Things you'd improve about Vanguard

Adamantine · May 2022

If we had the Vanguard sources and resources, and could improve them, and you'd be asked to improve one aspect of the game, what would be your answer ?

cheyane · May 2022

I really loved the crafting aspect of the game but it gave me so much pain in my wrist I had to quit before I did permanent damage to them. The problem was those events that you had to correct by moving your mouse very slightly to another icon. They should allowed that icon to be controlled by a key. By making that movement so slight it really hurt my hands and wrist. Since it was continuous and it occurred so many times on one craft it was brutal. That was the only reason I quit Vanguard.

The next thing is that they should have Diplomacy really have a very important effect in the game instead of just a side activity.

The engine was gadawful even during beta it was terrible and SOE did their best but the game never ran smoothly. It was a money pit trying to fix up the game.

Adamantine · May 2022

Hehe as far as I'm concerned they really could have introduced autoleveling for crafting.

It was an endless grind and I still dont get the point of it.

Sure its better than in other games where you have to actually craft stuff thats worthless from actual resources. But the endless grind was no fun.

Not to mention after seven years I had six maxlevel crafters ... and then the game shut down. Great.

Slapshot1188 · May 2022

That it would have finished development before release.

Adamantine · June 2022

That means primarily you would have made actual written contracts with Microsoft, instead of informal ones which got broken the minute Microsoft changed the leadership of their games department. That was why Vanguard was released prematurely, Microsoft stopped funding them out of the blue and SOE, which they went to for help, forced them to release immediately.

Another thing that should have been different is that the hardware demands shouldnt have been so high. Many people bought the game and only played it for minutes, indicating they simply didnt have the necessary hardware.

Also McQuaid himself led the company which was a bad idea because while he was a good game designer, he wasnt a great CEO at all. He fixed that with Visionary Realms / Pantheon, but of course he's now gone either way.

I think there was another crucial problem but I've forgotten which it was. Anyway that was 3 of the 4 issues McQuaid once blogged about after Vanguard was shut down. His blog however is long gone and I didnt made a local copy either.

Theocritus · June 2022

My only real complaint about Vanguard was it ran horribly on my PC......It was laggy and had stuttering issues...and that was with very few players online.....I couldn't imagine trying to do a raid in it.

Kyleran · June 2022

Theocritus said:

My only real complaint about Vanguard was it ran horribly on my PC......It was laggy and had stuttering issues...and that was with very few players online.....I couldn't imagine trying to do a raid in it.

Your experience was typical for many players, I was always falling through the world or something crashed, and the zone lines....ugh is being polite.

As mentioned by @Adamantine, Brad did once say they misjudged the level of PC hardware gamers would have which contributed to the issue.

In the first Gen it wasn't uncommon for players to buy or upgrade to the latest CPU/GPUs, I recall having to purchase one of the 8 or so Mythic approved video cards to get DAOC to run, my Hercules (remember them) wasn't cutting it. (Worked for L1, but not EQ1.)

Players started to weary of the cycle pretty quickly, especially as more casual players or their parents joined in.

I recall providing guidance to several of my son's friend's parents on what they had to do to upgrade to play and most weren't pleased at the news.

Blizzard recognized this groundswell first, probably due to customer feedback from their many Warcraft titles in the years leading up to WOWs launch so they set the system requirements amazingly low.

I recall being pleased to find out while on a vacation in Colorado with my family that my super generic work laptop could run the game (on subpar internet) so along with my gaming laptop my son and I were able to play together.

Brad's team totally missed the boat and by time they recovered and got it running on most rigs no one cared any longer.

Nanfoodle · June 2022

For me, keep the classes and the model of game play and just modernize it. It would not take much to launch a game that would capture a market of customer looking for that type of game. Many older games want a home like this and retro style games are huge. I cant count how many retro style new games there are and the younger generation is loving them. It just will take one company to have the money, team and guts to make a modern retro MMO.

olepi · June 2022

One of my favorite games of all time. As usual, I waited for a year or two after release to try it. By then, with a high end rig and SSD, it ran with no problems.

I loved the crafting, and all the multiple races/classes. Also especially loved the pet classes. The dungeons were the best.

I'd be glad to play an updated version that just modernized the game and kept it the same. If I was going to try to improve one thing, it would be to tie Diplomacy more into the game.

