Sometime in the next couple of hours the pre-release access for people like me who pre-ordered will begin. On the 30th, the game will go live to the general public.

I’ve been in the Beta since October.

http://dorksville.net/gallery2/geeky/vanguard/ <– my screenshot collection with captions. Only has shots of about one quarter of one continent. There are two continents and an archipelago (bunch of islands) in the game.

http://www.vanguardsoh.com <– Official Site

http://www.joinvanguard.com/ <– Demo videos and signup

So What?

I’ve been watching Vanguard’s development since 2004. It’s been in development for nearly five years and in Beta for more than a year. Its budget is somewhere below but close to World Of Warcraft’s staggering $45m US dollars. It is, in my view, the Next Big Thing in computer gaming. It comprises the best features of all current MMO’s, with the worst features removed or smoothed out, as well as some truly new and unique ideas, and some things new to the MMO world which we’ve seen in other games.

It also contains _a lot_ of everything good. This game is unspeakably massive, currently taking up 17.7GB of space on my machine. None of that is video files. It’s all program, models, maps, textures, sound and music.

The world itself is an unprecedented size - a truly massive trio of continents (two continents and a large archipelago), and three spheres of play - Adventuring, Crafting and Diplomacy. No longer is Crafting a crappy afterthought / last minute addon. Crafting in Vanguard is a deep and varied game all of its own, with its own classes, levels and challenges. Diplomacy - an entirely new sphere of play is another distinct game with its own progression, goals and quests. Diplomacy is a totally non-violent sphere, where you convince NPC’s of your viewpoint or extract information from them through structured conversations. The coolest part of these three spheres is that you can advance the same character in all three at the same time, and each sphere has its own set of gear (armour, equipment, clothing) that you are constantly seeking to improve. You switch gear sets automatically or manually through a single tick-box in your inventory.

I played adventuring to level 16 with one character and level 5 with several others. I made it to level 20 Smithing and played the Diplomacy game through its full newbie stage in Khal, and just touched on the beginnings of Civic Diplomacy (the next stage). I can safely tell you this is a game where there is so much to do, and so many different places to do it, that there is never any excuse to be bored. I’ve been itching for it to be released so I could play with my friends for weeks.

The graphics are awesome (see shots - this is just one continent - each continent has its own look and plant/tree species), the sound is very good (the first time you step into an echoey ravine you’ll know about it) and the music is awesome. I can’t get over how good the music is. Each area has its own unique music, and the track changes to something more upbeat or sinister during combat. Returning to an area you loved weeks after leaving it is very nostalgic because the music returns and stimulates the memory. Each piece of music is good enough that you’ll find yourself humming it all day at work, and there is tons and tons of it - several GB all told.

But the one feature of this game that really blows everything else out of the water to me is that the huge world is all one piece. Anything you can see, you can walk/run/ride/climb/fly to. This has a lot of effects, the most important of which is that the world very quickly becomes a real place to you, in your mind. Second most important is navigation - you can navigate easily by landmarks and by recognising the lay of the land. Lastly but still very importantly, for adventuring and exploring - any time you get bored with where you are all you have to do is climb the nearest hill. Looking around, you can pick something nearby or on the horison that looks interesting and just go and explore it. This is awesome to do in-game.

What does it mean for me?

For people currently playing World of Warcraft, Vanguard represents a much larger and more varied game, with a huge emphasis on the single-group content that most people have the most fun with. This is not a game where you race to maximum level in a month of play and then get bored shitless raiding every night of the week or grinding endless PVP for something to do. This is a game where you can get together with your friends and just do what is the most fun, for the longest period of time. With three huge and totally different continents full of content, there is always somewhere new and interesting to adventure. With three fully fleshed-out spheres of play, you can burn out on one and advance another with the same character.
There are vastly more classes and races than in WoW, giving rise to more varied play.

At any level and with any sized group, you can vary the challenge of the content you’re fighting from effortless to near impossible just by choosing where to go and what to take on.

Class balance is something these developers take with deadly seriousness. They’ve made mistakes with it in past games and learned from them. We have their solemne pledge that each class can perform its primary duty satisfactorily and comparitively well as compared to other members of the same archetype. (offensive and defensive melee, offensive and defensive casters). Over a long period of time, I expect the classes to balance out. At the moment most groups are fairly equal, with some exceptions. Nobody is left out in the cold though.

