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The dying game...
shassell
Member UncommonPosts: 105
Nooo,
Seem's like SOE are finally giving up on Vanguard. After purchasing it and promising so much, as usual, a strong wiff of Smeds bullshi.. Game update 5 is nowhere in sight, with no communication as to when or even if it may come out. Dev team laid off, virtually no one left working on it, maybe with the exception of Silius, the useless pratt that can only cut content with a vague promise of replacing it years down the line.....maybe.
All such a shame, the game world was beautiful, good combat, great character customization ( till Silius got rid of it).
If Sony had fixed the bugs and broken quests, finished the content and polished it, they would have had a solid MMO. It didnt sell 200k boxes for nothing. But they let Silius run rampage to try and make a WOW clone on the cheap, get rid of the depth and anything u might need to think about..
Now they have just about given up on it., population is draining away despite what remains of the once loyal fanbase, Sad really.
Yes.. i'm sure the die hards will flame me and tell us its going strong and growing. Thats why its down to 4 servers and they are low pop.
Shame on you Sony... soon you will be irrelevant as an online entertainment provider. Your product is dated with little attempt at investment in improvement, the flagship EQ2 is well and truly showing its age..
Perhaps its time for Smed to move on.
Comments
Dunno, I thought the lanscape was cool...but the combat and animations sucked hard.
Seradon has better pop than most EQ2 servers, Xeth and Halgar both have enough for a thriving end game. Sartok has a very low population but being that PvP balance is kind of screwed and a lot of upcoming PvP genre launches that can be inspected. It remains one of the only true FFA servers in existence in any game however, so even with imbalance you could say we have some of the hardest core PvP you can find.
Vanguard is the furthest from a WoW clone that you can get, or will be able to get for the next 2 years at least. You can have your opinion, but I don't see how can comparatively say that this game is dumbed down compared to the market.
They changed facial customizations in order to prepare for a revamp of character models (which was the only area in which vanguard does not have the best graphics of any MMO on the market). The differences are hardly noticeable outside of character creation or a full zoom on your own or someone else's face. It still has more customizeablitiy than the majority of popular MMO's.
Sony has fixed thousands of bugs, broken quests, finished and polished group content. Has it got them all? No, has any no? There are games that may be slightly more stable out there, but Vanguard is no longer the bottom of the barrel in this aspect and as more demanding MMO's come out like AoC and WAR the standards for performance and stability will either be lowered where Vanguard will look like MS notepad, or those games will flop.
Vanguard is much more stable than it used to be, and its requirements are no longer near as steep. I play the game at highest settings possible on my desktop with 80+ FPS (widescreen), and on my laptop on balanced settings at ~40. This is during raiding btw, there is still some hitching in the code but this is being worked on as a top priority and is much improved.
Vanguard is strong, at least to me. I have two accounts, and log in every night and am active in end game. This game lives up to my expectations. I don't know if it is growing or not, I see new people but we lose people, it could definitley be growing more.
I am going to get flamed for this for sure (by sony haters), even though Vanguard is the first SOE game I have actually enjoyed playing I think that the company as a whole is in a position to clean up in the future of MMO's.
My prediction is the big wave of players that WoW brought into the market will exit the computer gaming sphere as more demanding games out. They will return to their consoles (which may have their own MMO's at that point), and what will be left was the same pc MMO crowd you had before (plus a few who chose to stay behind). You will see a return to innovation, and the classic aims of MMO's.
There is a reason there are more ex EQ1 players playing vanguard than probably any other game out there, those of us who have been around appreciate the quality that exists in vanguard, what it could be, and what it is currently. If SOE can keep vanguard up long enough to outlast the bubble that is WoW/AoC/WAR they will reap the benefits because I am not aware of any game in development to be released over the next 3-4 years that can compete for what i look for in an MMO (basically end game, immersion, and highly cooperative content).
http://xivpads.com/?1595680
http://guildwork.com/users/murugan
Imo VG loses its left leg on May 20th, and its right one in October
What about the middle leg?
What about the middle leg?
