Vanguard, a review

Quite an achievement for a game to be one of the most expensive ever produced and an underdog at the same time. That’s how things work out in the everchanging and hardly persistent MMO industry.

Here comes Vanguard, the gigantic second child of the man who brought you EverQuest and thanks to that wrote “MMORPG” in the pop culture dictionary back in the late 90s. Claiming to be the second most expensive persistent world ever produced (though leagues away from THE most expensive one) and with a developing team boasting since forever about its next-generation features and engine, this beast fell short on more than one account, to the point of getting the dubious merit of being one of the most negative-hyped game ever. How’s that?

The old sage always told me not to write about an MMO until you played its release build for at least a month, as this kind of games are tricky and often hide diamonds under the rough (or shit under the chocolate coating). Whatever it is, there’s a lot that can already be said about Vanguard, but be prepared, cause you are in for lots of contradictions.

The first thing you’ll see upon entering the world of Vanguard will be the character creation screen. And you’ll probably have a scoff. Maaan, it’s ugly! The characters are ugly, the buttons are ugly, the backdrop is ugly, oh even the fonts are ugly (The music is fine but you’ll probably won’t notice it in this mess). A jagged washed out EverQuest-like character stands in the middle of the screen. Buttons on both sides allow you to choose a race among the 19 available and a class out of 15, but while classes have nice icons and some useful information listed, the small race portraits are as ugly as the models and close to no lore infos are offered at all. Next is customization, with lots of sliders to play with, increasing and decreasing details from feet size (?!) to boob stiffness. Sounds interesting? It is so not. The whole thing is plagued with poor implementation, lack of any kind of polish and a layer of “Are you kidding me?” on top of it. It’s not that features aren’t there, but Sigil should understand that this is the very first contact players (customers) are having with their 5 years of Next-Gen development MMORPG. And instead of any kind of splash screen, intro movie or just a perfectly polished lore-full character creation process, you are presented with this awful looking late 90s interface asking for you to get excited about some malfunctioning sliders and shell out a monthly fee to play. Ugh!

Then, you are finally in. What’s the second thing you’ll notice? Performance.

This has been discussed a lot, and there’s no way to settle the argument. Is the engine an untamable beast or just a heavy but scalable one that works well on pretty but not necessarily top of the line machines? It’s no mistery that you’ll need horsepower to handle it and to actually enjoy the experience without being forced to turn off all the eyecandy (or to stubbornly choose to go the “5 frames per second” way), but this is by no means a mess like the EQ2 one was at launch, whereas a popup used to come up everytime you tried to switch to high quality visuals saying “Be warned that the computer needed to run at this settings still have to be invented”. Still, it’s demanding. It’s scalable too, but unless you are fine with 20^th century graphics, you’ll need the vitamins under your hood. Is it worth it?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I have to admit that I like it for the most part. But it’s a mixed bag to say the least. The most stunning feature, and actually the only thing close to Next-Gen in Vanguard is the uncanny draw distance. You can climb a mountain, look to the horizon and you’ll be able to see buildings, trees and point of interest for miles, and there’s no screenshot that can give it justice, you have to see it in motion. It’s beautiful, seriously. Still, the clouds, the sky, grass and lights are all beautifully rendered. The day/night cycle is wonderful and you’ll have to lit torches at night to find your way around and the dynamic shadows cast by lanterns and other light source are truly evocative. Unfortunately, other than that, and no matter how much on the left you set the render quality slider, this is definitely a sub-standard MMORPG on the graphical department. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that it’s ugly, but some poorly implemented details kill the immersion, as textures are for the most part dull or good looking only from a distance, objects seem artificially placed without any kind of smooth blending with the environment, and the mobs and the player models are, all in all, pretty awful. Or better, not so ugly, but stinkin’ old! Too often you’ll have the feeling that you are not playing a bad looking MMO from 2007, just a very nice looking one from 2004. Got that?

