Anyone played Vanguard?

[Thadius]

Just looking at some screenshots, looks like SWg but with DAOC type gameplay

Is it worth it or just another fuckup by Sony? ;p

 

[fettoken]

Just looking at some screenshots, looks like SWg but with DAOC type gameplay

Is it worth it or just another fuckup by Sony? ;p

Very very much like Everquest 2, but extremely slow levelling up in any sphere (adventure lvl, crafting, diplomacy). If you have lots and lots of time on your hands for a long time then give it a try if you plan on making any progress. I gave it a few weeks, but gave up and decided to play it in the future some time.

 

[Pirkel]

All the cool kids are playing EVE now anyway.

 

[Afran]

The only part Sony have in Vanguard is the login/subscriptions. It's an excellent game imo, but it depends what you're looking for.

 

[Fana]

Im on the last day of my free trial today and ordered the game a few days into it - although i actually wish now i had waited with ordering since a few issues crept up over the remaining time. It could be an awesome game, but its supercomputer requirerments to run smoothly and the multitude of bugs and level of unfinishedness kinda puts a dampener on my enjoyment. That being said the dev team genuinely seem to care and are working hard and it does have quite a few good points as well - looks very nice (with a high spec machine), combat and grouping systems are good, diplomacy rocks and from what i hear crafting is ace (not a crafter myself). That it has very slow leveling is neither a plus nor minus to me, it can be as slow as it wants as long as its fun.

If you have a good computer and some patience with bugs then try it out - its a nice game that could be really great if the devs can get a handle on some of the more pressing issues.

 

[Cylian]

really like Vanguard. The crafting is just awesome, sometimes annoying as hell, but all the sweeter when things turn out your way
And once you know how things work the leveling up isn't all that bad.
The starting zones became quite a bit emptier, so you probably don't need super-high-end machine to walk in there anymore.

Though, don't start on Qualia though, it's the most boring continent imo. Thestra is the most developed one, Kojan is pretty funny (how often can you jump right into a big battle as a level 1 ? :] )

Haven't encountered any severe bugs in the past few days, and the game seems to improve almost every day.

 

[Kinag]

really like Vanguard. The crafting is just awesome, sometimes annoying as hell, but all the sweeter when things turn out your way
And once you know how things work the leveling up isn't all that bad.
The starting zones became quite a bit emptier, so you probably don't need super-high-end machine to walk in there anymore.

Though, don't start on Qualia though, it's the most boring continent imo. Thestra is the most developed one, Kojan is pretty funny (how often can you jump right into a big battle as a level 1 ? :] )

Haven't encountered any severe bugs in the past few days, and the game seems to improve almost every day.

From what I remembered, Only Kojani can jump into a "large" battle at L1

Dwarf Cleric on Gelenia here \o/

 

[Sparda]

Fantastic game, if your willing to download a 17gb file i can send you one of the 10 day trial keys i have.

As above realy, its a very slow old skool type MMO, there no rush getting anywhere and peeps are just enjoying the ride. I have also never seen any other MMO with as many dungeons, there everywhere! Everyone is masive too, and not having a map gives you the whole 'havent we been here before' feeling. Spent ages lost inside dungeons personaly. Deffo start on Thestra ( old style medievil place, similar to easter europe in design ) or Kojan ( looks like the far east ). Qalia is based on africa and the middle east and well, its all sand n stuff.

Msn me if ya want to know more.

 

[Saggy]

Vanguard felt fairly good untill I checked LotRO out - now I can't even touch neither Vanguard or WoW :| Hate the movement system in both - LotRO has the best parts of WoW and DAoC combined making it very enjoyable to play

 

[Vladamir]

Vanguard felt fairly good untill I checked LotRO out - now I can't even touch neither Vanguard or WoW :| Hate the movement system in both - LotRO has the best parts of WoW and DAoC combined making it very enjoyable to play

Cool Saggy!

 

[Saggy]

Cool Saggy!

Yeah!

 

[Vladamir]

Yeah!