Brad took it with him when he left
Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
Lao-Tze
I tried to play Vanguard when it released, even tried to defend it....
IMO, the biggest mistake Vanguard had was no Story Arc's and no end game content.... There was no reason to play, and if you did overlook its lack of story and played to level 50 there was nothing to do.... This killed Vanguard more then anything...
Oh almost forgot, didnt help it required a beast of a system to play on when it first came out... This above everything else is why WOW is so popular, you can play it on a computer that is 4-5 years old unlike Vanguard where you needed a computer that didnt exist yet....
give it up...the rating for Vsoh went up to 8.0 on this website and after all the negative threads about ...."its a dieing game"..."its done"....and the best..."let it die"....well its still going, so please stop being lame andposting threads like this!!!
Vanguaed will be around like any other mmo. it seems to be more popular as time goes by so your just making yourseld look silly saying these things!
ENOUGH SAID!!
You can't judge a game by it's ratings here. I mean, Rappelz, Puzzle Pirates, Sword of the New World, Tabula Rasa, Myth War, Mabinogi, Flyff, and HELLGATE (Omg!) .. all are rated higher than Vanguard. Trying to use the MMORPG rating to justify how "awesome" a game is .. well .. is kind of naive.
Trying to say Vanguard is better, than a game that actually works is kinda.. well .. naive. I bet more people play those games, too.
I bet a new server'sworth (did I just make up a word?) of people will come to this game if/when they put out a relaunch/ free trial thing.
It isnt one of the two games I sub at the moment (WoW and EVE) but from what i hear the game is not the suckfest that it was when i bought it originally. I think once the re-launch happens some of those, what, 200 thousand VG DVD's will be installed again, for better or worse.
I do not honestly know if i will be one of them. I kind of hope I will be.... I got my new computer specifically for VG about a week before it launched and now I just have an overqualified WoW machine! (EVE trinity looks splendid on it though)
Will people be willing to try a sony product ***AGAIN*** even though it was the suck at first? will be a big question and in my heart I don't konw if i can honestly trust them.
only time will tell. But the potential is there. and hey, if only 5% of the orginal game purchasers come back, and that number's matched by a equal amount of new subs then that's a whole server righ tthere.
It's not going to have 200 servers like WoW but i could feasably see it having about as many subs as my beloved EVE if the cards fall the right way for it and (important) if the MMO consumer will be able to ever trust SOE again.
just my 2cp
Itch
RIP Ribbitribbitt you are missed, kid.
Currently Playing EVE, ESO
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.
Dwight D Eisenhower
My optimism wears heavy boots and is loud.
Henry Rollins
That questions already been answered really. Those 200k+ had a free trial all throughout the winter holidays.
As you can see, there's still only four servers with most people flocking to one, so I doubt very many cared to give the game another try, and a fraction of those that did, didn't find it worth playing.
How much attention the 20+ million MMO players out there in the world will pay attention to Vanguard remains to be seen. Usually though, while Vanguard has desperately poised its "free trial" as a relaunch of sorts, it doesn't do much to increase a game's subscriber rate. Even good ones.
Are you kidding ?
The game doesn't even have proper shadows and water reflections, etc... Nothing in the world apart from toons and trees has shadows, and even toons/trees shadows don't work properly (your shadow is not reflected on objects, i.ex you are near a wall or a stone and your shadow is not working, the same goes for tree shadows). Houses, hills, objects, everything... has no shadow in this game.
The game looks good a night, but at day time it looks soo wrong/bad. The sun is high but there are no shadows. It felt so bad to me when I played the game, and even today when I see some VG screenshots it looks so wrong/strange/bad/bland without shadows. It totaly breaks immersion for me.
And where is the anti-aliasing ? Beauty and immersion is broken by jaggy lines all over the screen. So ugly.
To be on par with other games the game graphics at least need shadows, water reflections, world particle effects and anti-aliasing.
