There, I said it. I think Vanguard sucks. I haven’t been my old incendiary self in far too long. I bought this game with high hopes; I cancelled after my first monthly payment. That’s because I forgot to cancel prior. My subscription expires next week. This is one of the highest-budget MMORPG development efforts ever, with something like $50 million and 5 years invested. There are things I wouldn’t hold against an independent, or B-level, or even smaller AAA-level project that have finally gotten to me. Let the rant begin…
Over time, I find that some of my ideas and opinions in the MMO genre have shifted. For instance, I adored SWG from the first time I logged in. It had gamebreaking bugs, glaring oversights, and design/balance flaws galore. Some of the bugs were almost impossible for me to believe. Quests didn’t work. Weird character states (like “Ghosting” where you seemed to be in the game, but weren’t, and had to wait an hour or so for your character to unload before playing again) abounded. Corpses disappeared before you could find them. (If you think SWG didn’t have corpse runs, you didn’t play early enough.) Crafting recipes simply could not be made because recipes would not load. And the list goes on… Why did I put up with it? It was my first MMORPG (aside from MUDs). It was an earlier time in the history of MMOs; I think I could argue that SWG was the first of the “second-generation” (in the mainstream) of these games. And on top of that, it was Star Wars. This whole paragraph now strikes me as a lot of justification for “So I’m being inconsistent in my game evaluations.” Such is life.
So, back to Vanguard… I have tried and tried and tried and tried to like this game. It has pretty graphics. It has some interesting new features. The world is massive. There’s a pretty engaging crafting system. Harvesting is even more interesting than most MMOs I’ve seen. In fact, I’ll admit that it doesn’t totally suck, by a large margin. Vanguard has a lot of potential. I eagerly followed all news of the game right up until I received my preordered copy. I’ve tried to play since it launched. I’ve even reportedly enjoyed the game on at least 3 or 4 occasions, which puts it ahead of other games I’ve paid good money for. But…
Bugs
I’m less tolerant of bugs now than I used to be. Here’s the deal: I’ve played MMOs now that launched relatively smoothly. I didn’t encounter gamebreaking bugs (at least, nothing that made me want to quit a game session in disgust) in City of Heroes or EQ2 when they launched. WoW had lag and long login queues (and in fact, I quit in part because of that), but I don’t think anyone could reasonably have predicted the runaway success and concomitant problems there — but the game itself worked, more or less. Nowadays, I’m growing older and more bitter. Things I put up with in the past are no longer acceptable for me. Successful recent game launches make me far less willing to accept bugs in retail. If you want to take my money, I now expect a higher level of quality in exchange.
I’ve heard of a variety of problems: characters popping to incorrect levels, XP vanishing, warping to mysterious points in the middle of the ocean, falling through the map to certain death, etc. Here are bugs that I, myself, with my own eyes, have encountered in Vanguard:
- Random Death – Crossing a zone boundary, I died. Period. Dead, time for a corpse run, XP loss and item decay. For no reason. At all. I have no patience for this kind of crap.
- Chat Failure – I’ll admit I haven’t seen this in a while. But when I started, I was CONSTANTLY unable to chat in any form, as apparently my connection to the chat server was severed. Chat functions, whether they be IRC or BBS or UNIX talk or any other, have been around longer than the Internet. Come on.
- Inconsistent Grouping – I have about a 50% success rate at joining groups. The rest of the time, I’m disconnected from my group. Apparently the Network Ninjas enjoy severing this connection while molesting my chat connection. This is core functionality; it has to work. (I saw something in patch notes about this; maybe they’ve made progress here?)
