I played vanguard from open beta about 1 month before release, to about two months after release. I genuinely enjoyed it. It was fun, more or less. Why did I quit? For many of the reasons everyone else has posted, but I'll give a summary of the main ones.

Despite having bought a BRAND NEW, high-end PC two/three weeks before I joined the open beta, I had to turn down the video settings to the second lowest setting to get a playable framerate.

Some time before release they altered the geography of the world somehow, and the lore got all screwed up because of it. Some huge city that moved from one place to another and made all the road signs inaccurate - No one had bothered to change them. It sounds small, but it's this kind of thing in a game that REALLY pisses me off.

In my first week post-release I managed to fall through the world more than ten times. Damn, lucky I had a recall ability. It's a shame I was bound a 15 minute feckin' journey away.

Don't talk to me about the voice overs.

The animations also irritated me. Horses don't bend like that when they jump. I've seen horses jumping.

On the first day it took me about an hour of looking at a screen to be able to log in. The same thing happened to a lesser extent for the next three weeks. And from what I heard from my guild - I was lucky that it was only an hour.

I can't remember the details, but there was some bug that prevented you from looting monsters sometimes, and seeing a monster floating in midair and jumping up to try and loot it for 10 minutes begins to get frustrating after a while.

Another memorable occasion for frustration was when me and my guild travelled all the way to Qalia to attempt the first quest to get a player cloak. We'd seen all the "leet" guys with them, and since we were prettymuch at the cutting edge of the levelling curve on our server (Except those guys who were playing 10 hours a day as an organised group) we decided to have a go at it. The NPC we had to kill was called "Captain Fubared" Oh, how foreboding. I look back on that and think a quest designer gave up trying to fix the AI and renamed him that then went off to lunch. He never lost aggro. When I say he never lost aggro, I mean he REALLY never lost aggro. He camps your corpses. With his henchmen. Forever.

The performance issues finally just took their toll on me, and I said to myself, screw it, it's not worth it. This was a while ago now though; I hear there have been improvements. I admit I'm tempted to go back - I never did get my flying mount...

I don't know if some/all of these things have been fixed, but there are a plethora of other terrible issues that plagued my time in Vanguard that I can't be bothered listing. BUT! I did enjoy myself, as it was and probably is still the only good(ish) sandbox game on the market, I guess you can give it a go.

Anyway, that's just my two cents on Vanguard, or what I experienced of it. ;)

Originally posted by warmachine42

The game is does not break any grounds for mmos.

I'm downloading the fury trial now. Just about to log in and play it :) It taunts me with it's seductive "1 Min Remaining" message.

I know how you feel completely. A few months ago I canceled my EQ2 Subscription and just played bf2142, Counterstrike, and all that... I miss it now. I'm waiting for new releases, though - as for those, I'd check out The Chronicles of Spellborn and Age of Conan, they look like the best ones coming out soon-ish... As for developers getting their act together and realising that the average gamer doesn't play these games to slay x of y repeatedly ad infinitum with zero purpose, it might not happen for a while, if ever. Developers SEEM to be so caught up in worrying their game will fall short of their goals if they deviate too far from the status quo (WoW's carrot-on-a-stick "You Win" style of gameplay) that they're somewhat unable to create much if anything that is truly original.

You never know though, a great game could be on the horizon, I guess we just gotta wait. :(

Gief mmo plz :P