Amber Night

My first thoughts on Vanguard.

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Short and sweet: It's better than you might have heard.  I've been reading a lot of negative reviews, some fair, and others that are really just an excuse to write page after page of how the game sucks because I don't like your scenery choices.  And I'll admit there are some aspects of Vanguard that make me go "hmm," but on the whole I just haven't come across anything that pushes it into the Shadowbane category. (Sorry Shadowbane lovers, but seriously, that game is on crack, and not in a good way.)

First, the negatives:

• Back-story.  Compared to the Everquest and Everquest 2 back story (being a Sony product, EQ comparisons simply have to be made), the Vanguard back-story is almost non-existent.  As a writer, I like to know why I'm traipsing around your world. While there's some mention of conflict and wars between the various races, it all feels very generic.  It's like someone wrote a computer program to generate random fantasy stories, and Vanguard's is the first one it kicked out.
• The voice acting…how to say this delicately?…sucks ass.  It's really bad.  Embarrassingly bad.  From a tiny studio with limited resources, it could almost be forgiven.  Backed by Sony, it's unforgivable.  Seriously, if you're going to try to make all of your Male High Elves sound like Elrond, then hire Hugo Weaving, not someone who sounds like Steven Wright doing a Hugo Weaving impersonation.
• Related to the terrible voice acting, voice overs are often used in completely inappropriate contexts.  For example, one NPC asked me to go find a ring that he'd lost.  The text of the quest made it sound like he was desperate to get this ring back, and REALLY appreciated my help.  But as soon as I closed the dialogue box, he said something like "I don't have all day, what are you just standing around for?"  VERY immersion breaking.
• STILL related to voice acting, if I hear one more NPC say "I'm sure you think you're important," I'll scream.  Now I know that I'm just a little 4th level wannabe, and I know High Elves are supposed to be haughty and disdainful, but seriously.  It's getting old.  Don't ask me to go kill your fucking spiders if you're gonna be all up in my grill with that kind of smack.  Especially when you just got done telling me how important I am.
• Animations are terrible.  Hopefully this is one of those things they'll address post-launch, but I can almost envision the strings attached to my character's limbs.  'Cause, you know, she moves like a puppet.  A string puppet.
• When I entered the game for the first time, the first NPC I was directed to had a dialogue box that had 2 items: "Ethereal Study" and "The Discord of Koan."  I had no idea if these were quests, or if I was choosing a training spec line, or something else entirely.  Turned out they were quests, but it wasn't very clear at all.  In fact, I've found dialogue boxes to be confusing in several instances.  The most confusing was when I was trying to learn the parley system.  Sometimes you had to click a continue link, sometimes you had to exit the dialogue and right-click the NPC to continue.  Very frustrating.
• It could just be my monitor (I tried different settings) but when it's dark, it's really fucking dark.  Even turning my torch on helped only a little.
• Lack of content.  The initial quests are very linear, and there are vast swaths of empty land.

And now the positives:

• Down-time, at least at the lower levels, is almost non-existent.  Once you've spent about 10 seconds out of combat, your life and power come back fast.
• Combat is also fast.  Not City of Heroes fast, but fast enough.
• Character creation is enjoyable.  I don't like the fact that there are only about 3 hair and face choices, but the fact that you can customize just about every other facet of your character is pretty nifty.
•  The parley system is unique and pretty fun. It's intimidating to learn at first, but it doesn't take long to figure out, and it adds a fresh dimension to the game.  I do, however, question the wisdom in making it a card game, complete with deck shuffling sound effects.  It's cute, but immersion breaking.
• The interface is clean and easy to learn.  If you've played EQ2, it will be immediately familiar.
• Using"soulbound" equipment, Vanguard offers a nice compromise between EQ-style corpse runs and DAoC-style you-get-to-keep-all-your-stuff-when-you-die.  It basically works like this: Items and equipment marked as soulbound can be enchanted to stay with you when you die.  If you don't enchant these items, or if you have items that aren't soulbound, they'll drop where you died, and you'll have to go get them after you release.  It's still a pain in the ass, but at least the prospect of having to roll a new character because you've lost all your stuff is greatly reduced.
• In the 6 or so hours I've played the game, I had fun.

What I think I like the most about Vanguard is its rough edges.  It reminds me a little of DAoC right after launch.  Rough around the gills, but showing a lot of promise.  And here's where Sony can take a page out of Mythic's playbook: Make free content.  Vanguard's biggest weakness is a lack of content and polish.  Don't make the players pay for that.  Vanguard has a lot of potential.  It's no WoW killer (and thank god for that) but it can be the Everquest 2 that many Everquest players felt wasn't delivered in Everquest 2.  It's a good start, but there's still a lot of work to be done.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 12:53 pm and is filed under MMOs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.