Breakfast beer?

 

[WiZe^]

All the cool kids are playing EVE now anyway.

tought it was WoW tbh

 

[Saggy]

Breakfast beer?

Sadly my career of being lazy drunkard is over

...for now anyway

 

[Cylian]

I'd rather keep playing Vanguard than join a group of Legolazz the Ranger, Gymli the Warrior with his Brother Gimlii the cleric and Aragoorn the wannabe Hero ... all while being followed by Frooodooo, Frodoo and Frodownz.

...LotRO will need a hefty naming policy

 

[Ctuchik]

Is it worth it or just another fuckup by Sony? ;p

think asian level grind and ur pretty much spot on.. years of leveling and no sight of max lvl for any forseable future....

 

[Javai]

I played Vanguard for 5 weeks (everyday) to get to a massive level 28, xp'ing is painfully slow. Then during the double xp weekend I crashed (that occurs about once an hour) I played for 3-4 more hours then logged for dinner. When I returned and logged in I fell from the sky and died and discovered my character had been rolled back (adventuring and craftign xp) to where I had been pre-crash.

Looking on forums I found this was a 'known' issue and one that GMs refused to fix for those who suffered it. I logged off, cancelled the first month subs that were due the next day and won't ever go back.

The ex-EQ community like to go all elitist and pretend noone likes Vanguard because its too hard, but I levelled to 50 in DaoC in the Barrows 5 years ago I can do hard, Vanguard is instead painfully tedious and buggy as hell. Just because xp takes a long time doesn't make a game challenging, and I prefer my challenge to be something other than getting the damn game to run.

Unless you have ALOT of patience, avoid this game it's still very much in a Beta state.

 

[Levin]

After the SWG tragedy, i'll avoid anything Sony has their dirty little fingers in.

 

[Saggy]

I'd rather keep playing Vanguard than join a group of Legolazz the Ranger, Gymli the Warrior with his Brother Gimlii the cleric and Aragoorn the wannabe Hero ... all while being followed by Frooodooo, Frodoo and Frodownz.

...all of which you will find from each and every mmorpg by name "Legololz, Gimili, Arapr0n Frodown" :S LotRO brings nothing new there really - those names just happens to fit in the story better than in most mmorpg's

 

[Borand]

Four words - worst...customer...support...ever.

Considering how bug infested the game is, you would have thought there would be a mass of GM's in-game helping to solve people's many problems. On the contrary.

First experience of having to create a petition in-game was after my grave had disappeared quite literally into thin air. Yes I could have recovered it at an altar and suffered the harsh experience loss, but there's no way I'm going to do that if I can't recover a grave through no fault of my own. So I petitioned.

Three days later, I receive a mail in my character's mailbox saying something along the lines of 'sorry we missed you blah blah blah, please repetition your request'. This was annoying enough, I mean why do they need you online in order to fix a bugged grave? Repetitioned anyway.

Another two days pass and I finally get contacted by a GM who informs me he's solved the problem and I could now recover my grave. I spent the next 30 minutes or so trying to find my grave (again) and it still wasn't anywhere to be seen. Went AFK for another 30 minutes though and it suddenly appeared when I got back. A tedious process, but they solved it in the end at least (although I had lost five days of potential gameplay since I had no items due to them all being on my grave).

A week later and yet another gamebreaking bug. After dying and recovering my grave, for some reason none of my items were on there and I didn't get back the 20% exp for the level I was on either. Checked at the altar, sure enough I didn't have any other graves in the world, and had no items in escrow.

So, pissed off as I was, I petitioned again. Five days go past. The first 'major' patch gets implemented on the fifth day and during this process, they also delete all petitions that are currently in the queue. Great. So I repetition yet again. Waited another 3 days - so that's 8 days now in total with no response from a GM. Finally give up and decide that's enough to make me cancel my subscription.

Are SoE/Sigil idiots? Are they not aware that providing support to their paying customers is of the highest priority with a product such as Vanguard, espescially in the first few months of release? Certainly seems that way.