A couple days ago I upgraded my graphic card to enable directx 10 in Lotro. And now woaaw. Everything was already so beautiful, that game already had good working shadows but now even every object gets a shadow from another object (i.ex: a house will get a shadow from itself, from another house, from a tree, from a bench, from everything). And I am not even talking about the beautiful water with reflections, directx 10 water effects, directx 10 smoke, and everything else... Even without directx 10 lotro looks better than VG's game engine that is (still?) lacking too many features (yet)
So, no VG certainly doesn't have the best graphics. I agree that if the game would actually be finished it would be at the top best of the good looking games. But as it is now, still less polished than even several of the free to play games, it is not.
I hope they once finish this game. I will definitely subscribe again when the game gets the above mentioned polish and immerse myself again in this huge open world.
They need to focus on performance / bugs and adding more "stuff" into the game. VG's strength is in its diversity of play were LotR is weak in that area as it is far more linear and its classes far more limited.
If they keep building on content this game will be fine.
Trying to say Vanguard is better, than a game that actually works is kinda.. well .. naive. I bet more people play those games, too.
Saying games you haven't played are better (and more populous) than Vanguard is well.. Naive.
Go play them before you make a comment like that.
And possibly Read up on a Few of those. Anybody thats been following games for the last year know HELLGATE was buggy, busted and broken at release. Tabula Rasa was a buggy buggy mess as well. Oh, and Sword of the New World just merged their servers, they are down to 3, guess that means they have a thriving population huh?
you know your games failed when runescapes raking in more dough
In the right hands, Vanguard could be turned around. Matrix Online could be turned around. SWG could be turned around. The problem is, SOE is not the right hands.
I'm done being pissed at SOE (long time ago); I just wish they would get their act together. But everything they do leads me to believe they are clueless, and I think SOE management is to blame.
SoE's problem is like that old saying "Jack of all trades, master of None." They are spread out over 5 or 6 so/so MMOs and cant seem to master(get right) any of them. If Eq2 or VG were all they had and they dedicated all their time and resources to it, then they could give blizzard or any of the newcomers a challenge.
Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
Lao-Tze
...How heroic, want a medal ?
Yeah its amazing, some people live in the past. No endgame, lots of bugs ... really, what they are talking about. We got a really good endgame now. And one can go very fast to the endgame, or one can instead enjoy the game.
There will be no relaunch. Those plans have been dropped. Long ago, in fact.A free trial IIRC comes with GU5, though.
OMG you're right, this game must suck. Imagine that ! No shadows and water reflections ! The horror ! I cant spent my time looking at the screen watching shadowns and water reflections ! Seriously, what else can you do in a MMO ???Just for the record, Vanguard has natural sight distances. THAT is a feature that matters to me, and that really gives me a feeling of realism.
Now Anti-Aliasing is a different problem, I would love to have that too.
... turned around where ? Keep your dirty hands from my game, thank you very much ! Its fun right now.
Vg has some good ideas and a good combat system, also the environment looks great in my opinnion but i think the biggest problem of it was that the devs went at it with a unrealistic aproach.
They wanted to recreate a eq type hardcore game with a lot freedom in it, while i think these games have a niche market there will never be enough players for that gametype to support a a game that costed that much in developement as vg did.
During beta they had a constant drop of population on their servers, while some fanboys were still praising brad and the devs on the forums and attacking anyone that said anything about some aspects of the game beeing no fun. finally short before microsoft droped the deal they did a big survey among beta players to see why they were not playing, and after taht point they started revamping most of the game. If they would have done the revamp earlier then i guess the game would not have been such a mess at launch (they just did not have enough money to pay for more developement, and so they had to release with what they got).
After SOE buyout it was clear that the devteam will just be as big as the revenue from subscriptions can afford. The big problem with that is that chances are nearly zero to get more subscribers with such an aproach, which means vg will stay a niche game as long as it will exist.
Vanguard biggest problem is the mis-management of SOE. I hate to say it, all VG will ever be is one of SOE's station pass games like The Matrix, SWG and Planetside. Since SOE got it's hands on VG there has been a mass cull of the dev team and no investment. I take my hat of to VG's tiny (band of few) dev team for sorting out the bugs and increasing performance and I do not blame them for all of the band-aid fixes that get's implemented with every update. It's a shame, VG had the potential to be a great game. At the moment it's a good game but I am worried about it's future and the direction SOE are taking it. I'm hoping SOE pull there heads out of the sand and realize that VG can be a winner and invest some major resources in VG (I know I'm living in a dream world with that last comment
).