One other point worth noting is that character customisation in Vanguard (Which has improved a lot in the past few weeks) is such that you can make your Human Warrior look like no other Human Warrior in the game. Warcraft severely lacks this.

For people not currently playing an MMO

Vanguard is a good choice of a starting game, or a game to return to MMOs with. Many people have come onto the Beta boards and compared it with other games (hundreds of people have done this). As yet, nobody’s come up with a feature that another game has, that Vanguard does not, and is appropriate in a medieval setting. Not one feature - Vanguard has it all. It also has features that no other MMO has (such as diplomacy)

The systems (everything from combat to crafting and diplomacy) are all sucessfully built to the philosophy “easy to learn, difficult to master”. Its not difficult to learn any facet of the game, but it takes time and effort to become excellent at anything - so further investment pays off.

It also has a lot of different experiences to offer. In the past, games offered only healer classes to people who weren’t interested in violence (a lot of girls are like this I noticed). In Vanguard, crafting and diplomacy are big enough that you could play Vanguard for years and never seek combat, still have a lot of fun - and still trade and interact with other players a great deal.

It is also a game with the crap parts taken out. It’s made by developers who have come from the development teams of a lot of other MMO’s. They’ve made mistakes in the past, and they’ve learned. They’ve also benefited from the long Beta process. I have seen them react countless times to player feedback - in each case either improving something that needed it, or removing something that really sucked. Today’s Vanguard is a really rounded product in terms of gameplay.

The developers have not only put together a great game today, but they have a clear vision and many ideas on where to take it next. This is a game that will not disappoint or lack vision as the time goes by. There are a lot of really good ideas they haven’t had time to implement, and these are set for post-release enhancement or the first expansion.

Critcism of Vanguard

Over the past few months while I’ve been in Beta, and even beforehand with NDA breakers, I’ve read a lot of criticism of this game. Some of it is still fair comment. Some of it was fair comment before whateveritwas was fixed but is no longer so, some of it has been pure opinion, and some of it has been misconception. Some has even been actual bullshit - people criticising the game by saying things which either aren’t true, or certainly weren’t reproducable by other people using the same hardware etc.

I’m going to go through some of it now.

1. Performance

A few days ago when I was beta testing the final Beta build, there were two bugs which still affected performance negatively. One is related to the very pretty Volumetric Clouds eating up too much video memory and causing slowness, and the other is related to loading art assets (models and textures) from the disk. Both bugs have already recieved a lot of work in the past few weeks, and the loading problem (Which causes ‘hitching’) has improved in leaps and bounds over that time. However, as I last the saw the game, both were still a problem.

I personally have criticised Sigil on both of these problems. The clouds thing is obviously bug, and its a bug that can sap ten frames per second. 10FPS is enough to make the latest hardware give mediocre performance and no doubt the cause of some of the claims that “Vanguard sucks on the latest gear”. I just run with the “volumetric clouds” switched off so I don’t have to put up with it - I’ll turn them back on when they fix it. The ‘hitching’ is unacceptable. It doesn’t make the game unplayable (anymore), but it is annoying and there is no excuse for it. A modern game should be able to load things in the background without pausing the rendering engine. Vanguard pauses waiting for the disk, and this causes hitching.

I run on quite new hardware - 2Gig of RAM, a 7900GT video card and a dual-core Athlon CPU. I get 30fps outdoors with all the quality settings set to max, and about 10 in the most crowded city location I’ve ever seen. Being an MMO not a FPS, this game is quite playable at 10 frames per second, but not totally comfortable until about 20.

However, you do not need uber hardware to play Vanguard. Leaps and bounds have been made in the past few months in performance. I used to get worse framerates on really mediocre settings. The game used to be nearly unplayable on previous generation video cards (Eg 6800’s) but is now quite playable on these, if not at the highest settings.

