Vanguard Saga of Heroes noob report day 1
Im gonna make this a normal feature here on my journal. Im an avid MMO player, I buy new mmos to try, I beta them, Im even in alpha test right now that because of some Non disclosure agreements I signed I cant talk about yet, but you get the point.
So I picked up a copy of Vanguard yesterday and Ill give a little history of what I know on this game and then give initial impressions. This particular game has a very tainted history. Its only 7 months from launch and a lot of the negative nancys said this would go down in history as one of the worst launches ever. Even the most devout players would tell you it was buggy from the start, server crashes, CTD's (crashes to desktop), slow leveling, incredibly high system reqs to run...so on.
Sony had just purchased the game right before launch and found themselves under heavy fire from a lot of WoW fanbois as well as the MMO community at large. Thankfully Sony did not throw the baby out with the bathwater and have worked hard on this property to make it playable. I would go so far to compare the history of this game with Everquest 2. EQII started with high system specs, but the tech caught up to the game as well as the team tweaked things quite a bit to make EQII a fun game to play.
Before I go into first impressions heres a little about me and my gaming experience. I've been playing online games for ten years now (12 if you count the BBS door games I used to play). My first real RPG exp started with Dragon Realms, a text based MUD (Multi User Dungeon) that was pay to play. From there I did some PBEM (Play By EMail) RPG's, tried to play the first EQ but the UI (user interface) was beyond me, also tried Dark age of camelot and again had problems, I quit for a bit but World of Warcraft pulled me out of retirement and I have been beta testing and playing various MMO's ever since. My gaming resume now includes: Eve online, EQII (currently subbed to and play), LOTRO (currently subbed to and play..lifetime member), Vanguard (trying out for the first time hence this blog), CoH, Guild Wars, Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot.
So with that, Ill go over some first impressions of Vanguard. The race selection is very very nice. One of the biggest I have ever started out with honestly. All I will say is the game has three furry races, the Raki (fox people), The Kura (cat people) and the Vulmane (wolf people). There are race/class restrictions which was disappointing but I will deal. You got three furry races, Im there.
The class selection is very big as well. You have your typical fantasy classes: Warrior, Rogue, Ranger, Paladin, Cleric, Bard, Druid, Sorcerer. Then you have some others that are not typical but I have seen them in many systems before: Psionicist, Monk, Shaman, Necromancer. Now for some that look interesting and Ill need to look at closer: Dread Knight, Blood Mage, Disciple.
Right off the bat I rolled up a Raki Paladin. Hes shorter than I figured he would be. You start off with basic clothes and a weapon. The critters dont drop gear in the first area. Very different from WoW. Also the amount of combat skills a starting character has as they level depends on your class. Rangers get a ton, Paladins dont seem to get much.
Questing is very easy, the UI is very intuitive if you have played an MMO before. There is a learning curve if you have never played one before. The early encounters are no problem unless you just stand there and dont have auto attack on. Hey, I have seen it happen.
Now, so far, Im not sure how I feel. The meat of the game is you advance how you wish, what the literature says anyway. Supposedly you can advance one of three ways: Adventuring, Crafting or Diplomacy. What that means, so far I dont know. I CAN tell you that crafters, depending on your vocation, can build houses and ships. The idea of being able to build a ship appeals to me so Im gonna try to tough this out through the initial rough stages and see where this all goes.
Housing is cool, the vids I have seen show a character picking a land plot then constructing their house. No vids on ships I have seen yet but that just means I havent looked hard enough.
So, day one consisted of getting a paladin to level 3 which Im gonna re roll, and breaking a ranger out and finding them grossly overpowered. Not bad honestly. Im hoping to have a better report on things tomorrow as far as actual game content and the crafting system.
One final note, this game still has steep system reqs. Im running an AMD Sempron 3000+ with 2 gigs of ram and a Radeon ATI 9550 with 256 mb of dedicated video ram. The game alone requires 20 gigs of HD space, which I had. I mean I have three hard drives on this monster. With all that, Im having to run the game at Highest performance settings to avoid loss of FPS (frames per second) and server lag.
Im real curious to see how this will run on my other computer. I will report on that later too.