And this “old school” feeling that permeates the visuals is the core of the Vanguard experience. More than once, given that you played this kind of games for a while, you’ll notice the incredible resemblance between Vanguard and the original EverQuest. That had to be expected since Brad McQuaid is behind both projects and he purposedly created Vanguard trying to recapture the feeling of his firstborn, but still you’ll often have the distinct impression that he’s gone too far. From the questionable graphics to the lifeless stuck-on-the-ground NPCs everything resembles EverQuest much more than it should be for the self proclaimed first Next-Gen MMOs. The utter lack of polish, trademark of the pre-WoW era, strikes back with furious anger, and while the UI is functional and moddable, in its default form reeks of EverQuest expansion more than anything else.

But sooner or later you are supposed to start play, move your bad looking avatar around, start messing up with MOBs and eventually gaining some levels. Everything is where you expect it to be. Autoattack, check. Hotbars, check. Special attacks, check. Wandering mobs, quests, dungeons, levels, xp, drops, everything is there. Seriously, what did you expect? It’s a diku, it’s the spawn of EverQuest. These games haven’t changed much in the last 9 years and Vanguard pays homage to its digital parent. But as blasphemous as it may sounds to younglings, World of Warcraft and Vanguard have different mothers but share the same father, so surprisingly enough, the game plays stunningly similar to WoW too! Maybe it’s the UI, that although bad looking is a ripoff of the WoW one, or the default keybinding, with right mouse click to attack and the B key (in place of the originally more popular I key) to open bags and so on, but as soon as you start whacking foozles, and provided that you can run the game at an acceptable framerate, you’ll probably have a WoW deja-vu right after your first attack. It’s obvious that the combat engine has been tweaked to make it familiar to burnout believers of the Ruler of all MMORPGs, and questionable and retro as it may sound, the whole thing flows pretty smooth. Still, the golden formula of whacking, levelling and get new spells/attacks every two levels has been slightly enhanced. While everything that is in WoW is in Vanguard’s combat too, it’s worth mentioning that the ancient art of exchanging blows is slightly more interactive here, as your character has some nifty semi-hidden skills like “spell detection” or “tactics” that permit you to unleash, under certain conditions, powerful moves or more interesting counter spells. Basically, every time an enemy (Playing or non-playing, as there are a few PvP servers with both FFA or Team Based rulesets) attacks you or your party there’s a chance your character will recognize a pattern in its attacks or identify a spell it is casting that will unlock a button to “counter” that action. This works well in conjunction with “finisher” moves, “bridge” attacks and other feats that can be performed in the way of spicing up combat. It adds to that the significative class diversity, whereas the four archetypes of tank, healer, magical dps and physical dps are split in 15 more specialized and meaningful classes, some of which thoughtfully reinvented, like healers finally able to do their part in groups other than just chain healing (Disciples are monk-healers who heal while swinging fists, and Blood Mages draw their healing power from pummelling and leeching enemies).

But you are not limited to fighting, of course. Vanguard is proud to introduce a third sphere beyond adventuring and crafting (Which is a deep and turn-based thing, in between the EQ2 and the SWG models), and that is Diplomacy. Many overlook this feature, that is unique and definitely innovative, but I would like to show my respect for it, as it’s a clear example that even in the most conservative of the MMORPG models, there’s room for some out of the box thinking. Some labelled it as an unimpressing and forgettable minigame, but believe it not as diplomacy is so intertwined to Vanguard’s fabric that sooner or later you’ll have to deal with it, and that’s definitely a good thing. It is true that Diplomacy is played through a turn based game of cards where you confront various NPCs trying to score more points than your opponent, but this is the mechanic that moves the dialogues, letting players access the huge lore of the game and, by gaining diplomatic ranks and levels, unlock quests, items and content otherwise unavailable. More! Enhancing the common MMO concept of factions, every city has NPCs groups (The merchants, the soldiers, the commonpeople, the sages, the crafters, etc) that can be “diplomatized”, meaning you can pull the levers of those group through diplomatic parleys to the point of actually giving buffs to all players in the city according to the factions you strenghtened or weakened. No need to say that players can work accordingly, pulling a lever of the city in a combined effort, or work against each others, in some sort of subtle politic game where everyone tries to obtain the favour of a faction dishing disgrace over the followers of another. On top of it all, diplomatic questlines are the most engaging and sometimes hilarious I ever completed in any persistent world, as developers really had the chance to write stuff that doesn’t simply revolves around killing beats or gathering hallucynogen mushooms, but it’s focused on plots, stories and dialogues. Expect your morals to be seriously tested.

