9.14.07 - How Would You Rate Vanguard: Some Perspective

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Posted September 14th, 2007 by B. de la Durantaye

How Would You Rate Vanguard: Some Perspective

By Machail

September 14, 2007

I've been holding off on this review because I really wanted to include a decent review of Vanguard's raids. Unfortunately I couldn't speak much about it due to an agreement with SOE, stating that I would not reveal any information about the current raids until Sony was ready to go public. So I've been testing this raid content with my guild, and haven't been able to say anything about it to the community. Until now! SOE just gave us permission today to let out some of the goods, so now I can write my review in full force. Yay!

Graphics

I think Dalmarus and Ralsu are experiencing a bit of the "kid in a candy store" syndrome with their graphics ratings. I can't deny that Vanguard has some very nice landscapes and effects, but I can't give it more than three hammers personally. I don't run a beast of a machine, so I can't tweak up my settings too much. At best, I have to run on Balanced settings with Low texture resolution. The game simply looks "decent." There's not a lot of use of the color spectrum as most of the world is in browns, greys and greens, and with texture resolution set so low, there's not a lot of detail. Some may argue that it is not fair to rate the graphics with that setup, and there is some merit to that. But I ask you: "is it fair to expect the average user to upgrade their entire system in order to enjoy the graphics?" An age-old debate, but let's face it; the heavy requirements of the game released at the time Vanguard was released is not a way to get average gamers to oggle over the game. Most players won't even see the beautiful graphics for another year or two when PCIe and multi-core processors finally make their way into the homes of all gamers.

Sound

This is a tough call for me, but I think I'll have to concur with Ralsu and Dalmarus here. I've been playing Vanguard since beta 2.0 back in December of 2005, and I remember the first time walking into Leth Nurae and hearing the soprano vocals, and feeling shivers. I had to send Nino a tell at that point congratulating him on an amazing job. And it was. But it sort of died after that. The musical scores, though appropriate, are not memorable any more. I've spent a lot of time in all the major cities, and I don't think I could hum the tune of any of them if I were asked to.

Combat sound and character sound are just adequate. There's nothing there that makes or breaks the game for me - apart from maybe getting really annoyed listening to the gnome standing beside me at a crafting station.

One saving grace is that Vanguard does make good use of newer x-fi cards, and the 5.1 surround, for the most part, is spot on.

Game Play

Ralsu's view is pretty much on par with the Vanguard that I've been playing, while I have to wonder if Dalmarus isn't mistakenly writing a review of Hello Kitty Online.

The gameplay is pretty standard fare as far as MMOGs go. Click the icon. You win. Don't get me wrong, there are some fantastic aspects to Vanguard gameplay, but they just haven't been realized to their full potential yet. As it stands right now, any player can get from level one to level 50 by clicking no more than a handful of buttons. The real fun though, comes in when you make fun for yourself. The weaknesses system is a wonderful system where players can team up, and decide their best strategies to have their abilities compliment eachother. But is it used? Is it needed? Is it even introduced anywhere in the tutorial quest lines? Most players won't even realize it's there or, if they do stumble their way through and exploit a few weaknesses in combat, chances are they won't realize that they had. It reminds me a lot of the Heroic Opportunity system of EverQuest2, except when you pull it off, you don't realize anything just happened.

The dual-targetting system in Vanguard was simply a stroke of genius. It just makes good sense to have a defensive target AND an offensive target. I have a hard time playing any other MMOG now without dual-targetting.

Hats off to the diplomacy team. This aspect of Vanguard is both unique and fun. Until recently diplomacy didn't have too much practical use, apart from something to do to have a bit of fun. Now, however, with the recent introduction of the guild hall quests, and upcoming use in raid environments, diplomacy is finding its own niche in the game. Diplomacy will be used in Ancient Port Warehouse, Vanguard's first raid dungeon, assisting players in learning lore and strategies against the evils they will face in the dungeon. Steve "Aruspex" Williams also hinted at diplomacy encounters giving other fringe benefits later on. Perhaps an advantage against some of the bosses? Pretty cool stuff.

Crafting is a big grind fest, but it is rewarding. There's something unequally cool about making some of the best gear in game, and seeing folks running around the world wearing a piece of armor that you or a friend made. Reward really weighs in heavily for MMOGs in my opinion, so I have to give a thumbs up to the crafting sphere as well.

Stability

Why, oh why do we have to consider "crash time" when forming a group to go to a dungeon or run a quest? If a group of buds want to go kill the God King, we have to consider: "Ok, about one or two hours to fight down, plus another hour or three to account for crashes and wipes due to said crashes." Things were good before May 15th. Something very very bad happened during that patch, and CTD's are now as common as gold seller spam. All things considered though, on my old AGP, single core system, I only crash once every three or four hours, while my friends running on new high end systems are crashing much more often.

