I was wrong about Vanguard (march 23, 2007)

Reply #77 on: March 23, 2007, 05:47:37 am

I wanted to do this since a couple of weeks. I stopped playing Vanguard. And I have to admit that I was wrong about lots of things.

So yes, I was wrong, you all (not you Geldon) were right and yeah I'll stay grounded for the rest of the week.

I think it would be too long to list them all and explain why Vanguard ended up boring me to death, especially because many of the reasons already came up on these boards million of times turned out to be true.

I just want to point out what really killed me: the world.

Again, I was wrong: this game is NOT the explorer heaven I thought and preached it was. Because yes, as many of you said back in the days, it looks too much of the same wherever you go. It's huge, and there are for sure Points of Interests, but what really lacks is a "change of pace". I mean, you know in other games when you are bored of a certain zone/theme and you decide to go elsewhere just to have a completely different colour palette, theme, mobs, atmosphere? This basically can't happen in Vanguard. If you are in Thestra, that is the largest continent and it is VERY large, you will be in Thestra for the rest of your life! It doesn't matter if you'll go to the elven city or the dwarf/human/whatever city... it'll be more of the same! Don't get me wrong, New Targonor has beautiful buildings and architecture and I still thinks it's a beautiful world after all, but it completely lacks variations.

The game has slow progression so you are forced to stay in a single place for a long time anyway, but as soon as you learn that in 10 or 20 levels it will be basically more of the same, than your will to live starts crumbling to pieces.

Hiding and going into dungeons is the only way to save yourself from the attack of the too-real world but of course you can't go in there unless you have a good group (crappy group means endless Corpse Runs and usually some delevelling is involved too), so you are stuck to live in the usual green/brown hills killing the same old mobs for days hoping that maybe one day they'll patch in I don't know what maybe an alien world with some different colour or theme.

But I already wrote too much, and I'll sum it up:

- The seamless world idea turned out to be bad to me. I enjoyed gazing to the horizon but in the end it's best to have more foggy shortsighted old kind of worlds and more different places to visit. And I mean really different. The EQ2, EQ1, WoW.. well.. every other game's way.

- The graphics are bad in a not-fascinating way. So after 6 weeks of playing you are not so curious anymore about what will come, because apparently nothing will come. Not in a human sized time-frame. Mobs are just awful, seriously awful. Some of them are uglier than EQ1 ones. It's just uncanny.

- The dungeons that should give that "different theme" feeling are just, in most cases, pretty ugly. I tried all the dungeon I could try hoping that the next one could refresh my will to play and expectations of good things to come, but it basically never happened. Dungeons are ugly. To understand what I am saying just consider Befallen in EQ1 and you'll have a dungeon that is 10 times better of any of the dungeons I visited in Vanguard in 6 weeks. Not to mention places like Unrest or Mistmoore, and I am talking about the original EQ, not EQ2 (that has incredibly good dungeons too, especially compared to VG ones). *sigh*

- It completely fails to recreate the EQ1 kind of magic in all aspects. I remember a Freeport where you could be slain by a NPC in an inn just because of some nasty ill faction stuff or just being the follower of the "wrong" god, or amazing "secret" places like the sewers with high level sunken corpses. Nothing like that is here apparently. I know it wasn't fun to be killed at level 5 in your city by a crazy NPC, but it made for a creepy gaming experience. So far, Vanguard couldn't surprise me save for a couple of starter quests (showing that they gave their best for the first introductory quests, and the rests is plain dull, and duller as you progress).

- The supposedly neat stuff like Diplomacy and Crafting is actually there, houses, boats.. it's all good, but it's not even remotely close to the "worldly" feeling of Ultima Online (an example that I guess will be fixed is the lack of a function to recall to your house. I am sure they'll add it later, but it's not in now) so part of their appeal is missing and the funnever really kicks in. Plus, if the world is boring you are not compelled to "live" in it.

My final note:

The game is good for a diku, and I am sure it will be even better in a couple of years thanks to improvements in all areas and especially addition of features on an already pretty solid base. But unless they put in some new ZONES with COMPLETELY DIFFERENT themes I doubt it'll be ever able to lure me back. I don't care how good are the special moves or combat animations in a MMO if it is unable to give me the illusion of visiting many different places or have me interested in exploring its dungeons.

I want to conclude with something I scavenged from my memory and my hard disk and I feel this is very important given that I am now convinced that it's the "seamless" world that killed it for me, especially thinking about all the goodness you can still have in zone-based games, even better when zones borders are of the soft kind like in WoW. It's a 2002 interview to Brad McQuaid mostly about EverQuest 1 where he said something that makes me want to kill him with a 9-iron. It's 2002 so I guess the design documents for VG were already inked on paper and preproduction was supposedly already started:

Quote from: Brad McQuaid

Another very important aspect of the game and a goal from day one is how immersive and vast the world is. EQ has been criticized for being zone-based (as opposed to seamless), but look at what it allowed us to do. Whereas seamless worlds, at least with today's technology, require less detail, texture variation, and variety of objects and other points of interest, having a zone based engine allowed EQ's world builders to create well over a hundred unique and interesting places to explore. And then it's not just the detail in the world, but also the content in terms of NPC models, quests, items, etc. I think EQ really set the high bar there and also proved just how important depth and detail really is.

WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU BRAD? ARE YOU DISCONNECTED FROM YOURSELF?! YOU TWO GO SEE A FUCKING DOCTOR, NOW!

But it's too late I guess. I am stuck with my mistakes and the time I wasted saying stupid good things about Vanguard, a game that, as for now, is about 5 times less interesting than its predecessor.

Once again I was wrong, you were right and I am sorry. Just thought it was fair to let you know about it.