Another SOE POS?

I was originally going to rant about people complaining about 300 not being "politically correct" and "racist", but that's a post that deserves more attention than I'm willing to give it while blogging at work. General synopsis of future post: people are dumb.

Instead, I'll talk a little about Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.

So, I asked my friend Seth about this game, since I knew that his roomate played it and that Seth himself was rocking the trial key. Seth and I have very similar tastes when it comes to many things, so I value his opinion (he's the only other person I know that thinks The Last Dragon is a masterpiece of American cinema). He claimed that the game, while riddled with many (many) problems, was still worth a look, and then offered me a trial pass...an offer which I quickly snapped up.

I installed the game last night and patched (a process that took over an hour, if you can believe it). After getting to mess around with it for a few hours, I have some initial thoughts.

Background

First of all, there's some background info that you should know before going into this.

Vanguard is the baby of Brad McQuaid, the father of Everquest, and has been in development for some time. It was originally picked up by Microsoft, but they dropped it after development dragged on. It was then saved by Sony Online Entertainment, under a very strict condition: we're giving you $X. Finish the project with it, or we're pulling plug.

So, the development team did what they could, and of course ran out of money. SOE pretty much said, "Tough shit, release the game. It can't be any worse than Star Wars Galaxies."

Everyone that reads this knows how I feel about unfinished games hitting the market. So keep that in mind while you read this.

I think that does it for background. Let's start with...

The Bad

Yeah yeah yeah, everyone else in the world starts with the Good first, but this is my blog, so fuck 'em.

The worst thing (and what really encompasses most of the problems the game has) is that this fucking game isn't finished. I mean, for reals. It's glitchy and finniky. It's like everything in the game needs to be re-tuned. This taint spreads to almost all parts of the game, and it's frustrating. It doesn't just lack polish, the polish canister was never even opened.

Second thing: this game fucking devours system resources. It's a 20gb install, and that's before patches (I didn't have the heart to check after that lenghty process was completed). It's "required" specs aren't too bad (though nobody could say that they're good), but let me tell you something: the "required" specs are full of shit. My computer handily surpasses the necessary system requirements, and I have to run this game on the "High Performance" setting to make it playable. I hear that 2gb of RAM really helps things along, but I don't have the money right now to dump more RAM into my machine, especially for a demo of a game I may not even buy. Also, the game has some weird memory allocation problems. I've heard whispers on the internet that it suffers from a massive memory leak that the developers are trying desperately to hole up, and I can attest to the fact that the game starts to bog down after a while for no real reason.

The graphics are...strange. Some of the graphics are fantastic. Others are crap. This goes for animations as well. This goes back to that whole "re-tuning" thing I was talking about earlier. I've heard that when you turn the graphics all the way up, the game looks fantastic. I'm afraid to do this, since not only will it reduce my framerate to a slideshow, but it might make my computer implode. I'll try it tonight and let you know.

Okay, so that's most of the Bad Stuff. Onto...

The Good

For all the bad mentioned above, there's actually quite a lot of good stuff to be had.

We'll start with character creation. There's more than a dozen races to choose from, over three factions. Some of these are fairly standard (elves, dwarves), while some are new (wolf, cat, and fox-men) and others are just rad (goblin, anyone?). There's also half-giants and orcs and about five different human variants. All of these races have a unique racial ability (all of which are useful, too) and some stat and craft modifiers. A neat thing: You can change the way your character looks at the login screen!

Classes are easily coded into four different types: Defensive Fighters, Offensive Fighters, Healers, and Nukers (the term they use isn't actually "nukers", but that's what they are). This is broken down into Warrior, Paladin, Dread Knight / Rogue, Bard, Monk, Ranger / Cleric, Shaman, Blood Mage / Druid, Sorceror, Psionicist, Necromancer. I've tried out several of the classes for a short period, with my favorite thus far being Zibbazabba, my goblin Rogue. Rogues in Vanguard are interesting. They're your stealthy, pick-pocketing damage dealers, but with a twist. When stealthing about, they are considered Stalking. While Stalking, they do increased damage. When they attack, they stay in stealth mode until they are damaged. If you have a good tank with you, you can stay stealthed the entire fight! I also hear that the longer you stay stealthed in a combat, the more damage you do. Pretty neat!

I also messed around with the Dread Knight, which is very reminiscent of the Shadow Knight of EQ. The Dread Knight's a tank with a class ability called Dreadful Countenance. Every time they hit their target, they afflict it with a debuff. The more you pound on them, the worse the debuff gets. They also have a small array of DoTs, and magical debuffs as well.

Really, variety is the name of the game. The world is huge, and there seems to be quite a bit to do in it.

The difficulty of the game is higher than I was used to in an MMO, and that came as a welcome change. If I screwed up, I paid for it. I understand that there's an xp penalty after level seven, which is worrisome, but I can't comment on it yet since I haven't experienced it.

I didn't get chance to mess around with Diplomacy or Crafting. Hopefully I will before the trial ends (9 days from now).

Overall

I don't honestly know what to make of this game yet. There's a lot of stuff that I really like, but the game is just so damn buggy that it's frustrating as hell. It's got a lot of potential, that's for certain. I'll keep you updated as I play!