I am Joe Blog’s Left Ventricle

Here be the link to the vanguard free trial.

What’s the trial? It’s a little island (the playable area a mere 2km x 2km - tiny for Vanguard) the developers have put together to show off the awesomeness of VG in 10 levels of gameplay. You can get to level 10 in all three spheres on the island, and with a free trial account you get 14 days to do so.

Wyvern - a flying mount within Vanguard

I beta tested the island on the test server last month and it is by far and away the best couple of hours entertainment you can get for free on planet earth. Vanguard is a hell of a game and the developers have pulled out all stops to show it off in the demo. I heartily recommend checking it out to anyone - whether you’re an mmo veteran or you don’t know what ‘mmo’ stands for.

My level 10 test character at the end of the trial

The stuff I love about Vanguard:

• You can go anywhere you want and do anything you want. There are very few limits and you can step right off the beaten path anytime you like and go exploring.
• The rewards for stepping off the beaten path can be great. Going where others don’t can be a big advantage.
• Adventuring is excellent. The combat system is complex enough to be fun for the first 46 levels so far with one character class.
• There are *15* different character classes, and all of them are unique. All of them are great. All of them can get groups, all of them can solo (some have more trouble than others). There isn’t perfect balance, there never will be, but nobody’s really left out in the cold.
• There are 19 different races. Some are really unique to the game, but all the tried and true fantasy races are well represented.
• There are two continents and one archipelago. Each of these three areas are completely distinct in their plant and animal life. You can tell at a glance where any screenshot was taken because their character is so unique.
• Qalia, the hot, dry southern contintent is my favourite. Deserts and an ‘Arabian Nights’ feel just keep me coming back. The lack of heavy woodland on most of it (there are some surprises ;)) means you can climb up on a hill and see for literally miles.

An Oasis in southern Qalia

• Thestra, the “medieval europe” themed continent has what you’d expect - pine and broadleaf forests, swamps and plains, mountains and rivers.
• Kojan, the Asian themed archipelago is a large cluster of islands and has its own unique stuff. I’m not sure what, in two years of playing I’ve hardly gone there. Which just underlines how big the game is really.

• The game is FUCKING HUGE. You can literally play several characters from level 1-50 and level up in different areas each time and STILL not have seen every dungeon or area in the game. Every time I turn around there’s something new I haven’t even HEARD of.

Everything you see, you can get to. That big city on the hill is full of evil Djinn and stuff. You can see the oasis from the photo above in front of it. One giant, consistent world.

• Crafting is the best I’ve seen in any game, period. It’s an entire “sphere” of play on its own. I’m a level 45 blacksmith and I chose to specialise in armour. This makes sense because I can make my Dreadknight excellent gear. If I work at it. I could have become a weaponsmith, or I could’ve worked with stone, wood, gems, or cloth and leather. Lots of depth there, many of the items for sale in the game were made by players.

Crafting... think rather than bash your way through problems

• There is this whole other sphere called Diplomacy which I don’t have time to get into. If you like card games, it’s for you.

Riding across the dunes at sunset

• It’s jaw-droppingly beautiful.
• Character customisation is pretty detailed. I was once crafting next to two other males of the same race, and we’d all chosen the same hairstyle. I was even looking from behind, and despite similar clothing as we were all similarly levelled blacksmiths, I could tell the three of us apart at the glance. One was more lightly built and another had darker skin. Everyone looks unique, and I recognise my friends in the game at a glance usually. There’s sliders for everything from the size of your butt to the slant and width of your nose…
• The music is awesome. There’s about 24 hours of original music in the game. Each area has its own unique themes and battle music for when the going gets rough. Some of the orchestral themes for the big cities will blow your socks off when you first hear them. And the second time, and the third, and so on.
• The dungeons. There are dozens of them, and many are huge. I’ve only really just begun scratching the surface here but so far, it absolutely owns.

Check out the vanguard free trial. You’re absolutely mad if you do not.

Vanguard is very pleasing on the eye, fun and relaxing to play, almost always rewarding, everybody’s nice… but it’s not overly intellectually stimulating. The most complicated strategy I’ve yet formed goes a little like “as a platemail wearing character, I’m going to go through something like five or six suits of armour before I hit level 50, at which point I’ll probably STILL be looking to upgrade my armour. So I’ll become an armoursmith!” Duh.

Eve is a strategic masterpiece where you can form a 12-month strategy and reap the rewards. Every decision involves maths, tactics, risk and rationalism. I built a small empire of three starbases moon-mining precious minerals to achieve my goals. But it’s cruel, it’s stressful, and it’s full of assholes. You can lose months of what you’ve been playing towards with one silly mistake. Those three starbases? One of them has been destroyed and the moon taken over by pirates already. Meanwhile, with its completely realistic market, Eve is punishing me doubly for my efforts - the price of Technetium is falling. I guess like every other starbase owner out there, I rushed to find moons with these rarer minerals when their prices skyrocketed earlier in the year - and now supply has caught up with demand and the price has gone into freefall. It will probably hit rock bottom and stay there - the motivation to tear down your starbases and abandon your moons just isn’t there. A risky enterprise, hours of fucking around, for no gain whatsoever - except you can finally stop refuelling the damned things.

In Eve, I’ve finally got myself a Carrier. Now I’m a strategic force, ready to enter Zero space with my alliance and help them push our enemies out. The carrier took half a billion isk to build and over a billion in training costs to fly it. That represents months and months of play just to get that much money up, even if the training didn’t take that long in the first place - and it does. I haven’t named the fucking thing yet, it’s still in kit form in a hangar waiting for me to get the pilot over to it - through vicious space infested with our enemies. The least stressful way of doing so is to ship a clone out there and commit suicide. I am seriously considering doing exactly that.

In Vanguard, I just bought myself a pretty little sloop. Her hull is forest green, so I named her the Spirit of the Woods. If I walk near a river or beach and right click the title deeds to the ship in my inventory, the ship appears. If I hit U, I appear on her decks, and if I hit U again standing behind the wheel I can control the ship with the arrow keys. The captain’s training program consisted of typing “how the fuck do I control my ship? :)” into guild chat.

Meanwhile, I currently have two jobs at work. I’ve been promoted, but there’s really nobody to take over my old role. So I’m trying to be a manager (succeeding, for the most part… I think) while still halfassed being a Systems Administrator at the same time. My replacement’s hired but wont start until Nov 12 - at the earliest - he now wants to start as late as Nov 29. Up to seven weeks of shit are ahead therefore - the combined stress load of learning a _completely_ new job on the fly and still trying to do my old one without anywhere near enough time to do it. Last week was the most stressful I remember - I’m pretty sure I’ve got symptoms of high blood pressure.

So what game do I find myself more drawn to? Vanguard… by the time I get home from work these days, if I feel up to looking at a screen at all, I tend to shy away from the high stress option.

Still… there’s a hangar out there with a million tons of metal in it waiting for me…