Thanks.  Great info on the download option.

Anyone know if one goes with the EBgames or Amazon option, and orders the DVD, will it arrive on January 30th or do they typically ship on January 30th.

Thanks.  If you order a box from Sony, what to you think the chances are of getting the game in the mail by January 30th?

With regard to downloading, yeah, he's thinking about it, he's just nervous about a 25 gig download, how long it would take and if it would bomb out on his DSL.

Thanks.

My friend lives in the backwoods somewhere and has no storefronts to pick up Vanguard on January 30th.  However, he really wants it on day one.  Last time he tried to order a game online and have it shipped, he got it a week after it was released in stores.

Are there any online stores, or ways to order this so that he can be reasonably assured he'll get it in the mail right on the 30th?

Thanks.

Hello,

Any classes in Vanguard have tracking abilities?  I've looked through different abilities etc. and couldn't find it anywhere.

Thanks.

For me, that is great news.  I prefer to have the quests challenging.  I remember the first I ever completed in EQ.... probably in 1999 if I remember correctly.  Some mechant in Qeynos told me to find Miliea in the Karanas.  The reward was a lvl 9 spell.  I spend days on that quest.  I enlisted the help of friends and strangers to form groups that were strong enough to push deeper into the Karanas than I could do alone.  A lot of people died to help be complete that quest!  :)

Well, I have a little more than a week now to upgrade my system for Vanguard.  I'm not sure if it's worth it or not, so here are my current PC specs and my question:

3.6ghz pentium,  Geforce 7800 GTX Video (512mb), 2 gigs of ram, the rest doesn't really matter.

I think I'll be OK on the processor and ram, but I'm seriously considering upgrading to the Geforce 8800 GTX in time for the January 30th release.  Obviously, this game is going to be very GPU intensive.  Are there any beta testers currently using the Geforce 7800 GTX?  If so, how is the game play and can you crank the video options up?  Anyone play with the 8800 GTX?  If so, is there anything you can't turn to max?

Thanks in advance.

As much as I hated corpse runs back in the early EQ days, I now appeciate what they brought to the game.  The element of risk-reward balance.  Knowing that if you died, you would undergo a painful corpse recovery (or never get your corpse... remember early Plane of Fear?), heightened the excitement of any given quest, dungeon crawl or raid.  The sense of accomplishment was significant in EQ because the downside of failure was so miserable. 

So yes, I hope deaths are actually painful in VG. 

If you are really enjoying EQ2, then I'm not sure if you'd get much more out of Vanguard. 

Personally, I really enjoyed EQ, played it for 6 years in fact.  But I did not like EQ2 and only played that for 6 weeks.  I'm hoping that Vanguard brings back the sense of adventure, danger and risk that I liked about EQ.  In my opinion, EQ2 felt to easy, too scripted..... it had lost that wild west feel.  For example, zone instancing in EQ2, I couldn't stand that, made the game feel fake to me.

I know a number of people that really like EQ2, especially over the past year where various improvements have been made.  In fact, my old EQ guildies are almost all in EQ2 now and it doesn't look like many of them will be trying out Vanguard.

Hope this helps a little.

I have a friend who t is going to upgrade is current PC to get it up to snuff to at least run Vanguard on minimum settings until he builds a brand new rig.

He's planning on buying a GeForce FX 5500 256MB.  Does anyone in beta have experience with this card and know it will run the game on minimum settings?

The difference is primarily a matter of preference.  If people don't like the risk-reward balance and the challenge, there are plenty of other games to play out there.  After trying many MMORPGs, the secret ingredients for me are risk, challenge, reward and fear.  I got that from EQ and nothing else.

I'm not a hardcore player, I have a family and a full time job, so I could never put in that many hours in a given week.  Sure, it took me more time to get things done in the game, but heck, I played it for 6 years and enjoyed it immensely.  That time, that challenge, led to many good friendships in game.  A lot of bonding through common experiences that were both enjoyable and painful.  Basically:

I want to be afraid to die.

I want it to be a pain in the ass if I need to get my corpse, or even find it.

I want it to take effort to level.

I want it to be risky to travel from one place to another.

It's this risk that leads to excitement, which in turn, led to great EQ memories for my friends and I.  The first time our guild was going to go into The Plane of Fear.....  Wow!  I remember it like yesterday, I was scared to death because we knew if we got wiped, and couldn't get our corpes back, well then, they were going to decay and we would lose all our equipment.  When I got my epic.... it felt fantastic because as a casual player, it took a long time and a lot of help from great friends.