[Grumpy Old Fart]

So, my free month is about up and I'm pretty much done fiddling around with Vanguard. I know there's at least three or four of you out there still debating over trying this thing, not to mention the loss of reader morale on these boards when there are no new posts on any threads here to read (hey, we all get bored sometimes).

I thought I'd perform my last service to this thread with a final review, of sorts. As posted above many times, my PC is pretty decent (all new nine months ago: Core2Duo, 2 megs sweet RAM, 8800GTX, Raptor drives, SB X-Fi Gamer sound, Windows XP SP2, all liquid cooled, over-clocked, etc.) and I have a fairly high level of knowledge on setting things up to run these 3D games. I've also played pretty much every MMORPG since they were invented - as most of you dear readers have - if that background is necessary. In Vanguard, I got a Druid to 20 and nearly every other class to level 10-15 over the past few weeks. I'm smart enough to realize that level 20 (out of 50) is pretty low, so take these comments with that in mind, please.

The Vanguard good and bad, one year after release (most of this a repeat of earlier posts, but at least you get something to keep you busy for five minutes reading here):

GOOD
- If you set it up correctly, the graphics are very nice - except for the teeny problem of there being NO FUCKING ANTI-ALIASING allowed (even forced AA) in a 3D game released in 2007. Not having AA drops the graphics from a 10/10 to a 7/10 all on its own, besides making the developers look like fucking idiots.
- The music is very good.
- Some of the animations are excellent. The animations on my dual-wielding Halfling warrior are the best I've ever seen in a 3D game.
- Very large world with some attractive, varied geography to explore. Whether it's too big is another argument.
- Crafting and Diplomacy are quite well done, and enough to keep you busy all winter all on their own.
- There are huge numbers of quests and they have decent enough XP that you don't feel like simply grinding mobs would be a better use of your time.
- Large number of races and classes to pick from, most of them distinct, interesting and useful to groups in some way.
- The community is just slightly more erudite and polite than your typical WoW RP server, and of course about three trillion times better than any WoW PvP server. There are still quite a few of the "u"-speaking moron crowd, but you'll actually hear these idiots being corrected or scorned in the world channels in Vanguard, which is quite refreshing.
- Better character naming enforcement than any other current MMORPG. SoE has slacked off on this quite a bit over the past few months, however, according to the general playerbase in VG (desperation for subscription money can do this to a company with no morals), and there are now a fair number of level 50 "Imurwarrior" idiots running around.
- Grouping is fun and at least this game has a "/lfg" tag and a "/ all lfg" command (hello, Blizzard, are you listening?!).
- The Druid Team Lead is apparently capable of learning, since her recent postings have much less of that "..." retardation in them after a few upstanding members of the community (*cough*) pointed out how fucking stupid that made her look. Smart TLs are good. Hi, Kxciv, you may now lay down your obligatory smack-down so you look kewl for defending a guildmate.

BAD
- No anti-aliasing (even forced via your graphics card CP) in a 3D game release in 2007. Absolutely ridiculous.
- All sounds not related to music are horrible. The generic "mob attacks" grunting noise will grate on your nerves so bad, you'll turn your volume down every time you attack a mob. The character voices range from "whichever Sigil employee was wandering by the Sound Guy's office" to "whichever Sigil employee's kid was in the office that day" bad. The generic "female laugh" voice is stupid and annoying enough to make you turn the volume off in every city.
- Some of the animations are horrible. You'd think with this "skeletal" system that VG uses, once they got the animations done right (which they apparently did on some of the races), they'd just copy that for all races. But no, we have excellent animations on some races and intern-newbie-level crap on some others. It's all very strange.
- The world is just too damn big. When you go to this immense city in the desert at prime time EST hours and don't see another player character there all night, that's a pretty bad sign.
- The "cat" and "dog" races have no tails.
- The vast majority of the quests were obviously just thrown in at the last minute (or tossed in over the past year, to keep one employee busy) and are pretty bad. Not only are most of them the good old "go get me ten bear asses, and only one in twenty bears has an ass" shit, most of the rest are just complete nonsense and don't make you feel like some sort of "heroic adventurer" at all.
- You can play one of many distinct races in this game, but what it all boils down to is playing a fucking Chinaman, a fucking Arab, or a fucking Middle Ages European as regards the entire cultural, architectural, and religious backgrounds of all of the races in the game. Really creative there, guys.
- There are no helm models in the game.
- The graphics performance is still pretty bad, even with that system listed above. If you put everything on max, it's a slideshow until you do the "slowly pan 360 degrees" thing to get all of the textures loaded and it will liberally hiccup whenever you enter new areas.
- The horrid "chunk line" thing, which will never be fixed (all detailed in other posts).
- There were lots of bots and hacks many months ago (and SoE gave up on fixing the problems, or so I hear), so there are many players with obscene amounts of cash that you'll never be able to compete with. There are also still Diplomacy and Crafting botters around that you'll see. Seeing the same five characters follow the same exact path between the same ten NPCs and play the same ten Diplomacy cards for hours in the big cities is a bit disconcerting.
- The hotkey controls need some work. When playing a warrior involves rolling your fingers over three keys until you don't hear a "thunk" noise, something is wrong.
- Spell effects are seriously underwhelming.
- Most of the character models look stupid and it's damn hard to make even a remotely "hot" mangina character (which, as we know, is what 87% of MMORPG players want).
- The population is extremely low, and I'm guessing once the newness of APW wears off it will drop off drastically, since the current dev team just doesn't have the capability to put out content to keep many players busy beyond that point.
- The current dev team appears to be a bunch of dewds (pHaThOM?, please spare me from 14 year old idiots), youngsters and MMORPG newbies with very little of the talent and skill needed to even perform the most basic maintenance on a monster the size of Vanguard. This is pure speculation, of course (and what isn't on this forum?), but I just get the impression the last sixteen people left on the Vanguard team have pretty low morale since they know the game won't be live much longer and are just showing up for their 9-5 shifts M-F while farming their resumes around the industry.



This game is a damn shame. It's quite obvious a few weeks after starting to play that Sigil really didn't have much in the way of creative or talented people involved. I read enough of the on-going gossip stream to know that getting a job at Sigil rested more on your ability to ride Brad's cock than to be good at what you do, but you'd think with all the millions they dumped into this project that Microsoft would have at least insisted on a "Senior Programmer" that knew what the fuck they were doing.

Is it worth $20 for the box to try it out now? If you're the "explorer" type like me, I think so. But be sure to do it within the next week, when you get a free flying mount to go explore with. After that, it's pretty much a wasted $20.



EDIT: I spelled a word wrong!