Nanfoodle · June 2022

Theocritus said:

My only real complaint about Vanguard was it ran horribly on my PC......It was laggy and had stuttering issues...and that was with very few players online.....I couldn't imagine trying to do a raid in it.

I had a really high end PC at the time and it ran like a dream for me. I do remember many upset with the performance. I cant pick at the game, it was ahead of its time in many ways. I really loved the Bard in this game. Music was done in such a unique way. A remake would still be on par with many modern MMOs in many ways but in others, it would need an update.

Sovrath · June 2022

Besides less buggy and better performance I would say more hidden areas/secret areas/discoverable areas to find.

I've mentioned on other posts that I had inadvertently found a secret door in a tower. After playing Vanguard I discovered that this was actually part of a quest that did indeed lead you to it.

My initial discover was awesome. Had I come upon the quest it would have been less so.

Another discovery I made was entering into a mine where the workers had broken through a wall to discover a lost Elven temple/bathhouse sort of thing. What an awesome surprise.

As I've gotten older the sense of surprise coming from exploration has shaped my game type/how I play.

So yeah, more of that.

edit: oh, and better looking gear.

Adamantine · June 2022

Some of the things I would have changed about Vanguard:

- I really dont like how they handled attribute points. IMHO it would be far better to pick the attribute points only once at creation. Sure, allow redistributing later if you feel you misskilled. And maybe give some additional points to spend every couple levels. But needing to distribute 14 points ever levelup, what was the point of that ?

- Fix the racials. For example the darkelven one didnt do anything at all in the end anymore; that sucked because many other racials worked fine. In fact I would have liked to make this aspect of the game much more interesting. Like you could choose a total of three abilities from a longer list of options. For example you could pick one such ability at level 10, 25 and 40 from a list of seven options.

- In general I would have welcomed more race differences.

- Instead of having to kill mobs to gain faction and thus access, I would have prefered questlines to enter certain cities if you're KoS.

- All abilities would have a name, but not a number. So you get your ability at some level and you may have to upgrade it, but you dont have to edit all your macros just to get the latest version. Likewise if you buff a lower level, it would always work because it automatically picked the appropiate version. And if you mentor, again all your macros work except if you didnt even have the lowest tier of that ability.

- Make abilities that have the same functionality have the same name across classes. Like resurrection for healer classes. Oh, and for that matter make the level 10 resurrection just slow to cast, not disallow it during combat.

- More subraces. Drop barbarians; we had four human subraces already, that really was enough. Instead multiple dwarven subraces. Also ogre as a player race.

- Make orcs look ugly, sure, but manly. Instead they looked like pigs.

- Make animal inspired races have sentient sized brains, like in TES. It looked really ugly the way they did it.

- Give me an /attack command that actually attacked, instead of toggling the attack.

- Give me a /try command to explicitly suppress messages from abilities that fail to execute. That was really annoying that some buttons would spam you for that.

- More. Friggin. Space. For macros. That was really annoying, there was a steep limit on the text size. For example I couldnt make a macro to equip a new set of gear, because that would have required a far too big text.

- Ability to assign an ability to a macro. It would show the cooldown of that ability, so it looked exactly like regular buttons and you had feedback when the button was useable again.

- More freedom in picking gear. For example everybody could wear a wizard robe if they wanted to.

- Automatically put those weaknesses you yourself could exploit at the top of the list of weaknesses, so you wouldnt have to search for them. Maybe even mark them, too. If a weakness is applied multiple times, add a counter.

- Make Paladin, Dread Knight and Warrior a lot more different from each other to play. I would make Paladin have the least hitpoints but let them have lots of immunities and resistances, Dread Knight would have the highest evasion and get stealth, and Warrior would have a buttload of hitpoints but not that good defenses, then again their defenses would get better the lower the hitpoints get (at least while they're in defensive stance). Stuff like that.

itchmon · June 2022

1. The performance (I remember spilling 2000 bucks on a new machine specifically for VG and being REALLY bummed when I still only got like 20 FPS and fell thru the floor a lot)

2. Reduce the tedium for crafting but keep the general system

3. The voice acting

Adamantine · June 2022

I should probably add that my last posting was a brainstorm.

For example reworking the attributes for real would be too much work for too little effect so I wouldnt prioritize that at all.

And I would like to add that all games can of course be improved. Vanguard is my favorite game so far, even if I dont agree with every decision about it.

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Things you'd improve about Vanguard

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Things you'd improve about Vanguard

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Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV