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[Column] Vanguard: Saga of Heroes: Seven Years in Telon: An Analysis of Vanguard
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
I’ve always had a soft spot for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, which closed its doors last week. Sony Online Entertainment’s traditional high fantasy MMORPG represented to me an online world that had a tremendous amount of potential, but without the modernization and implementation required to compete in today’s saturated market. The game happened to be the subject of my first review on our site, and although it was by no means my first MMO experience, Vanguard helped me to conceptualize the various aspects of online games that resonate with me, along with an understanding of how poor execution can greatly overshadow potentially interesting design choices.
Read more of Som Pourfarzaneh's Vanguard: Seven Years in Telon - An Analysis of Vanguard.
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Spot-on analysis, nodded on every paragraph whilst reading. I was in a similar position like yours, with main interest in altoholism, pve, Diplomacy, and the exploration. True, it was a bugfest, and even at the end there were some bugs left, but it was a nice game overall.
"where do we go from here? ... If you have an answer to this question, by all means, let us know." none of those games you've mentioned. As I wrote in a post many months ago, SOE should release Vanguard: Dimplomacy
Now that TCGs are on the rise, it would be great. Walking around the world, and Diplomacy-ing our brains out...
"There are at least two kinds of games.
One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning,
an infinite game for the purpose of continuing play."
Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse
Potential aside, it's time to come to terms with how terrible Vanguard was. If Sony didn't throw money at it for some inexplicable reason it would have either never launched or died in less then a year.
Even years later you couldn't walk 5 feet without being riddled with glitches and bugs. The animations were ridiculously exaggerated, what little equipment graphics they had looked terrible, basically no spell graphics at all, entire world looked dull despite insane system reqs, half the world empty of content, "map" zoom glitches, every 4th quest was broken in some way, horrible memory leaks and server side lag, UI bugs and crashes, commonly falling through the world. We're talking problems 7 years post launch people. You don't even want to know about the issues at release.
no spell graphics at all? i don't think you and i were playing the same game.
"There are at least two kinds of games.
One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning,
an infinite game for the purpose of continuing play."
Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse
It was epic game. This Khal city music still in my memory, impossible to forget epic times..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn1GQULXxIY&index=14&list=PLD585E063A8259C16
The spell graphics were great because they weren't over exaggerated light shows.
I would go so far as to say that for my tastes they were the best around.
I loved Vanguard and subbed up until the point they announced the cancellation. It was the only game to ever come close to what I thought an mmo was (prior to me ever playing an mmo) and should be (after I realized that mmo's weren't what I was told they were).
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
if you liked it, try FFXIV, it is quite similar, in some aspects maybe even a little bit better (and in some worse, ofc
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www.90and9.net
www.prophecymma.com
Have you ever crafted in any MMO? SWG maybe? UO? Eve? I could go on, but Vanguard's crafting was at best mediocre since SOE never investing any time in the game.
The game was mediocre, yes it had possibilities, but we all know that once SOE bought it, it was effectively history. They had no intention of ever fixing or improving it beyond fixing the most obvious bugs.
I think you need a history lesson. SoE spent about 18 months working on VG, doing a LOT more than just squashing obvious bugs.
If they had no intention of fixing it why did they invest so much money and time into it?
Man those Diplomacy quests had so any great twists and turns, the writing was superb, on par with a full fledged fantasy novel, and the ending to the Dark Elf quest line where your life literally hangs in the balance of the diplomacy mini game was just incredible!
The music in the High/Wood elf starting area was so beautiful
I went back to this game many times.
This games problems already started when they choose the wrong game engine. Unreal Engine 2.x at the time was a pure FPS game engine, totally not developed nor optimized for MMORPG's at the time. EPIC Games even discouraged Developers using it for this kind of Development. And yet Brad went with it anyway.
Bad decision after bad decision doomed this game from the start.
We have been Lucky that SOE jumped in, after Microsoft bailed out (they already saw a sinking ship from afar and were right to jump out)... or this game would never been released.
Vanguard is the only game that i have playd that was truly Epic.
Adveture, Hidden secrets, Hard quest for Epic loot that took weeks to finish. But when you
did finish them you now you was one of the few to have that item or mont. That is Epic to me.
iam pretty sure ther still plenty of seret never discoverd in vanguard.
I dont want Vanguard 2. I want vanguard whit new engen and new code
I Think if they released it agen whit todays grafic and no bugs it cude be a smach hit.
I can only hopp sombady remake vangard as a kickstarter Project or somting and perhaps
rename the game to vanguard resurrection or somting..They get my money fore sure.
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While I am grateful that SOE saved the game by fixing it up a bit when they did, I so wish they had a bit of a vision and invested in developing the game further rather than just keeping it on life support. If you compare how much was done to EQ2 in the same amount of time, the difference is quite stark. Vanguard could have had another 10 years of life if it was supported properly.
P.S. In addition to what was already said, one thing that endeared me to Vanguard is that it did not have cartoony art design like most of other MMOs. RPGs are about escapism and immersion. That just does not work for me if my character looks like a cartoon.
And you think they didn't try? Let's be realistic here. They did.
The first year, when SOE took over the entire game and some of the staff, when Brad's studio went Down under.... SOE put a Whole team of experienced SOE Developers on the game.
These Developers did an amazing job with patching the game up and made it actual playable! They fixed the constant freezing when moving from one chunk to the other. Tons of glitches and bugs were squashed!
They added tons of content to fill up all those unfinished empty zones and dungeons. They revamped the character models.
And all that work was rewarded with an ever declining playerbase!
That was the sad reality! The reality today is, that you only get one single chance in today's oversaturated MMO market. And that's at launch day!
So yes. We should be thankful, but also realistic, that SOE kept the game running as long as it did. They could have shut it down years ago already.
Totally agree. I hate healing but Vanguard was the only mmo that made me want to play a healer due to the awesome classes.
The Brave Do Not Fear The Grave