A lot of critcism of Vanguard’s performance is now well out of date. The hitching problem used to be a lot worse than it is, and old hardware has gone from unplayable to comfortably playable. In the future I don’t expect average framerates to improve much, but I expect the hitching to vanish forever sometime in the next few months, and the clouds bug should too. Also, really powerful video cards (by Vanguard’s standards) are going to get much cheaper. Mine has gone from $500 australian to $400 since I started playing, and 8600’s will probably be out in a few months for $300. Play on your 6800 and upgrade to an 8600 in a few months.

2. Gameplay

I’ve read a lot of opinionated shit about Vanguard’s gameplay. Most negative posts about it contained no details - just useless generalisations, or criticised something based on opinion, not how much/little fun something is or how to improve it/what might be better. A lot of people have called for either more or less difficulty (and I believe you can obtain that for yourself in game just by choosing the content you take on), a tougher or less tough death penalty, more or less detailed maps etc. The fact is, a lot of Vanguard’s features are a compromise and a middle ground between a ‘hardcore’ game (like original Everquest 1 before Sony) and an easy ‘casual’ game (like World of Warcraft 1-60 solo or group play).

An example of this is the death penalty. You lose experience when you die - quite a lot of it. It’s about 10% of your level. Where you drop, a tombstone appears with all your gear on it. (you can ‘bind’ gear to your soul to prevent this, but this means you can’t sell that gear later). You respawn at the nearest altar (there’s at least one in every chunk) and have the option of summoning your corpse. If you summon, the experience stays lost but you get whatever you were carrying back right away. OR you can opt to do a “corpse rescue” and go find your tombstone. If you do that, you get half your experience back as well as all your stuff. If your tombstone is sitting at the feet of a small crowd of badass mobs, maybe you will want to summon. Or if you just can’t be fucking going and getting it, you have the option of summoning. If 10% experience would mean you lost a level, you go into debt instead of losing it. So death in Vanguard is a flexible and strategic element that makes you shitscared about dying without ruining your night and gives you options about how you want to deal with it. It’s all based on player feedback too - like the “never lose a level” thing, players insisted on that. But there are still people who bitch about the death penalty. Some say it’s too harsh, others say its not hardcore enough. I say it’s in between, and its the best and most detailed of any game in history.

Another example is races, classes, and differentiation. A lot of people complain that “all the races and classes play the same”. Well, just a few days ago, all races got unique and quite powerful abilities. These abilities mean that each race/class combo is now unique. Classes have become more and more individualised over time, while remaining true to their “archetype” for the purposes of balance. For example, as a Dreadknight I mitigate damage primarily by making the NPC trying to kill me nervous and afraid and thus less dangerous. If I were another “defensive fighter”, say a Warrior, I would achieve the same goal (take less damage) by different means and in a different way. It would take time for me to learn how to play a warrior, but I would be achieving the same goals. To me, that’s the right balance between making all these really individual classes, but still achieving balance between them so people don’t spend two years building up their warrior and eat Paladin dust the entire time.

Visual character customisation has copped some criticism too. We complained we couldn’t make our characters look older than 25. Now we can - mine now looks 30-40. People complained that you could make freakish weird looking characters - that has been fixed. You can still make a big fat dwarf but you can’t give him an inverted nose anymore. People complained that the character models were awkward and looked wrong, particularly the Female models. Now, the models today still aren’t the best of any MMO ever (consensus view) but they have improved a lot. Tits look more natural and grow more naturally when you use the customisation sliders, and girly asses are looking a LOT rounder and more toned, and more feminine. People even bitched that everyone had the same underwear on, and now you can even customise that, and change its freaking colour. People are _Still_ whining about character customisation, but IMO it’s now right up there with the best and certainly good enough that most people will love how their character looks, and very few people will look similar, let alone the same.

Then we have adventuring combat. I personally have slammed Sigil for the lack of tactics and strategy in Combat as of several months ago - and provided pages of advice on how to improve it. But by fuckery, it’s improved. A few nights ago I was soloing Wyverns two levels above me (but still ‘two dot’ or soloable mobs) with my level 16 Dreadknight and it took all my concentration, a good tactic, actual planning, excellent gear, and I only got efficient at it after refining my strategy for about an hour. I still got my ass handed to me every once in a while if I was unlucky, clumsy, unobservant or got an add. I’ve had feedback from higher level players that difficult group content is extremely detailed and has many varied challenges that require tactics and teamwork to excel at. You just can’t say that about other MMO’s. A lot of the criticism of Vanguard’s combat I’ve seen has come with people who aren’t taking on any difficult content (EG doing two-dot mobs with a full group, or only soloing mobs at or below your level) or who don’t cite any examples at all.

