Originally posted by Jenaka

...

 

I play Vanguard and LOTRO. I get much better performance in Vanguard. I play Vanguard with all settings on high, but I can't do that with LOTRO. Maybe you're talking about chunk lines?

I am not talking about chunk lines.  I am talking about walking around in the newbie areas.

Originally posted by SignusM

Originally posted by fwhite

Vanguard suffers from  intermittent lag.   It is challenging in the sense that you sometimes move without seeing how you move until you've fallen off a cliff. Though the powers, quests, dialog, difficulty, and character choices are many and good, the lag makes it no fun.

LOTRO is not challenging.

I was asking about a good PVE game, not an almost tolerable one.

 

 

You must be on dial up, because Vanguard has no such lag. 

You must be mistaken, I use cable.  Vanguard has such lag.

LOTRO does not.  WoW does not.  EQ2 does not.  WAR does not.  Atlantica online does not.  AoC does not.  Vanguard is the only game that does.

Vanguard suffers from  intermittent lag.   It is challenging in the sense that you sometimes move without seeing how you move until you've fallen off a cliff. Though the powers, quests, dialog, difficulty, and character choices are many and good, the lag makes it no fun.

LOTRO is not challenging.

I was asking about a good PVE game, not an almost tolerable one.

Originally posted by mrmeloni

If you want to play PVE only, GO PLAY ONE OF THE MANY PVE GAMES THAT ARE AVAILABLE TO YOU.

If you can cite a good one, I'd be happy to.  Cite one good PVE game this century.

I've done a bit of research into the sandbox game, and found it to be a holistic ideal, not an actual one.  The real sandbox games, such as second life and the sims, aren't really RPGs.  The story is 100% up to the player to create.  The game simply provides a place to put your furniture, house, family, stuff, whatever.

I see Ultima Online in a similar way.  Though it has some story, its mostly about the players.

Now everquest you could play without anyone there.  Well over half the content is impossible without them, but the story is there, waiting to be discovered.   This and the class system are the limitations the game imposes.  But you can attack who you want and befriend who you want.  Your role in the story is mutable.

Beyond the challange aspect, which would make lesser games truly enjoyable, this mostly free framework is a goodone.  I would not qualify it as a sandbox, but its awfully nice to slay a god one day, and defend it the next.

Originally posted by Xgeneration

 if your friend likes PvE better than PvP than he must be in MMO heaven right now, hes got a ton of games to choose from. Those who like PvP have very few good games to choose from.

There is a good PVE MMO that has come out this decade? 

All I see are:

* sad PVP (WoW, AoC, WAR)

* good PVP (Eve, GW, TR)

* and railroad, far2easy PVE (all of the above, EQ2, Vanguard, Free2Play junk, City of H/Vs)

The last good PVE game I played was EQ1.  Where are the rich storylines?  Where are the NPCs not the same every time you encounter them?  Where do you have to take risks in order to succeed?

Playing this game for the first time in 3 years on a trial basis reaffirmed the death aspect.  I didn't want to die, and the game really tried to kill me.  I trained things around to stay alive.  It was a relief when sneaking allowed me to explore areas without fighting everything.  Each new spell (I was a bard, so every level) was a massive boost to my abilities, and wasn't overpowered.  Grouping didn't just make things faster, it made them 10x faster because you weren't constantly worried about death.

Death brought this game to life and people listened to one another about how to play.

Software in Beta tends not to be fully localized.  textures and animation (as opposed to models) tend to be late-stage production items as well.

-FW

Thanks for illuminating these options.

This was the reason I stopped playing after the first few minutes.  It was constant on the day I tried it - like about every few seconds.

I tried this game a few weeks ago and couldn't stop the gold spammers from filling my chat interface constantly.  /ignore didn't work and I found no interface option to make the annoying chime stop.  I'd love to know how to do this.

I live with a digitial and traditional oil-painting artist, so get really dismayed when models and animations are not good.  This does not mean realistic - the biggest problem with most digital models is proportion.   Distortions, especially in more of a body-building way, are great; comic artists have done it for decades with spectacular results.  However, if the head of your vulmane looks like an overlarge  mushroom sprouting from the body, with no neck musculature to support the head, it isn't believable and is therefore bad.  Even really clunky models like the frogloks or Vah Shir of EQ1 were believable because their bodies looked like they bore the weight of the features and were not disproportionate.

The new orcs in these pictures are an example of it working right.  They are by no means realistic,  with heavy shoulders and arms.  Their legs are also chunky and their heads are small, giving them a big body look that is not realistic, but still believable.  The humans and elves have heads that are proportional with fairly slender bodies, especially the elves.

The vulmane and kurashasha have large heads and broad shoulder, but thin legs and necks.  A little of this would be fine, but its really over the top.  They look like unbalanced barbie dolls or he-man action figures as result.

Originally posted by morpin

Originally posted by eugam

Originally posted by Kilrain

Originally posted by SgtFrog

Originally posted by coffee

yay trial island.. played at the end of the open beta and it was simply awful.. lets see what they have done in a year or is it 2.. I forget now =D

 

even if gameplay is improved.

the toon models are too ugly for me.

Correct me if im wrong but aren't the new character models coming with GU6?

 

They are the same models with revamped bones and a bit more athletic appearance. The biggest win is the reduced lag in crowded (PC and NPC) camps.

 I  think the character customization is a bit more than that.  I think of it as:

- Bringing back facial customization back to what it was before GU2  I think everyone was satisfied with these options.    I am still waiting on the female facial customization results which I think will be important and where not so hot when the test version first came out.  The net result is that helms now work and there is some FPS imporvement since release.

- Enhanced body customization. Supposedly better than ever before.

- Enhanced appearance armor. (not sure how much)

Could we get some screenshots of the new models as they appear live? The ones from test are not suitable.

 

Thanks for posting the video.

It really didn't go long enough to give me a feel for the game at all though, which is unfortunate.

There were only 2 intolerable things about Vanguard that made me stop playing it:

1) The perfomance was hell - not just bad, hell.  I could not play the game even though I had a top-end machine without several seconds of freezing and delay.  According to the article, the graphics are still glitchy.  So this problem remains, though probably not as severe.

2) The models looked like poser knockoffs.  Good models with good textures are part of what make a game good.  The artists at blizzard, as the comparison was already made, do this very well (at least before the expansion).  I guess this just didn't get changed either - it is, like so many other things, scheduled.

I suppose the article was enlightening in that it told me about these two key points.  Vanguard will gather more dust, even though I really want it to be better than it is.

Awesome!

Thanks for the information

I gather that burly 64-bit architecture machines are up to the task; I have one of them here so I shall give it a shot.

I played this game in Beta and its performance was horrible.  I look at videos on IGN and youtube that were posted in the last month and I still see a lot of jerking and jitter.

Has anyone run this game and had reasonably smooth performance?

Good Afternoon,

I downloaded this game and have been enjoying it so far.  However, it has some consistent lag and crashes now then for reasons I cannot discern - the error messages are all question marks (?).

Does anyone have any suggestion about how to make it more stable or how to switch the languages for error messages?

thanks