Vanguard E3 Coverage

[Angry Amadeus]

Originally Posted by Blargius_FR

Oh man I feel you on that. MMORPG spiders reside in my nightmares. The LDC's in SolB, the spider gauntlet from FV -> LOiO, the damn spider zerg in plane of air, El Farid (spider dungeon in Neocron) oh god e-arachniphobia.

I have to agree with the FV > LOIO conjecture. As a non-night vision race it was a pain in the ass, for sure.

[ZeckEQ]

Damn spiders creep me out.

Those *screens* do look good overall.

[Olio]

Needs bigger shoulders.

[Agraza]

Originally Posted by dub

Best VG pic yet. Now where are the flippin' vids?

Agreed.

It looks a lot like the corrupted end of Valor. It's darker and more detailed of course, but weird spiders + paved hills + castle = Valor.

A lot of the armor is palette swapped, which is unfortunate. Hopefully more armor sets are under construction. I only see 5-7 armor configurations + robes/clothing spread among 24 characters.

[Smurf]

http://www.gamespot.com/e3/e3videos....ype=all&page=1

Here's the VG movie.

[Digits]

I don't like how the majority of the cuts just showed a few frames of animation, except for the finale. They did display some cool models and music though.

BTW, the screens are pretty spot on.

[Laek]

Hmm played on IE but not Firefox. I could have watched that 4 years ago and would have thought it fit in then. 3rd gen = 1st gen it seems.

[WarderX]

Originally Posted by Laerazi

Here's the Vanguard game poster : Click here!

Is this the same artist as the inside cover art of Kunark and Velious?

If not, please tell me someone else sees this as a rip off, lol

[Mixtilplix]

Kieth Parkinson worked for sigil before he passed away so it was probably intentionally done in his style.

[Agraza]

I think that's the point.

It seems like the artist is now in the picture. I haven't seen the bearded fellow drawn before. See Pic Here

[Ayeshala]

I spent some time outside the SoE booth today and got to chat with Bill Fisher.

First before I say anything, keep in mind that _every_ company out there demos their stuff on high-end hardware. So it's reasonable to expect the computers running the game were "high end" - at least, high end as of mid Mai 2006, that's going to change before release.

I noticed two real slow downs during the demo. Once was after a starting the game while the area around the character was being populated; it took a second or two for the ground texture to appear, etc. Standard stuff and I've seen much worse in other games. The other was when at some point a door was opened and the character was made to step outside a building, you had second or so there were frame rate dropped.

During the rest of the demo the frame rate stayed at a good 25-30 FPS.

They just got their interior world lighting tech in and from what Bill was saying it makes a pretty big difference. At some point one of the demoer was inside a circular room with a pool in the middle, some fire particle effects going on on top of the pool, a sort of ball levitating near the ceiling, a "snow" effect showing flakes swirling in a circle around the room and the demoer's character fighting two MOBs; frame rate stayed around 25-30 FPS.

I saw a group fight a bunch of undead MOBs outside what looked like the elven starting city and again frame rate stayed solid, including when spells were cast.

Again keep in mind that every company demoing PC games will use whatever is "top end". So assume that what I saw was running on (currently) expensive hardware. However also be aware that the graphics sliders seemed to be near the max settings: I did'nt pay enough attentions to the graphics to say if they were identical to what we're seeing in screenshots, but everything looked pretty good. At some point I asked them about the new weather system; they could'nt get the rain and snow to start but did they manage to manipulate the speed of the wind. At some point you had a pretty strong storm going on (minus the rain which they could'nt get to work), trees started swaying heavily because of the wind and the world lighting changed to a dark, overcast effect; FPS did'nt seem to be affected at all by the change.

Anyway, that's enough rambling for now. I'll probably go back to their booth before the show ends friday and report more. I'll try to get the specs on the demo PCs.

[Caocao]

Originally Posted by Ayeshala

Anyway, that's enough rambling for now. I'll probably go back to their booth before the show ends friday and report more. I'll try to get the specs on the demo PCs.

Please do, I hope the game is written that well where particle effects etc don't drop the frames that bad. WoW doens't lag unless there is too many people and eq lag'd whenever there were just too many particle effects. Although you did say that they are probably running on top notch as would be expected. I hope an actual gameplay video comes out though. They have yet to release any thing like that, and its been awhile since the hype on that started.

[Designz]

These days, the gap between high end and consumer level system is larger than ever. When you say high end, you could mean an FX-60 with Crossfire X1900XTX cards and 2GB ram, a system of which would set you back at least 3.5k.

[Designz]

Man, I just watched that Vanguard movie. The animation looks so choppy, and the all the ingame sequences look like 10-20fps.

[Digits]

Something with the animation system is being redone, either it's being converted or a whole new set of them are coming in. I forget, exactly. Anyway, that's why you see nothing but quick cuts to avoid putting a bold exclaimation point on the rough quality of the animations.