3. The World

People complained that mobs never attacked each other. Lions would walk right past antelope and ignore them. This no longer happens - some parts of the world look a bit like battlezones, with mobs killing each other left right and centre. Some parts of the world ARE battlezones, with opposing armies clashing and general pandemonium.

People complained that there are never any “out of place” badass mobs in any zones that appear and scare the crap out of the lowbies hanging around there, giving the world a bland and complacent feel to it. Two nights ago on my way from Khal to Aghram. Mobs range in level on this trip from about level 9-10 near Khal to about level 18 near Aghram. Crossing my path was a giant, five dot (challenging for a full group at the same level) level 45 ogre (or cyclops or something). This guy was named (had a unique looking name) and agressive. I was lucky that I saw him and could give him a wide berth, because he could’ve smashed me flat in one hit. This critcism is out of date.

A month ago people complained that it was too easy to get from A to B. Mobs were spaced so far apart you could easily weave between them and get by. You could also easily outrun anything to agrod on you. Sigil fixed this to the point where people complained you couldn’t breathe without stumbling over a crowd of angry bad guys. Population density has now been tuned several times in several “population passes” over the world. It now varies from easy-to-navigate loosely populated places (and even totally barren mountains where nothing grows hunts or grazes) to areas of dense population and even little clumps which are totally unpassable and need to be bypassed. I think it’s a nice balance now. It’s also difficult to escape from mobs if you need to, so travel is always challenging and entertaining.

Travel is too long and boring. Flat-out opinion. For the long-term good of the game, travel is something you as a player will need to deal with. When you go somewhere, it takes time, and it means something that you arrived in one piece. The world is a single, real-feeling place - not a bunch of “zones” connected by teleporters and portals. The travel mechanics in this game are second to none. The scenery you see on the way ranges from very good to absolutely breathtaking, and you never know what’s just over the next hill. At an early level (about level 10), you can obtain a Horse to speed things along. Its a very basic horse at first - quite cheap - and you can eventually replace it with a more expensive horse and/or customise it with better horseshoes, saddle and saddlebags. You can store stuff in your saddlebags (quite a lot actually) and for example improved horseshoes will make your horse faster. Player crafters can make the good horse gear so this is yet another area where the spheres come together. As you get higher level, more expensive mounts will become achievable and these run faster and its harder to knock you off them, so travel becomes a bit quicker and easier. Eventually special mounts will be available via quests - very fast land-based mounts and even, finally the mighty flying mounts - Griffins, perhaps even Wyverns and Drakes… maybe the greatest of the great will ride Dragons themselves. Having tested a Griffin during beta (I wont see one again until higher level ) I can say that this mechanic works wonderfully well. Flying over the places that I used to have to run or ride over was an amazingly liberating and exciting experience, and it hammered home to me how much Travel in Vanguard is another area of progression, another way you can build your character and reap the rewards. Travel also carries its own rewards - there are hidden or hard-to-find/reach places which groups who explore will have to themselves. Harvesters of ore, stone, wood or fibers (like cotton or flax) will all benefit from exploration because these resources will be depleted in crowded areas. For some people, travel will still just be a chore. These guys probably, quite honestly, are probably more into first person shooters or more basic games than Vanguard.

Everything looks the same. Quite frankly, anyone who says this obviously hasn’t seen much. The three continents each have their own style of terrain, architecture, individual species of grass, shrubs, trees, animals and NPC’s. I can tell from a glance at most screenshots where the shot was taken. I can tell from a glance at many places on Qalia (which I know about a quarter of fairly well) exactly where that shot was taken. Everything looks different, but is consistent with the climate and style of each continent.