- Performance – This is a dead horse, but I’m in a kicking kind of mood. I don’t have a cutting-edge SLI eight-CPU né-server, but my gaming PC is pretty dang powerful. I can run Oblivion with almost all settings maxxed out; why do I get 10FPS in Balanced mode? (And don’t give me any crap about dropping settings or getting newer drivers — Anything below Balanced looks like a game from 2000, I have up-to-date drivers, and I’ve even tweaked settings down within Balanced as far as I can.) And while I’m at it, why does it look like everything in the game — land, weapons, armor, my HAIR — look like it’s made from plastic? There’s more than one setting for specular highlights…
Design
There’s more to a successful game than the technology, though. I’m willing to overlook a LOT of bugs if I’m having fun. And I expect minor technical problems in an MMORPG; I know there are lots of business reasons that these games are published before their time. But there’s another aspect that suffers when games are rushed, and here’s my uninformed opinion of how this impacted Vanguard: Vanguard was so technically challenging that design and gameplay aspects suffered doubly. The technology wasn’t ready, so of course the content wasn’t even close.
- Diplomacy, the Sideline – This probably stings for me because I was totally psyched to see this. I love card combat games. But this one is (A) boring, and (B) trivialized to a sideline. It’s OK, but it’s just something to do when you’re bored and not a core gameplay element. Maybe I misunderstood something? Even if I did, then it’s not presented as a core element. Sigh.
- HUGE empty World – Where’s the giant world? Sure, I can ride through 45 minutes of mostly empty seamless space. (OK, so it’s mostly empty but graphically stunning seamless space. Five points for graphically stunning; minus five for boooring.)
- Population issues – Did we really need multiple servers, aside from PvE/PvP splits? Finding groups is HARD.
- Uneven Starts – Some new toons’ starting areas and quests (Thestran human) bore me. Some (Dark Elf, Orc) are awesome. Too bad.
- It’s not Hard, it’s Boring – A promise was that this game was for the hardcore. It was supposed to be challenging, interesting, and appealing to players who wanted something harder. In practice, I’m finding it just to be a longer grind than other games, with almost nonexistent mapping. Maybe I didn’t get far enough to experience interesting tactics and the like. Maybe it’s just not my thing. But I didn’t find this promise to be met.
- Bland Vanilla High Fantasy – Seriously, what’s the point of this world? Why am I out in it, adventuring? Is there some overarching story? Is there some massive conflict going on? Am I out thwomping rats with sticks for any reason other than a way to pass my non-work hours?
In Closing
Despite all this, I STILL play Vanguard for an hour or so most mornings, and plan to until my subscription runs out. The early game moves fast enough that I end up enjoying it more often than not; the little annoyances aren’t so annoying when it only takes tens of minutes to achieve a new level. Orcs and Dark Elves both had fun starting areas and even a bit of flavor to the initial quests. I enjoy assembling Bard songs and craftable items. I don’t enjoy random death and disconnection. I wish this had been The Next Game, I really do.
In summary, I’ll keep my ear to the ground on this title. All of these gripes are just my opinion; maybe this really is a Great Game and just Doesn’t Suit my Carebear Playstyle or I Just Didn’t Get the Point. And honestly, maybe I’ll re-sub in 6 or 10 or 12 months if I hear that things that annoy me have been solved. But for now, I think my time will be more profitably employed tinkering on bits of my own game, and checking out other online and offline offerings: Console games, LotRO, Warhammer (OK, I’m speculating on that one), and all sorts of other yummy gaming opportunities.
At the end of the day, I am placing Vanguard on the B list: Don’t sink money into it today unless you have the patience of a saint, but keep an eye on it tomorrow.
8 Comments
Here here! I agree with all your points. I didn’t get a feeling of overall SUCK when I played VG, but I was bored pretty quick and I felt that most everything in the game was already done better in other MMORPG’s. There was no reason for me to play VG over EQ2. It has an equally underpopulated world, a complete lack of lore and motivation to adventure, awful performance for a game that (IMO) doesn’t even look at that great or inspired. B was an okay rating, but I’d give a C for middle of the road mediocrity…only because almost all the games on the market right now are more exciting to play.
Oh, you forgot one thing. The complete lack of any official community. Yeah, they have “affiliate sites”, but no true central repository for Dev communication. I just happened to write about this today.
I see that this blog entry has been referenced and has launched some surprisingly vituperative discussions out there on the mighty interwebs. (You know who you are!) I swore that I’d never argue with critics, because after all, just about any discussion thread on the net WILL end in flaming and fighting… But there were a couple of points that I felt I ought to address. Out of respect for the communities I saw this in, I’ll post here and not there. And out of respect for my own site, I’ll leave it as a comment here and not a front-page item.