Alas, too many more things could be said about this huge (seriously, the client is almost 17 gigabytes large), enormous new iteration of a ten year old formula. But there’s a point where you have to stop and let go as the line between neutral observation and biased judgement starts to fade away. It’s undeniable that Vanguard it’s NOT what it should have been. Too ambitious, too expensive, too out of its time, it just falls short on the excitement factor you should get for a new world right out of the box (and after you paid for it). I started this write up calling Vanguard the most negative-hyped game ever, and that is the direct result of all the claims Sigil and Brad McQuaid made in this 5 years of development. They promised so much that there was no way they could deliver it all, so people made up their mind that it would have been an half baked mess between the masochistic lines of the original EverQuest and some of the unique features of Ultima Online. Spice that up with a Second Coming named World of Warcraft and the overly annoying “We are Next-Gen” mantra and you’ll end up with some millions of unimpressed and genuinely skeptical gamers armed wit pop-corn and ready to witness the flop of the century. With a cynical grin.

But Vanguard is far from being a trainwreck. 8 months ago former publisher Microsoft dropped the ball and Vanguard faced a crisis averted with the new deal with SOE, which injected enough cash to launch the game but not enough to finish it.

So here we are, with the usual paid beta shit you all know very well, bugs everywhere, graphical glitches, broken quests, balance issues, pathing problems, missing arts, rough UI, and a massload of post-launch features coming in some future updates, including post launch tails for the futty races (my personal pet peeves being the lack of chatbubbles and the horrible fonts. Both soon® to be fixed issues). All these reasons, as they are actually the first things you’ll notice upon logging into the game and what probably drove away in disdain lots of betatesters so far, forced me to wear my negative glasses and speak in blue tones about it, and that’s what I did so far.

Still, there’s a lot to enjoy in it. I tried to keep the best for the part where you usually get your coat and head for the door, in the effort of being the more objective I could given that I am enjoying it a lot.

How’s that? Because what I forgot to mention so far is that the world is truly beautiful, enormous, immense, it’s every virtual explorer’s heaven as it is so big and so diverse that it’ll take you months to visit it all even with one of the numerous land, sea or air mounts. I forgot to mention how compelling and engaging some of the quests are, and that even if the lore could be a little more in your face, it’s definitely there to be discovered proven that you have interest in doing so. I forgot to say how huge (and how many) are the dungeons and how much content is in each one of those, how sweet is to pilot a player boat, fly through mountain peaks with flying mounts and settle yourself with non-instanced and higly customizable player houses, or how nice is to have 5 different paperdolls holding your equipment for adventuring, crafting, harvesting, diplomacy and your mount, letting you change your outfit on the fly. Almost forgot to tell how nice is to harvest trees actually chopping them down and see them falling on the ground, or how fun is to be a spy for a noblehouse in a complex plot of politics and intrigue played out through word fights and the entertaining game of cards. And still, I forgot to say how good itemization is, or how great the ten different starting cities are and how interesting are new concepts like Equipment Expertise, reactive combat, defensive target, rescues. How nice is to play in a world without instances and with dungeons to share with everyone still knowing that the quest named mob you are looking for will be triggered for you and just for you when you’ll reach its spawn point. So far I didn’t have to camp a single mob or grind a single xp, as quests perfectly led me from a zone to another and from a level to the next. As I said, it plays scarily similar to World of Warcraft, with 80% less polish but 30% more meat. Yes, it’s dirty, very rough, but I am enjoying it.

I know these are all mere and stupid little dumb diku achievements, and they are obsolete and conservative in 2007. But go tell that to the Borg-like 10 million monster, and let poor failed Vanguard be. It doesn’t eat so much, it doesn’t poop around and eventually, with time, it’d be able to bloom as the “uber-diku” it was supposed to be. Now with 30% more features!