The world is Dead. In one aspect, I agree with this one. Your character only percieves NPC’s and mobs within about a hundred meters of them. In the distance, most people just disappear. This makes the world seem less alive than it really is. After a while you get used to it, but I really hope they fix it at some point. It has to do with the loading bug detailed above - until they get background loading fixed and ‘hitching’ is gone, they really can’t fix this one by pushing out the sight range to a kilometer or more - or people’s computers will jam up way too often. In other aspects, I disagree or label this one “out of date”. NPC’s now interact with each other, even to the point of fighting to the death, and there is more NPC activity now than there was. The newer ‘newbie zones’ and quests tie you into the world and the story far more effectively than the older ones - this is based on player feedback and re-examination done by Sigil. There is every reason to expect it to improve further still.

4. The Interface

The Vanguard interface looks very much like the World of Warcraft interface. This is deliberate for two reasons.

1) So WOW players can make the switch very easily

2) WOW has an excellent interface, the best of any medieval MMO. Until Vanguard.

People complain about this and say it’s unoriginal. Who gives a fuck? It’s the best available now, and that’s because they took a working base (Which in turn was copied from Everquest) and improved on it. That’s modern software.

Maps. When I started playing the maps looked like satellite photos. They were generated from actual digital terrain maps and were incredibly accurate. They also showed your current location (like a handheld GPS device would) perfectly and the location of quest NPC’s and items you needed, as well as where your tombstones were if you had any etc. A lot of poeple, myself included, complained that this was hideously out-of-place in a medieval game. I accept that maps are needed, because some people just have no sense of direction at all, but they shouldn’t look like a combined GPS and CIA Spy Satellite linkup system. They should look like medieval hand-drawn maps with very little detail, just enough to help you navigate to where you need to be. That is exactly what Sigil have now implemented, and I believe it works perfectly. With the huge seamless world and unique-looking terrain, buildings and trees, you can easily learn your way around a place without an accurate map, so only the basic maps are needed.

Conclusion

This is the greatest game ever made to date. It achieves that title with a massive margin between it and its nearest competitor (WoW). It has everything good that any other medieval MMO has, none of the shit, and a lot of new and exciting stuff. It has a wonderful team of developers who listen to and respond to player feedback with expert care. It has been shaped by more than a year of such feedback, without losing its hard edges or originality. It has a clear purpose and direction for the future, with no shortage of excellent ideas to draw upon. Over a million posts to the official forums (almost 2 million if I recall) included literally tens of thousands of ideas and suggestions from players - a huge resource. It is certain to attract a large and feircely loyal playerbase if it gets half a chance.

But its chances are hurt by two things.

1) That ‘hitching’ problem is going to turn a lot of people off. People are going to start in a crowded newbie zone, see that the game is performing like a stoned corpse, and carry that impression with them until they get sick of it and quit. Even if 1% of the first wave of players do this (and it could be much higer than that) the flow-on effect to Vanguard’s reputation will damage numbers and therefore income and future development for years to come. In my opinion Sigil and Sony should have held the release until that problem was fixed. I really hope they’ve nailed it before release day but I’m quite sure that hope is in vain - they’ve been working on it the entire time I’ve been in beta. I personally have spent literally hours trying to diagnose the problem and give useful suggestions on how to resolve it. The hitcing problem also feeds directly into the “short range popping” problem where NPC’s and player characters pop into existence just a few tens of meters in front of you. If they did that even another hundred meters back it would look a lot better but make the hitching problem exponentially worse as more data would simply need to be loaded, more often. The minute they fix hitching properly with background loading they can push the load range to hundreds of meters.

2) The release comes two weeks after WoW’s first ever expansion was released with massive fanfare and a vast marketing campaign. Two weeks BEFORE would’ve been good. Even just two more weeks AFTER might’ve been good. But two weeks after is just long enough for every WoW player - no matter how bored shitless they might be with wow - to go out and buy it and get caught up in it. Now WoW players are all $50 US out-of-pocket (vanguard’s fucking exacty buy-price) and all caught up in WoW again. Indications are that players will be sick of this thing within 1-3 months, based on how soon the first guy hit level 70. But until then, a lot of people wont look at Vanguard for a while. The massive Blizzard marketing machine is also going to drown out (to some degree) whatever efforts Sony is putting into marketing Vanguard.

