal taste) the "lighting effects" and facial animations. Other then that, even the body animations are in my opinion lacking in Lotro compared to Vanguard. Sorry I do not want to derail this thread into a vanguard vs lotro graphics, its just something that surprised me in your post.

What puzzles me is the graphics look like complete shit and the world is completly empty and bland and the animations are soooo horrible and the character models are the worst i've ever seen and yet people still play it.

If this game has enough subs to keep it running then I dread to think how long SWG will go on for.

People say it's about the gameplay and yeah if Vanguard had good gameplay but it doesn't it's just a poor buggy version of what we already got and you just know SOE will patch it to a crap WOW clone within the years.

I have to look at the graphics so if I don't like them then why would I play? We're in the 3D age now so please make things look kool so I can be happy with my character instead of thinking how ugly looking he is and frigging make places I want to explore..... Currently Vanguard has a giant open world of jack shit in it.

Ya really heres a guy that plays LoTR trying to tell me whats wrong with vanguard  and than lists a bunch of stuff thats actually worse in LoTR than it is in Vanguard

If those are the things you dont like in vanguard i cant wait to see your face when you fire up AOC for the first time

I have to agree with the OP. I have played VG since BETA, on and off, and the last try was only 3 weeks ago...when i rolled a new toon to 20. My highest is a ranger 39 and i have tried all classes at least till 10, with my favorite a warrior level 27. So overall, i have spent quite a bit of time in VG, in all 3 spheres.

Now, to the graphix issue. You start VG, look at the grass and wow, looks great. Look at the trees, and wow looks great. Look at the sky, especially at night, and wow looks great. Look at the depth of field (ie. distance) and wow.Now, look at all this together, and that's where my issue is.

Despite fantastic looking graphic elements, they dont seem to go together. Trees feel like they were dropped on the ground, so do rocks and others. As for toons, the armors look absolutely gorgeous, especially as you level up, but again, as mentioned by the OP, some classes feel dull when moving or in combat. This is on almost ultra high settings as my rig can handle it.

The best animations to me are tanks, casters are the worst.

As for LoTRO, I  beta tested it but did not buy. Reasons are mine, but when looking at graphix the world does come together very nicely. Toon animations i agree (especially the running) need some work and will not be for everyone's liking. The customization wasn't very attracting to me either.

So for people who will ask, which toon animations look best? I would go for Guild Wars, with WoW in 2nd place and EQII in 3rd.

My ideal game: GW animations/graphics + VG world size (throw in some instancing but that's another debate and more content) + WoW playability (not how easy the game is, but how intuitive it is to play) + EQII Lore and crafting.

My 2 cents.
 

Good read. I always follow news about VG, partially because I fail to understand why SOE paid so much for it and does almost nada, but maybe expecting reason from a company like SOE is too much to ask for. *shrug*

A friend of mine, when I first showed him VG (at the time I still was positive about it) said, it looks just as platic-like as EQ2. And thats true. I mean ok I played EQ2 for almost 3 years but it wasnt damn sure for the graphics. This entire EQ-thing always looks the same, and VG shows its roots in everything. The plastic styling, the cumbersome Fedex quest, the hollow lore and the lack of almost any catching stories. Its so EQ2 without anything good, they only took the bad parts of Everquest.

While grand in design there are very few places with real atmosphere. One of the biggest reasons is Sigils failure to make a) good textures and b) good use of light, shadow and fog. Just go to LOTRO, think of the game what you want, but the look BREATHES atmosphere at every corner and with WAY less polygons and hardware demand. They just made damn good textures and breathtaking use of lights, shadows and fogs. Just go to the Old Forest for instance; its not big, but when you stumble there the first time it feels like a giant labyrinth of a forest! No high res VG forest ever created a similar atmosphere, for example. And the list goes on: cities, villages, dungeons... all barren and plasticy. Khal's revamp showed how much better it can be made with relatively small changes. But it took so much time to rework only one small part, so I kinda gave up the hope they redo any bigger part of the game. Alas.

I also agree with the combat. I never felt the realism or impact of what I do, just as the OP said, with very few exceptions. Disciple played ok and Ranger too, but still leaving wishes open.

Originally posted by Saerain

I actually preferred Vanguard in Beta 2 over the final product, for a number of reasons, but I always find distaste for Vanguard's art and graphics interesting, because I have higher praise for it in that area than any other game save perhaps EVE, although EVE gets off easy by rendering far less than any terrestrial setting demands.

Out of curiosity, which MMO do you favour visually? I mean it sincerely, not suggestively.

Which do I favor? Good question. The thing is, I don't much favor one over the other when it comes to which has "better" graphics. That's why I was careful to critique Vanguard's graphical offerings as terrible for being incomplete more than anything else. 

By that I mean, oceans of flat, sparkling water are ok; but how does it compare to the waterfalls of LOTRO, streams breaking through and streaming from frozen rivers, or ponds that actually appear muddied? A lot of that has to do with quantity of animations, and their quality, an area Vanguard is lacking in with both avatars and the world design.

Vanguard's water is closer to City of Heroes' in appearance to me. Prettier, but just as static and unchanging in appearance from place to place.

I revisited River Valley on my higher level Dread Knight; that's about the only place I've encountered where the water seems at least somewhat different, and stylized. While I keep rambling on about water, that isn't the only graphical aspect that concerns me. There's a downside and incompleteness to just about every graphical feature.