Having said all that, and in between all the disappearing mobs, non functioning abilities and broken quests, I could see the potential for a decent MMO in perhaps 12-18 months time, if they fix all of these bugs and put some more of McQuaid's ideas into practice. Unfortunately I think they've already missed the spot and driven away many of their early customers for good.

 

[Afran]

think asian level grind and ur pretty much spot on.. years of leveling and no sight of max lvl for any forseable future....

"lol"

 

[Fana]

Well, just consumed my retail key since my trial runs out today - ordered the retial copy 2 days into the trial and after that ive been back and forth about wheather it was a mistake or not. Particularely the last 2 days have been bad for me with multiple crashes, forced logouts and stuck in geometry issues. But since i cant be arsed to try to sell my retail key i decided i might as well use it - and i love spending time online with my guild (wowguildies that started VG). Had a nice session this morning that made me feel more positive about the game again - no errors, crashes or buged quests, and not much serverlag (since its monday morning) and managed to find and complete some nice quests.

Ill be in VG for my 30 "free" days at least, then ill evaluate if its worth staying on or not. If not ill likely try LotRO that conveniently enough is released only about a week after my VG sub is due for renewal if i remember correct.

 

[Saggy]

Vanguard felt fairly good untill I checked LotRO out - now I can't even touch neither Vanguard or WoW :| Hate the movement system in both - LotRO has the best parts of WoW and DAoC combined making it very enjoyable to play

I take the underlined part back :S Hadn't played for some time so tried the game today - the movement has been made identical to WoW making it pathetic and totally unplayable for PvP :|

 

[Case]

think asian level grind and ur pretty much spot on.. years of leveling and no sight of max lvl for any forseable future....

Since this is a PvE only game and is designed as such with as far as I can see no "end game" content as a DAoC player would know it why are you rushing/grinding to level? I haven`t played this yet but am going to tonight after I pick up the DvD from my mate but interested to know why people are grinding a PvE game before I play it.

 

[Javai]

Since this is a PvE only game and is designed as such with as far as I can see no "end game" content as a DAoC player would know it why are you rushing/grinding to level? I haven`t played this yet but am going to tonight after I pick up the DvD from my mate but interested to know why people are grinding a PvE game before I play it.

I suppose it depends on your definition of 'grinding' - I found that Vanguard wants you to enjoy the ride to level 50. A slow ride it is too. The problem I had was that there simply was not enough quests/content to gain each level. Leading to 'grinding' out levels to access the next few quests.

There is, however, more 'group' content than small group content so some of this is eleviated with a decent group. But that said finding groups if you dont have a fixed one was difficult and to make matters worse all the groups at the same level are in the same relatively small areas competing for kills. (This is on EU server Gelenia which had far too high a population due to being the only EU pve server at launch).

 

[Afran]

I suppose it depends on your definition of 'grinding' - I found that Vanguard wants you to enjoy the ride to level 50. A slow ride it is too. The problem I had was that there simply was not enough quests/content to gain each level. Leading to 'grinding' out levels to access the next few quests.

There is, however, more 'group' content than small group content so some of this is eleviated with a decent group. But that said finding groups if you dont have a fixed one was difficult and to make matters worse all the groups at the same level are in the same relatively small areas competing for kills. (This is on EU server Gelenia which had far too high a population due to being the only EU pve server at launch).

QFT.

I haven't had much trouble getting groups on Frengrot Team PvP, and the population there isn't great. I have a set group now who are raiding Thelaseen/VT every night for golems and such, lots of fun We could be doing other dungeons for much faster exp, and better loot, but we prefer to do it this way.

If you're looking for a game to get to the max level within a few weeks of playing, then this really isn't the game for you, but that's no reason to put it down as a "shit game" for the rest of people, I'm level 35 now and I have never felt the need to force myself to grind levels, there's plenty of quests and places you can "grind" whilst exploring into the depths (I say "grind", as when I'm exploring somewhere new, I don't take killing the mobs to go deeper as "grinding".)