Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

And sadly, I have to include myself in this accusation.  Yes, I have had the "complainer hat" on for a very long time, but now, alas, I am taking it off and laying it down humbly upon my desk.  It is time to give Vanguard its due.

Firstly, many fans are still making posts that say this game has come a long way.  And who am I (or you) to question them?  They wouldn't pull themselves away from their gaming time to write empty posts.  Indeed, there must be some bit of truth to their claims.

Second, McQuaid and Butler themselves designed this game, and who better could have added their creative talents?

Third, if parts of the game seem empty, well, perhaps that's because you and I are not in it.  Let us join, sign up, and log on this weekend and see for ourselves if other folks are around.  My bet is that we bump into one another and probably spend the first five minutes laughing away our prior concerns about this game called Vanguard.

C'mon now.  Take off your "complainer hats" and resub to "The Vision."  What's $15?  You spend more than that on a blind date.

Originally posted by pencilrick

And sadly, I have to include myself in this accusation.  Yes, I have had the "complainer hat" on for a very long time, but now, alas, I am taking it off and laying it down humbly upon my desk.  It is time to give Vanguard its due.

Firstly, many fans are still making posts that say this game has come a long way.  And who am I (or you) to question them?  They wouldn't pull themselves away from their gaming time to write empty posts.  Indeed, there must be some bit of truth to their claims.

Second, McQuaid and Butler themselves designed this game, and who better could have added their creative talents?

Third, if parts of the game seem empty, well, perhaps that's because you and I are not in it.  Let us join, sign up, and log on this weekend and see for ourselves if other folks are around.  My bet is that we bump into one another and probably spend the first five minutes laughing away our prior concerns about this game called Vanguard.

C'mon now.  Take off your "complainer hats" and resub to "The Vision."  What's $15?  You spend more than that on a blind date.

 

 

except on a blind date u actually have a chance @ getting some puddin :)

They had A chance. They blew it big time.  Without appology they will NEVER get another chance me.

I don't care if the game has come a long way.  In fact, if all other MMORPGs were gone tommorrow and the only choice was Vangaurd POS, I would not play.  They had their chance and they blew it.

Who could they have added to the team?  The foundation was screwed up by McQuaid, the vision and others.  With a such a horrible foundation, add new people to build on top of it doesn't make sense.  Remove the foundation and start from square one with out "The Visionary" McQuaid.  They had their chance and they blew it.

I won't put any money into this game.  I don't believe in that type of reward and their failure should lead to the type of success they are experiencing right now.  If the game was good for the marketplace, it would have reaped the rewards without your help.  They had their chance and they blew it.

Many people are seeing that throwing money at games just because isn't good for the industry.  Let bad games loose money and go away.  Let it server as a major warning to developers, better use that one chance you have well or you will blow it.

I'll give it a chance - maybe - after their trial is out. I think many will do so just out of curiosity.

I gave it a chance, I loved it. It had amazing potential, but as soon as Sony took over it went down hill. The patches came slower and slower. Features like Equipment Expertise were removed simply because Sony claimed they were "complicated" (this removed further customization). Diplomacy was changed from level 1-500 to 1-50 to make it "easier to understand" It didn't really effect anything, just show the direction the game was going in. Exp on mobs was increased, death penalty decreased, bind on pickup added. The game was becoming a WoW clone.

http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/posts/list.m?topic_id=21665

After I read that, I uninstalled forever.

The vision died when Brad left, just like it did when he left EQ.  The future of this game is in new hands and that is my concern.  Who cares about $15 bucks a month when compared to the time spent invested in creating a character and community.  There has to be a future and what concerns me most is what happens when SOE runs out of Sigil content to finish/recycle?  The potential is there and thats why I keep watching and checking things out.  So far the game is just kind of ok compared to what it was.

I however am not going to spend $15 to try to save a game.  That is what the devs are being paid to do and if they do it well enough the game will save itself.