OMG you're right, this game must suck. Imagine that ! No shadows and water reflections ! The horror ! I cant spent my time looking at the screen watching shadowns and water reflections ! Seriously, what else can you do in a MMO ???Just for the record, Vanguard has natural sight distances. THAT is a feature that matters to me, and that really gives me a feeling of realism.
Now Anti-Aliasing is a different problem, I would love to have that too.
Who said the game "must suck"? Why do you now need to act like a troll, putting words in my mouth I didn't use? I was just commenting on someone saying VG had the best graphics in mmos. Nothing more, nothing less.
In an MMORPG (<- do you see the words "RPG" here ?) I am first looking for a beautiful world to discover and immerse myself into. Then, I am looking for game play. Of course both are needed.
If I were only looking for gameplay, there are enough f2p mmos that provide some excellent gameplay for free. No need to pay for this. What is supposed to set VG apart from free games is its huge polished open virtual world with activities that makes you feel like your toon lives there, that's why we pay. But... where is the polish after now more than 1 year?
If you want to stretch it, Tetris also has some great gameplay and it doesn't have shadows either. Oh... but Tetris isn't a huge open imersive virtual world, is it?
VG without shadows and antialiasing looks like an unfinished game. The aliasing makes it look clunky and the lack of proper shadows makes it look bland, lacking atmosphere (->immersion). I hope they fix this.
Also, GU5 is on test already for a preview... Racial mounts, hitching fix, faction is back etc. LOL, GU5 no where in sight? LOL, come on.
I swear, this game could go to 100 servers, have 10 million people playing it and someone who doesn't play the game would still come along and make a 'Vanguard is Dead' post.
Moreover, despite your assertion that GU5 is nowhere in site even though it's front page news on VGplayers and is also on test....
GU6 looks pretty darn good too... Maybe June/July.
High Probability
Point here is, a dying game just doesn't get the type of attention and investment that Vanguard is receiving.
keep hope alive boojiboy! i wish my glasses were as rose colored as yours.
Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
Lao-Tze
Just for the record, Vanguard has natural sight distances. THAT is a feature that matters to me, and that really gives me a feeling of realism.
Now Anti-Aliasing is a different problem, I would love to have that too.
Who said the game "must suck"? Why do you now need to act like a troll, putting words in my mouth I didn't use? I was just commenting on someone saying VG had the best graphics in mmos. Nothing more, nothing less.
In an MMORPG (<- do you see the words "RPG" here ?) I am first looking for a beautiful world to discover and immerse myself into. Then, I am looking for game play. Of course both are needed.
If I were only looking for gameplay, there are enough f2p mmos that provide some excellent gameplay for free. No need to pay for this. What is supposed to set VG apart from free games is its huge polished open virtual world with activities that makes you feel like your toon lives there, that's why we pay. But... where is the polish after now more than 1 year?
If you want to stretch it, Tetris also has some great gameplay and it doesn't have shadows either. Oh... but Tetris isn't a huge open imersive virtual world, is it?
VG without shadows and antialiasing looks like an unfinished game. The aliasing makes it look clunky and the lack of proper shadows makes it look bland, lacking atmosphere (->immersion). I hope they fix this.
I can run vanguard every setting maxed at 1920x1200 and even force 8xQ antialiasing. But i have to force 8x because any lower dosent seem to make a differance but shadows are something i turn off in any game no matter how well my computer runs it for me having a black mirror image of my character running on the ground beside me totally breaks any immersion i feel its alway so unrealistic in any game Its an eyesore for me dont know how anyone can play a game with that following there character every where they go
Now shadows on everything like you want well it looks good and all but am afraid you and me or anyone else for that matter wouldnt be able to run vanguard with shadows like that. Shadows are probally the biggest performance hit of any feature in a game. Guess alls am saying is why put shadows on everything when no one would have the computer to run the game with them on