Never played it, would have given it a shot if it was still around and part of all access. I'm currently looking for something else to play, so it may have been ideal for my needs.....shame it's gone.
Before it was released everyone was giving ideas on how the new game should be. I remember one person hoping travel time was something real again and requested it taking a month of real time to travel between the distant reaches of the world.
It was the spiritual successor to EQ. Inspite of the great technical challenges it had it managed to recapture much of the same magic that EverQuest had, just in an updated form. Unfortunately several changes were made to the game to make it more of a WoW clone, destroying the magic the game once had. Lots of developers want the success of WoW but none of them are willing to do things the hard way that Blizzard is willing to do. You can not take short cuts to being an industry leader.
What? be Blizzard? You do realize everything they've released in the last couple years IMMEDIATELY has millions of players regardless of reviews, right? This has been true since StarCraft. Blizzard fans are many and extremely rabid. WoW was an aberration, NOT a representation of what an ACTUAL MMO could achieve. WoW's success is from having fanboys. Nothing more. Stop trying to emulate it or claim they did anything special. They didn't.
Rouan I hear what you're saying friend but have to disagree. Granted most of the people who have websites and podcasts dedicated to the Blizzard "BRAND" are super fanboys, but to stay steady at near 9 million people for all this time... you have to concede that it's not just fanboys right? I mean as much as I personally dislike WoW I will say that they do a lot of things right. I also think they take a lot of things from EQ but also when they do take they also tweak it and pay a little extra care. They have terrific fan interaction and branding. These are things that make an incredible business, as much as you/we/I don't get it's very true. The stronger business and brand you have the more money you rake in and the more money you rake in the more you can spend on things like Customer service, graphic design, coding and game design. So does WoW blow, I think it does personally but they do a bunch of things right. And at +/- 9 million people we can not say its just because they have fanboys.
And to add: What's wrong with having fanboys? lol I mean shouldn't SOE/Daybreak shoot for the same thing? Consistently producing products that are polished and for the most part realiable and functioning and FUN. Only sadomasicists wan't to pay $15/month to log into a game that is painful to play, so at the end of the day they can brag to... whoever, that they beat the non-existent dragon of 3li7t3-ness. I enjoy EQ because its a bit more tough then other MMO's and sometimes you log into a zone and your kind of scared because you've never been there and you know if a mob see's you you're gonna get one shotted because your friends are not around. And it gives me a sense of adventure sort of. EQ also has some mechanics that make it easier and that's cool to. EDITED: Because I'm one of those idiots that your/youre's are horrible. I hope EQ starts gaining some fanboys, because we need em. Put my order in for 5 million fanboys.
It was a WoW EQ hybrid that 95% of people that played it felt no reason to keep playing after the first month. It also had performance problems with the computers of the era it was released in.
I never got to play this game in its earlier days, but started it with a friend after he did not like what EQ1 had become even more than I did. I was a dorf dread knight and he played that continents human as the monk healer thing. We were having alot of fun. Lots of dungeons just strewn out through the world ready to be explored. In terms of class mechanics it was alot less mashy than a modern MMO. You had few abilities like in old Pop era eq I guess, but had to use them decisively and wisely. It is a shame the game came off to such a bad start, as from what I saw of it before sunset was announced was a very appealing game to me as an old EQ fan.
It was nothing like wow. It was every bit a successor to EQ. 19 races, 15 classes. Separate starting zones for each of the races. EQ type graphic style - nothing like the cartoon style of wow. Adventuring sphere that was more than just autoattack. EQ of today has come a long way on that front but at the time the difference was night and day. Tradeskills that required actual gaming. You didnt just click combine and get something, you had to use stats, buffs, and player skill to succeed a combine. You had to get tradeskill gear to up your stats and you completed real quests to get it - just like you do with adventuring gear. Diplomacy sphere that also required gear, and quests to get the gear. Diplomacy wins also required stats and skills. Diplomacy was used to create extra buffs for the other 2 spheres (adventure & tradeskill). Fishing was less than a sphere but more than eq fishing. It took gaming type skills to catch a fish. Some people couldnt get it. It could have had more rewards though. Player crafted boats and houses, and land plots in the open world environment for both houses and guild castles. Bards were dps. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- How it failed. At start it was BUGGY. Worse than eq has ever been, and believe me in the past eq was known to be very buggy. It also had hardcore machine requirements. Even very good machines couldnt handle it. Even their servers couldnt handle it. This chased many off. Eventually they cleaned up the majority of bugs, but by then it was too late. They went 7 years without an expansion because they didnt have the playerbase to pay for one. No mmo can survive that.