So far, so good though. I do have hopes for this game as it seems..SEEMS to be much more RP friendly with the depth of all that is here. We shall see.
rw
So I picked up a copy of Vanguard yesterday and Ill give a little history of what I know on this game and then give initial impressions. This particular game has a very tainted history. Its only 7 months from launch and a lot of the negative nancys said this would go down in history as one of the worst launches ever. Even the most devout players would tell you it was buggy from the start, server crashes, CTD's (crashes to desktop), slow leveling, incredibly high system reqs to run...so on.
Sony had just purchased the game right before launch and found themselves under heavy fire from a lot of WoW fanbois as well as the MMO community at large. Thankfully Sony did not throw the baby out with the bathwater and have worked hard on this property to make it playable. I would go so far to compare the history of this game with Everquest 2. EQII started with high system specs, but the tech caught up to the game as well as the team tweaked things quite a bit to make EQII a fun game to play.
Before I go into first impressions heres a little about me and my gaming experience. I've been playing online games for ten years now (12 if you count the BBS door games I used to play). My first real RPG exp started with Dragon Realms, a text based MUD (Multi User Dungeon) that was pay to play. From there I did some PBEM (Play By EMail) RPG's, tried to play the first EQ but the UI (user interface) was beyond me, also tried Dark age of camelot and again had problems, I quit for a bit but World of Warcraft pulled me out of retirement and I have been beta testing and playing various MMO's ever since. My gaming resume now includes: Eve online, EQII (currently subbed to and play), LOTRO (currently subbed to and play..lifetime member), Vanguard (trying out for the first time hence this blog), CoH, Guild Wars, Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot.
So with that, Ill go over some first impressions of Vanguard. The race selection is very very nice. One of the biggest I have ever started out with honestly. All I will say is the game has three furry races, the Raki (fox people), The Kura (cat people) and the Vulmane (wolf people). There are race/class restrictions which was disappointing but I will deal. You got three furry races, Im there.
The class selection is very big as well. You have your typical fantasy classes: Warrior, Rogue, Ranger, Paladin, Cleric, Bard, Druid, Sorcerer. Then you have some others that are not typical but I have seen them in many systems before: Psionicist, Monk, Shaman, Necromancer. Now for some that look interesting and Ill need to look at closer: Dread Knight, Blood Mage, Disciple.
Right off the bat I rolled up a Raki Paladin. Hes shorter than I figured he would be. You start off with basic clothes and a weapon. The critters dont drop gear in the first area. Very different from WoW. Also the amount of combat skills a starting character has as they level depends on your class. Rangers get a ton, Paladins dont seem to get much.
Questing is very easy, the UI is very intuitive if you have played an MMO before. There is a learning curve if you have never played one before. The early encounters are no problem unless you just stand there and dont have auto attack on. Hey, I have seen it happen.
Now, so far, Im not sure how I feel. The meat of the game is you advance how you wish, what the literature says anyway. Supposedly you can advance one of three ways: Adventuring, Crafting or Diplomacy. What that means, so far I dont know. I CAN tell you that crafters, depending on your vocation, can build houses and ships. The idea of being able to build a ship appeals to me so Im gonna try to tough this out through the initial rough stages and see where this all goes.
Housing is cool, the vids I have seen show a character picking a land plot then constructing their house. No vids on ships I have seen yet but that just means I havent looked hard enough.
So, day one consisted of getting a paladin to level 3 which Im gonna re roll, and breaking a ranger out and finding them grossly overpowered. Not bad honestly. Im hoping to have a better report on things tomorrow as far as actual game content and the crafting system.
One final note, this game still has steep system reqs. Im running an AMD Sempron 3000+ with 2 gigs of ram and a Radeon ATI 9550 with 256 mb of dedicated video ram. The game alone requires 20 gigs of HD space, which I had. I mean I have three hard drives on this monster. With all that, Im having to run the game at Highest performance settings to avoid loss of FPS (frames per second) and server lag.
Im real curious to see how this will run on my other computer. I will report on that later too.
So far, so good though. I do have hopes for this game as it seems..SEEMS to be much more RP friendly with the depth of all that is here. We shall see.
rw