One point is, I applied a little bit of hyperbole. OK, Vanguard doesn’t SUCK. I’m just not thrilled with it. Part of the disappointment I then experienced is my fault, since I got sucked into the hype to a degree and was hoping for something almost on-par with the Second Coming. On the other hand, being inflammatory sure seems to have served its purpose — we got read, woohoo!
A good point one responder brought up was that I haven’t gotten very far in the game. This is both true and not; I tried a whole bunch of characters through the first few levels of adventuring. My designated “main” is in the teens for adventuring, and I made a serious pass at crafting as well. Still, I’d say I spent 40-50 or so hours playing Vanguard; if the game hasn’t “grabbed” me yet, I suspect it’s unlikely to. This is a comment I plan to return to in the near future… Why, exactly, is it that I haven’t given the game a fair shake, if I’m not interested in several hundred boring hours before things get “good?” Full investigation coming Real Soon Now ™.
Another great comment that I’ve heard many times could be paraphrased as “There’s no grinding, you’re always doing quests.” Whether I’m a min-maxer whacking rats in a field because my calculations show that I earn 13.02 more xp per second by avoiding travel time, or whether I’m whacking specifically-designated rats in a specifically-designated field becase Farmer Jones has an infestation, it becomes “grinding” when my attention wanders long enough that I feel the repetition deep in my bones. I have no magic solution; I think any game in the near future will be sufficiently repetitive or contain enough parts that we wish we could “skip by” that this will continue. I don’t even dislike grind, per se — hell, I still fire up Diablo 2 on occasion, and after your first 80,123,613.5 butcherings of the Prime Evils, that’s nothing but grind! But my specific complain about grind was that Vanguard promised DIFFICULTY, and instead I found a LONGER GRIND.
Several jabs were taken at my ability to analyze games, since I liked SWG. One thing that I’ve changed stances on is bugs in a AAA title; I was FAR more tolerant back then than I am now. Today, I’d probably flame SWG heavily for the bugginess levels. However, beyond the bugs and design flaws (AWFUL balance), SWG met a lot of criteria that I would dearly love to see in a new game. The levelling process was not “the game.” An experienced player could take a character from “brand new” to, effectively, “max level” in days or weeks. The endgame began almost immediately. And due to the need for players to craft nearly every item, house, and vehicle one needed to play, the game could easily become one of player interaction and world-building.
Contradictions are everywhere. I still enjoy WoW, even though it seems to be many things I dislike: leveling-oriented, “on-rails,” few “innovative” features, “cookie-cutter” iWIN builds, etc. We’ll see what I think about VG and other up-and-coming games as time goes on.
To provide a bit of a counterpoint . . . I am enjoying Vanguard currently.
- I recognize there are lots of bugs. I read about them all the time. And a few of my group-mates have experienced them first hand. But with the exception of getting booted on a vanishingly small number of occasions, I haven’t had the bad experience.
- Game performance both is and is not a huge issue for me. It’s a huge issue in that I can’t run any higher than balanced settings on my current rig … but then again, I really have no need for higher settings. In a way, I wish they’d developed artwork only to the ‘balanced’ level, and focused the money on perfecting the game play.
- Certainly the world is devoid of players. At the time I play, I usually see perhaps only 1 or 2 other players outside of my group. But then again, I’m not playing this game to group with random people. I play each morning before server restart with same one or two other people I always do. I find an hour or so of bland-high-fantasy-pixel-clicking to be a great way to start the day. Conversely, I have no interest in starting the day by hooking up with some random asshats for a party wipe.
- In terms of difficulty … I’m not (and probably haven’t ever been) a ‘hardcore’ (whatever the fvck that means) player. But I’ve found there’s enough to keep me interested. Healing vs. fighting (and switching well); managing aggro; timing progress through fast respawn areas; all the usual stuff. Sure it’s not rocket science. But it’s ok.