Both of these things come down to Sony refusing to fund Sigil for even another two fucken weeks. Four would’ve been better but two would’ve been nice. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the hitching problem is halved or even eliminated in the next two weeks regardless of release. Its infuriating because Sony fucked my last medieval MMO addiction too - Everquest 1. I hope this is the last time they’re allowed to affect Vanguard in any serious way.

Disturbance one

I have a new job. It’s very different to my old one. I will be leading a small team (which we are yet to hire so atm it’s a very small but dedicated team of one), so I read 5 or so books on management over my christmas break. The new place is a fraction of the size of my old place, but the IT department is comparibly sized (because all we do is IT - domain names to be exact) and there is comparitively more money flying around.

It’s amazing the difference that makes and how quickly you notice. It’s something like a 20 grand base payrise for one thing, although the lack of on-call penalty rates mitigates that a lot. I have two brand new 19″ LCD’s on my desk instead of a shit old 17″ Dell scrounged from some company my previous company bought out. The air conditioning works… instead of floor to ceiling shit old servers I have floor to ceiling brand new servers not even unpacked from their boxes yet… the list goes on. But I won’t…

And yet… I miss my old Primus friends, and even though I’ve been at the new place for a week, I miss operational work! I’ve got a grand total of one project, and we all know what that means… yes that’s right, when I get stuck on something, I’m stuck. Total. GRRR.

Today I hacked together several different crap little IBM firmware updating CD and floppy images to create a single CD that updates the firmware of a particular server automatically on boot. Useful since we have like a hundred of the fucking things to do, but it felt like… stupid work. GLHAGLHALGHLAHGLAHGLAHLGHALAH

Disturbance two

My new job is on the very southern edge of the city, bordering St Kilda. If I keep taxi-ing into work it’s going to cost me $20-$30 a day. Train would mean changing trains again (FUCK THAT WITH A HOT POKER SO FUCKING HARD ITS DNA MUTATES!) and Tram would mean sharing my personal space with…. people. So, there’s no logical option but to move to St Kilda!

This train of thought and subsequent decision taken by myself and the ICG (Incredibly Cute Girl) was of course undertaken the night I was told I was getting this job. The previous weekend we’d gone out and bought a benchtop dishwasher and a window/wall reverse cycle air conditioner to make THIS place properly livable. So… for the past dozen or so heatwaves while we try to get a place, we’ve had an air conditioner nick-named “irony” in its cardboard box on the living room floor. It’s conveniently placed for crying over while we slowly die of heat exhaustion.

Anyone whos ever moved to St Kilda can tell you “I’m sorry that property has been let” is the standard voicemail greeting of every local real estate agent. Real estate? Fucking vapourware estate agents! Every cunt and his dog wants to move to St Kilda!? Why? It used to be a reeking shithole decorated by the bloody vomit of heroin addicted street prostitutes and the randomly thrown faeces of whatever creatures feed on heroin addicted street prostitute vomit. It used to resemble the boys toilets for fucks sake!

I’ll tell you why. In Melbourne, Grunge is in. If your suburb resembles a festering corpse’s arsehole, odds are that in the next five years it will be crawling with yuppies (yeah shut the fuck up you hypocrisy smelling motherfuckers), sprouting juice bars and swanky cafes, while people who don’t even know who they’re trying to be anymore but nevertheless have dedicated 9 hair colours and 63 facial piercings to the cause prance around complaining about globalisation and the iraq ‘war’. These people do not actually enjoy living in filth, but they enjoy the filth ambience of your shit-hole suburb.

Those swanky cafes that go up will be made out of the rotting hulks of whatever sludge-factories line your main drag. They will charge $25 for eggs bacon and coffee, but they will still look like diseased street whores eat there. They’ll hire artists to draw the graffiti back on, rip the wallpaper just so, make you sit on cartons and crates, serve you through a hole in the wall and actively cultivate the grunge look so their completely fake customers are drawn right in. 190% puuuuuuure wank.

So… St Kilda. A few years ago, it was Out With The Skanks, and In With The Wanks. Now you can pay hundreds a week in rent, and I’m sure in a few weeks I’ll be blinking in the afternoon sun of sunday morning sipping a cappucino and belching contentedly while sitting on a box, in front of a crate with silverware and china on it, outside of a converted brothel that now sells a fried egg for more than a handjob used to cost.

The view is nice though.