I remember looking into the game at the time and thinking that it sounded awesome, but my computer at the time was not capable of running it.
Vanguard also set the bar for exploration in my book. The complete lack of zones and instances really set Vangaurd apart. When the added WoW style sparklies to points of interest in the game really killed it for me and I unsubbed. They simply gave up on their vision and tried to copy WoW everywhere they could but without Blizzards resources. I will not pay to play a WoW knock off. If I want to play WoW I'll go get the real thing, It's not like it's expensive.
It was a brilliant game, only crippled by lack of development. I continued to play it right until my character was 100% maxed out (Socketed RoRRs in every slot, multiple sets of raid gear for different roles, etc) and there was just nothing left to do any longer. Such a waste of a great game! Some of the classes were awesome too, making the 'holy trinity' concept interesting and engaging but not going down the 'action rpg' route that it seems all next gen MMOs are heading for. To those saying the game became more WoW-like as it progressed, they couldn't be more wrong. The opposite was true: as developer numbers dwindled, content became ridiculously grindy to compensate, the kind of stuff that even most old school EQ players would shudder at. The final content addition (City of Brass) preserved the difficulty level too, you certainly would not last long there without a full group of the best equipped players.
There was an unbelievable amount of content in that game at the start (compared to most games). They seemed to have big plans but abandoned them early? Wow and its army of clones being spawned until the end of time ruins the chances of these type of games gaining attention.
Played it from beginning until end. Only game besides EQ that kept me interested. Wish you could upload screenies here. The graphics were great.
Vanguard was VERY buggy with bad performance when launched, which ultimately killed it off. From what I understand they were forced into launching even though the devs knew it wasn't finished. However it did have some very nice features, and most of the bugs / performance issues were fixed. Things I liked Twin target rings; offensive and defensive, automatically changes the appropriate one depending on target. Bloodmages. Awesome class! Used the twin target rings to great effect. Imagine a necro healing a player by lifetapping their offensive target and giving the hp to their defensive target. Map layout. Dungeons were in the same map as non-dungeons. If you want a dungeon, then you have to fit it in somewhere. Under that mountain over there for example. . None of this daft case where you run up to a small ish tower, zone in, and then spend hours exploring an apparent TARDIS. Diplomacy (mentioned by others already). Exploration. Some people slammed it for having huge wide open spaces with not a great deal going on. IMO that was a strength. I hate it when MMOs come up with some fractal map design where the main quest lines take you through each and every nook and cranny in the entire map. Sometimes I planned to do things and got nothing done simply because I thought "I wonder what's over there?". Class synergy. Everyones special attacks also lead to a debuff on the mob that helped several other classes rather than their own. This meant that there was a suprisngly large number of duos (or more) that could benefit from grouping up. Some MMOs (eg Rift) seem to have this philosophy that absolutely everything has a purpose. Egdropped a badger spleen... "Hmm I wonder what quest this is for?". HIDEOUS design. That's not how MMOs should work. Stuff is there just because it's there - everything doesn't have to have a purpose, and Vanguard got that right.
It was fun while it lasted, but it should've died sooner than it did. No game should've launched in the state VG launched. No company should be given $30mil+, 5 years of development time, and not able to deliver a stable, mostly bug free game. This isn't counting the extra resources, manpower, and money that SOE gave them to keep the game in beta for an extra 6 months. Engine problems were the biggest issues with Vanguard, next were bugs bugs and bugs. Of course lack of endgame content was also a problem but not a lot of people made it that far. I beta'ed the game, supported it through heartaches for over a year after launch. I played on the FFA PvP server, and it was a BLAST. Credit them, they had the cojones to launch with FFA PvP. FFA PvP server was the highlight of the game for me. Other good things were: -Bards, they were well designed and very fun to play. Unfortunately they never could get bard songs to work properly with chunking. I used to get killed randomly while zoning with bard songs up. -Blood mages, a very interesting class that I wish more MMO's would've copied. -A mixture of open world dungeons and instanced. -Open world housing, although there were downsides to them, they were never fully materialized. -Crafting, how housing used harvest materials & crafters. -Music, they spent a lot of time & money on music (perhaps too much money). -SHIPS AND BOATS, games today tend to avoid ships & boats, I have no idea why. They were cool. Alas, the technical issues, bugs, engine problems, chunking issues (they never were fully "seamless"), lack of endgame content, and way too heavy system requirement ultimately beat out anything good the game had to offer. It served as a lesson to any future developers that you can have the most well thoughout game, but nothing matters if people can't play the game without hitching, crashes, bugs, and lag. In other words, Blizzard had it right all along, accessibility & quality = king.
