Vanguard: Saga of Heroes Forum » General Discussion » Unfortunate UI

I gave this game a little try this weekend. I am at the raid phase in WoW and am sick of leveling alts, so I tried this (and a few other games out). I liked the character creation ( a little too in-depth in my opinion) and the general theme of the game. What turned me off right away was the feeling that the character was sluggish and didn't feel like he was on the ground. (I have a Nvidia 9800gt, a dual-core cpu, and 4 gigs of ddr2 1200- so I don't want to hear that :P)  From the little that I played I can see why people get really into the game, but if you're used to WoW, WAR, or even Ryzom- this game feels a little sluggish.

That's not really the User Interface though, is it. 

It is sluggish, isn't it.  Very jerky at times, and it is the only game I'm playing at the moment that is.

Yeah, if you are getting lag or hitching it doesn't have anything to do with the UI.  You could try some of the custom UI's but they won't impact lag or hitching. 

We could go through the whole system thing.  But VG will run smooth fps-wise on a decent rig.  The initial hitching near big cities or highly populated areas is nearly impossible to get rid of if you run the game in high quality settings.  Some say Windows 7 and a lot of ram gets rid of that issue, but I haven't tried it yet.

Also, if you were on the Isle of Dawn that area is more laggy than the real world due to the number of people in a small area (100ish or so) all adventuring, questing, crafting, diplo'ing etc. 

Ahh, that makes sense - good point.  I just subbed to the game, in order to try out the rest of the game, so to speak, so I shall see if things are better on the mainland.

I think he means the Ui is less responsive than WoW's. It's one of the major reasons I have a hard time getting into new games. You don't feel you have full control of your toon always because keystrokes pile up and do not sync with animations. I have found almost every game out there is this way when compared to WoW. But they have a bit of money to polish the small stuff...

Originally posted by Irishoak

I think he means the Ui is less responsive than WoW's. It's one of the major reasons I have a hard time getting into new games. You don't feel you have full control of your toon always because keystrokes pile up and do not sync with animations. I have found almost every game out there is this way when compared to WoW. But they have a bit of money to polish the small stuff...

Pretty much on the money. LOTRO has seemless response time and AOC is very good too.

AoC did revamp their Ui some and I was impressed at how improved it was compared to release.  (Just went back this month for a try.)

Originally posted by Irishoak

AoC did revamp their Ui some and I was impressed at how improved it was compared to release.  (Just went back this month for a try.)

I've checked it out for the first time and am quite enjoying it. You can tell because X-Fire keeps track of who little a life I have.

I don't have any sluggishness with the default UI (which I have on one of my computers).  I have a barely noticeable lag sometimes with various custom UIs.  I'm on Core right now which is good, but might switch to DroxyCore.  But other than that, the response is instant.

I don't play anymore but the best part of the OP's post was that he stated that he had a 9800GT ......a (oh my gosh) dual core CPU, and 4GB of memory.  I mean, like you really needed to state that.

The OP was just fencing off the possibility that someone might say "oh you must have a crap rig".

VG is so close to being really a great MMO, it's a crying shame.  I have a decent rig, and while it mostly plays smooth (50-60) on highest settings, there are still occasional bizarre slowdowns to like 9 fps.  Then there are animation problems (actuallly perhaps also something to do with glitchy networking) and responsiveness problems (again, probably partly network problems) like the OP points out.   I wish someone would just inject a whole pile of cash into the game (I do believe it's probably true that Microsoft is the ultimate culprit, on account of it drastically cut its funding of the project half-way through development).

Having said all that, the devs on board have done a great job of getting the game to a playable state, and the subs seem to be at least holding steady (it's not exactly crowded, but it's usually possible to find people to play with). 

Honestly, had Vanguard been released in the state it is now, it would have been a different story.  It would still have been a somewhat problematic launch, but at least it wouldn't have been the debacle that it was.  For it has to be said, the gameplay is fundamentally sound, and the whole atmosphere is hugely immersive when everything is going smoothly - there are some AAA-class moments to be found in Telon, too, both in terms of graphics and in terms of absorbing, dungeon crawling group gameplay and neat quests (with some refreshing black humour sometimes).

I'm on a Core i7 Overclocked to 4.2 ghz with an overclocked ATI 4890 with 6 gigs of RAM.  I take the fog off and can see 100 miles into the distance it seems.  I have absolutely no lag and it's not one bit sluggish.  The only issue I have is when swimming in water in the swamps.  Some times go flying out of the water when you touch certain parts of the land. 

I've tried several mmorpgs in the past few months from Darkfall to even going back and trying EQ2 and none of them come close to the graphics you can get in this game.  The view distance is unmatched as well.  With EQ2 on all the highest settings, I actually get lag spikes with a ton of people casting in one area.  The graphics on that game don't even compare to Vanguard. 

I'm not sure, maybe I have been blessed.  I did have issues running this game on Vista though.  I switched to Windows 7 and have had absolutely no problems since.

Originally posted by gurugeorge

The OP was just fencing off the possibility that someone might say "oh you must have a crap rig".

VG is so close to being really a great MMO, it's a crying shame.  I have a decent rig, and while it mostly plays smooth (50-60) on highest settings, there are still occasional bizarre slowdowns to like 9 fps.  Then there are animation problems (actuallly perhaps also something to do with glitchy networking) and responsiveness problems (again, probably partly network problems) like the OP points out.   I wish someone would just inject a whole pile of cash into the game (I do believe it's probably true that Microsoft is the ultimate culprit, on account of it drastically cut its funding of the project half-way through development).

Having said all that, the devs on board have done a great job of getting the game to a playable state, and the subs seem to be at least holding steady (it's not exactly crowded, but it's usually possible to find people to play with). 

Honestly, had Vanguard been released in the state it is now, it would have been a different story.  It would still have been a somewhat problematic launch, but at least it wouldn't have been the debacle that it was.  For it has to be said, the gameplay is fundamentally sound, and the whole atmosphere is hugely immersive when everything is going smoothly - there are some AAA-class moments to be found in Telon, too, both in terms of graphics and in terms of absorbing, dungeon crawling group gameplay and neat quests (with some refreshing black humour sometimes).

I beg to differ.  I've played most games out today and beta tested quite a few of them.  If this game was released today this game in no way would be a problematic launch.  This game would be near perfect with the bugs it has. 

People seem to forget how bad some of the big games did at release.  This includes WoW.  For months after release I would harvest or loot items and be stuck in a kneeling position.  I would have to log out in order to get back to my normal position, and able to do anything besides slide across the screen on my knee.  On top of that for several months I'd be stuck in combat and have to relog only to hope I wasn't in combat any longer when I returned in game.  People really seem to forget how bad some of the successful games launches were.  This game on the other hand had a horrid launch.  I beta tested and played for 2 weeks after launch before I gave up.  I couldn't stand this game.  It did have one of the worst releases ever besides maybe Shadowbane.