Raid Content

The good stuff! Raid content is a challenge. A very big challenge. The creatures in APW are unlike any you've seen anywhere else in game. The trash mobs have a lot of hit points and take a good raid team to take out. They'll throw a few tricks at you, like AEs when you least expect it. Every mob in this dungeon has a learning curve to it. Some steeper than others.

The strategies formed to defeat some of the boss mobs takes a bit of creative thinking. It took us many attempts to take down one in particular, who appears at the end of the first wing in APW. We were lucky that we were placed in such a position on test server that we could just reset and start again after every wipe, but this won't necessarily be the case on live servers. Guilds and raid groups will have to consider where they are fighting, and have a contigency plan in case of a wipe. And wipes will happen frequently until said group figures out the secrets of this boss. Once figured out though, the fight is fluid and relatively safe if your raiding group stays on their toes and works completely in unison.

Heavy Fighter classes are in for a treat as a lot of these encounters are best done with multiple tanks. Gear is now going to make a significant difference as to who lives and who dies.

Aggro management is not as easy as it is in other games either. Every single class will have to keep an eye on their damage, and other hate-generating abilities. And, if one of the tanks goes down, strategies will have to be re-formed on the fly, as getting a rezzed tank back to second on the hate list is a tricky task.

Healers are not stuck as heal-bots, though obviously they'll need to keep on their toes to keep everyone alive. But every healer has more abilities that come in very handy on many of these fights apart from just spamming their heals.

None of these encounters have been created that you need one specific class' abilities in order to succeed. This means that every single encounter has several valid strategies to ensure a win. What might work for one guild may not work for another.

All classes will enjoy thumbing through their abilities books, trying to find those seldom-used abilities that now suddenly have a very potent use in a raid setting.

The raid tool is wonderful too. You can select which groups in your raid you want displayed on your screen at all times. Raid leaders can do a /raidalert which will pop up a message on the screens of all the raiders. This sort of tool has many uses - it can be used by raiders with high intelligence to announce when aggro switches and to whom. It can be used to announce incoming spells, abilities, or other tricks that a scripted event might throw at you. Or it can simply be used to tell the entire raid to quiet down and pay attention.

And /readycheck? Thank you SOE! No more "Is anyone not ready?" A quick /readycheck will tell you who is ready, who is not, and who is AFK.

The spectrum of difficulty in APW is pretty extreme. Some guilds may get stuck on the entrance wing for some time. Others will progress. One thing that's guaranteed: Every guild will find challenges in the dungeon and many great rewards.

Fabled loot is being introduced with the dungeon. This is a new tier of loot available, and will be the envy of all. In some cases, some of this loot will be required in order to defeat certain encounters later on in the dungeon. Yes, folks, you've read it right - a solid form of progression that raiders can work to achieve.

Now, with all this great stuff, why only four hammers Mac? Well, I had to take off a hammer because many of the mechanics in the raids have not been used or introduced in group encounters. That is to say there are some things that you need to watch that we're all used to just ignoring. Some of the combat features that seemed to have little importance in game are now going to make the difference between a win and a loss. It's not a bad thing, but it is going to stump more than a few raiders for a while.

Also, the default UI as is makes some of the encounters very difficult. Most of my guild uses Drox' UI now, which, in my opinion, was a necessity to beat some of these encounters. That being said, nothing is impossible, as all information you need is available in the Default UI, it's just not as easily accessible at times.

PvP

I feel bad for the PvP community. The idea of infamy may have gone somewhere, but the implementation left it wanting. Sadly, the former Team PvP players were the ones that really got "pwned" with the server merges. This is not a mistake unique to Sony (or Sigil at the time). MMOGs quite commonly introduce PvP at launch in kind of a rushed state. I, like my colleagues, could not, and would not recommend the Vanguard PvP experience to friends.

Overall (not an average)

Vanguard has kept me playing for almost two years now. Yes, there are things that bother me about the game; most of which you've read in this review. But one thing that gets left out of most reviews, including my own, is the fact that Vanguard DOES deliver. Having been able to communicate with the team several times over the years, they have proved time and time again that they know the problems, and even if things don't get fixed over night, they do get fixed. The whole switch-over to Sony may have slowed down some of this progression temporarily, but now that the infrastructure is ironed out, you can literally see the team's wheels spinning and many issues being realized and resolved. The game steadily improves. And, with a game like Vanguard, that has had so much potential from day one, I'm confident that if Ten Ton Hammer were to write a second review in a few months, a lot of the low scores you see today would be much much higher.

The Bottom Line:
Graphics: 3/5
Sound: 3/5
Game Play: 4/5
Stability: 2/5
Raid Content: 4/5
PvP: 1/5