I’m in a down period for MMORPGs and while waiting for Warhammer Online, I was intrigued by Vanguard. Is anyone playing/ has played this title? And if so, what are/were your impressions.
Thanks!
Edit: Fat Fingers. Substitute ‘n’ for ‘b’.
I can’t begin to describe how bad this game is so instead ill post this link so one of the developers can explain it for me: http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/31593-vg-producers-letter-49.html#post945201
My SO and I played it for a few months last year. At the time it was pretty buggy. The worst bug I personally experienced is my character never appeared onscreen correctly. You could customize your character down to the curve of their chin and proportions of their limbs… but when I entered the world with her, she looked completely different. I also heard of a bug that caused items to disappear.
They’ve since released patches and integrated the servers. IIRC most of the bugs are gone. The gameplay is (and always was) pretty good, but the player base just isn’t there anymore. Which is too bad; the game was ambitious, and pretty, and fun. The world was huge and it was fun exploring it. I’d have played it longer and possibly would still be playing it if it weren’t so buggy.
In terms of difficulty, it was more challenging than WoW, closer to FFXI and (I’m guessing, I never played it) EQ.
The SO, who had been most excited about Vanguard and was pretty disappointed with it, is waiting for Warhammer and Age of Conan. I’m distracting myself with WoW.
I still play on and off - I have played since beta.
It had MASSIVE problems when it was released-too-early. Most of these have been fixed (along with several solutions in need of problems). As is, it’s actually not bad at all - it helps a TON if you have other people to play it with. As AudreyK notes, the player base just isn’t there anymore, at least at non-maxed level; levelling speed has been increased to the point where anyone who plays seriously is probably 50, which means you never have groups in the mid levels to do anything super-fun. It’s very easy to solo to the max level, but you’re missing a ton of the best content along the way.
They just recently (finally) released the first proper raid content, and that in particular is a better MMO experience than I’ve had since EQ1. Other than that, the max level content is a bit lacking - but there’s PLENTY of low-mid level stuff to do. Easily enough to level to 50 a couple of times without repeating anything until you’re in your mid 40s (not that anyone does anything other than take the path of least resistance anyways).
Don’t go anywhere near the PvP server unless you have a compelling reason to; they have no clue what they’re doing with regard to PvP balance.
You should probably keep in mind that I’m one of the people who played EQ for something like five and change years, and got really really bored with WoW after about a month and a half. The Current Era of MMORPGs just doesn’t appeal to me that much - I can’t blame WoW for doing what it would take to attract millions more to the genre, but it doesn’t mean I have to play all of the various games that are clones of it.
I’m pretty sure MMOs have been near-permanently ruined for me anyways with the advent of Ventrilo, and being forced to listen to the actual voices of all of the whiny people out there in the world if I want to do anything fun. Gaming was better before voice-chat… sue me.
Anyways, I wandered a bit there. I’m not sure if there’s a free trial out there for VG right now - if there is, you should definitely try it. If not, well, I would probably say wait patiently to be underwhelmed by the next offering and save a bit of money.
I’ve been playing it since release, although for the past five or sixth months I’ve only been playing once a week. I bring my PC to a friend’s house and we play with another friend.
It has a lot of failed potential, but some goodness too.
I have 9 free trial codes, and if anyone wants one I can PM it.
Amen. That was part of what put me off of LoTRO – I couldn’t join a group without getting “Turn on your voice! You need to have your voice on!!”. I hate voice chat in MMORPGs. Nothing could be less immersive.