Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

A trial/newbie island is ear marked for Game Update 5, it should hopefully be out in a couple of months.  I would wait and try the game for free. GU 4 has just gone live which has introduced a few more bugs and upset some of the community, it will take a while to iron out the winkles.

Some amazing changes with GU4 from under the hood.  Memory requirements for VG have taken a significant drop.  I tried playing in all graphics modes and it didn't matter my vgclient stayed at around 650mb.  Thinking this was too low cause I tested it a couple months back and it was 900-1.2g.  I decided to run around the world and through a bunch of rifts.  Well my memory usage did go up but not very fast and the highest I got it was 780mb.  I find this amazing as it means that VG might in fact be able to run on a 1GB system.  The real test will be if it does any collection over time.

In any event I'd give it a try on your 1gb system before assuming you need to add more memory.  Not that memory is expensive enough and I'd recommend upgradeing it since it is cheap but I'm pretty curious.  Looks like GU4 made some big reduction in memory usage.

My wifes computer is a Semprom 2.8, 1GB DDR RAM and the video card is a Saphire ATI 1600 Pro (256 RAM). She can play Vanguard at medium settings with an average of 30 FPS in the wilderness and 15 - 20 at big cities.

Vanguard is pretty playable for her and she's noticing that FPS has improved since GU 4 (I didn't checked how is her FPS after the update).

 Edit: to get to this performance I did some tweaks on her OS like defrag the HD, turn off all useles programs that remains resident o her Windows XP,  a registry clean-up and defragmentation.

I use to play on an AMD 2800+ (2.08 ghz) with 1 gig of sys ram and a radeon 9550 256 mb vid card before the latest update on balanced settings and was getting around 30 fps but not much over but once i hit the first major town i slowed to a lot of jittering  but once back outside it was all good again, I now have an AMD 5200+ with an 8600gt 512mb vid card and 4 gigs of ram and run on ULTRA high settings and can truly appreciate how this game looks with good fps to boot even in the city's Your wife's pc will definately run it at minimum specs but i would atleast upgrade the Ram to 2 gigs just to be safe and if you vid card supports it lend some of that ram to it to help things along but i think you will find that if your rig has good visuals and your wife's dont she may get a bit jealous lol. I think i have a spare buddy pass at home when i get home from work i will check and if i do i will send it your way good luck i hope it works out ok for you.

If possible, I would definitely think about more RAM. 1gig just isn't enough for this game.

You are correct in your one post, this game is all over the place with system performance. Its not nearly as bad as it use to be though.

If you don't want to wait for a trial and are looking to try it right away, EBAY generally has some very good prices. You can usually pick up the 100 dollar collectors edition for around 10 bucks these days. I wouldn't pay full retail for it.

Or ask around for a buddy key.

Sounds like you and your wife might like Vanguard. Its a decent game. Its not great but it has a certain appeal to old schoolers. I like the fact that its not combat driven if you don't want it to be. Class selection is really good. I know what you mean about LotR. I betaed both Vanguard and LotR very early on. LotR was the stronger of the two when it came to graphics and polish but Vanguard much better at real variety, uniqueness and creating a virtual world. (BTW, I hate EQII..IMHO its a horrid MMO...thats just me though...the only thing I feel it has going for it is the voice overs) I really don't like some of where SOE is taking Vanguard, it looks like they are just going to make it another endgame raider.

BLUETURTLE!

I have lots of trial keys.

I had the special edition when it came out.

Been looking at coming back.

We could return together!

Erm, or not. Either way, if you want (freshbakedtots@hotmail.com) hit me up for 2 trial keys, 1 for you, 1 for your wife.

Better yet, PM me so I know it's you.

[Wow, I really need to log in more and get my post-count up... being a forum-ghost is no fun :(.... ]

Well someone was kind enough to give us a key to try the game (thank you by the way) and her computer just cant run it...I think it is the graphics card or something....she gets in plays for awhile and then it crashes...I mean black screen crashes....have to hard reboot the computer. Graphical messups on the screen corrupted pixels and then crashes.....=( shame we really liked it...

Why is it the wives that always have the worse putes.  My ex use to ahve the killer gaming rig when we were married - though I 'd still whoop his arse in FPS's.