Indeed there are a number of changes for the better in the game, but not enough given the timespan. 

Up until Feb, I had been with the game since the start of beta 3.  I don't necessarily blame the current Vanguard devs completely for the lack of momentum in getting the game on track.  Personally I think SOE should have given more resources to the devs, including manpower.  But I can understand SOE holding back, wanting to see what the devs could come up with in say...12 months.

With regards to the work that the devs themselves have done, like I said, it's taking too long to turn the game around in my mind.  Wrong decisions are being made (again, my own opinion) which will only serve to set the game development time back even further.  I mean, who honestly thinks that one new central starting location is going to pull the masses back to the game?  The fact is it won't.  Forcing people to start in the same zone is a tool to promote grouping.  But you can't promote grouping if no one is actually using that zone because there are no new players entering the game!

Flying mounts?  Well done devs.  Its a shame it couldn't have been implemented sooner given that ridable griffons were ridable at launch day.  Albeit they required tweaking.

New areas?  Well I had a little flutter in APW, and apart from the odd "horizontal saw" trap its the usual "bread and butter" raid zone that you find in MMO's, just with more lag.  Still, I found it enjoyable for a few times I went in there.

The game desperately needs "fluff" to make it look and feel more like a persistent world.  Sadly, a lot of even the simplest suggestions made on the forums fall into the "nice, thanks, we'll put it on a VERY big list of things to look at in say...2012".

As for performance, yes its improved.  Strangely enough though, it is only now, after all this time, that the devs have FINALLY realised that the player models are the things causing major performance drop.  I mean, come on guys, the forums were telling you this immediately after launch!

Crafting is different and rich in content but takes way too long.  This is because the devs wanted it to be comparable to combat.  Which whilst both require an amount of effort (and rightly so) crafting takes approximately 5 x as long to make anything as it would take you to kill anything.  Thus making it seem a bigger grind than questing / combat.

As for Diplomacy, I had high hopes for it.  Sadly, like everything else, its on the "back burner" till they get combat / questing / performance sorted out.  Another facet of the game going to waste due to lack of management skills of certain well-known names at the start of the games development.

In short......I'm sure that Vanguard may appeal to those who've never played it, but theres too many things on that "back burner" for my liking.  And until things show any sign of changing in that respect, I'll be watching from the side lines. And the only way the dev team can "catch up" is by having more resources and manpower at their disposal.  Which is something that SOE are obviously not willing to give to the devs.

Sadly, Brad Mcquaids legacy to Vanguard is his lack of management skills during the games development.  The guy has a great imagination.  But he should never have been CEO in my opinion.  Lead Designer?:  Yes. The guy who decides what is done and when it gets done?: No.

A lot of the ones who said the game has come a long way, or is better, are the same folks who said it was fine at launch to begin with. They've always claimed to have good frame rates, experience no bugs, and have always believed the populations were fine.

So there's no objectivity there. It's difficult to believe a person who yells they receive 60+ FPS, yet every other patch claim miraculous performance increases and bug fixes.

Worst of all, who's ever to believe the worst is over so long the developer's attention remains on performance and bug fixes above all? It's a good course of action, but it also means there's still a lot of performance problems and bugs out there, otherwise it wouldn't make any sense.

So personal my stance has aways been, give the team the year or two more they need to create an MMO that can last as long as UO or EQ1. Why rush it?

At the very least I wouldn't encourage folks en masse to give the game a chance until free trials are out. Otherwise I feel like I'm suggesting a bad financial decision more than anything else.

I have a station pass and despite defending this thing many times, trying to keep focused on some cloudy "vision" out there, it's the only one I don't ever log into every so often. GU3 and GU4 completely gutted and destroyed the game. I'd rather have the bugs back than have some soulless, clone-filled pile of crap like it is now.

I've given it a couple fair shakes.  Character customization is still sub-par and reminiscent of a tech school project.   Not sure if they still have the issues with names floating over PC/NPC's heads all buggered up?