- Despite a lot of people going on about how the game was supposed to be hardcore … I don’t think that was ever the case … my understanding from beta-days was that it was to have some ‘old-school’ elements. Corpse runs, for example. I like them. On most occasions, a corpse run is just a time penalty. But once in a while, when you’re deep in a mob-infested zone, the possibility of having to make a corpse run helps to reinforce the desire not to die. It also makes you carefully pick your team members. Personally, I wish they’d remove the ability to summon your corpse to a bind point. It ruins the corpse run effect.
In summary: I am enjoying Vanguard. Sure, it’s not the worldy-game I’d hoped for. But I tolerate the problems because it’s delivering ‘acceptable’ fun for me right now.
I tried WoW just before launch (yes, I played all of perhaps 5-10 hours … yes I feel that qualifies me to talk about how I feel about it … if you have a problem with that, bite me). I though it was wonderfully smooth and well put together … but it didn’t grab me, and I never subscribed.
And that I think is the key. Vanguard isn’t (apparently) delivering what you’re looking for, no more than WoW delivered what I was looking for. The MMORPG market isn’t one homogenous group of players.
Rumor has it, btw, that corpse runs are being removed… I predict the easy-ification of Vanguard progressively over the next year or so, as they strive mightily to capture and retain market share.
I was impressed with the polish of WoW when I first played, but I lost interest within a month or so. I didn’t actually enjoy the game until over a year later, when I managed to get into playing with a bunch of former SWG and EQ2 guildmates. I guess it goes to show how much “Your game experience may change with online play,” as the disclaimers like to say.
I havent played Vanguard. Been looking into it tho. But what I would like to say is that I too have been searching for “The Next “IT” Game” the most enjoyed games thus far for me have been Diablo1(1st mmorpg) Ultima Online, EverQuest, Back to UO, SWG for a while, then EverQuest Online Adventures, FFXI. Since then I’ve played about 40 either P2P, semi P2P, or F2P(for those who dont know thats pay , semi pay, and free) and a couple handfulls of MMOFPS. Nothing since FFXI seems to “Grab Me” or if it manages to grab me enuff it doesnt hold onto me. (I enjoy Shooters but thats not the subject.) Alot of the games since FFXI seem to be so close to a great MMORPG but fall short in undisireable ways.
Games are either simply built wrong, assembled wrong, planed wrong, or Destroyed and modified into the craper by complainers , whiners, people who want to change the game, and people who have no clue what theyre talkin about when it comes to mmorpgs.
When it comes to population, I agree I like a more heavily populated game if it doesnt interupt gameplay or disturb. Population isnt everything tho. a extremely good game with a spread out or simply, half there community isnt a game killer if the game itself is good enuff. The better game will draw more people as people play it and keep the people who do play it. Theres always a undrelying debate, is it too hard or too easy to A. find a group B. level/progress?. Probly always will be.
In closing and to sum up… I wish there was a incredible game out there waiting for me to play it. Most newer games are either Rehash, semi Rehash, or as i stated befor, built wrong, assembled wrong, deved wrong or modified into gimpness. It seems very hard to make a Extremely good game for those of us who have played such games as Diablo1&2, EQ1&2&EQOA, Ultima Online, SWG, Anarchy, FFXI, WoW, ect. We expect SOO much and really alot of games I think try to “Copy The Wheel” Rather then Reinventing or Inovating the wheel. Give us something like Vanguard, a EverQuest REHASH with a few bells and whistles and new classes/races and too many bugs and too few mobs and we will spit it back in the industries face.
I just bought a new XPS 720 from dell’s web site with an 800 dollar nvidia upgrade option from dell. My comp is a 2.9 quad core…. And my frames is 40 fps! WTF!! I ran oblivion before this and i had no lag whatsoever! In fact oblivion ran like the dream i had it would run like you were actually there kinda dream with out loading times for the gigantic landscape. Vanguard also constantly disconnects me from chat server and than throws me off the game… Those retards at sony better get crackin at making this game good… ill still play it ironically to see if it gets better though… lol
I’d very much like for Vanguard to work out it’s problems … I really enjoyed it (till my guildies abandoned me!)
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