Vanguard - I don't give a fuck if it's dead, It's still brown as fuck (Download link in 1st post)

Gnomedolf_sl said:

I started playing Vanguard again after years being away from it. My first experience this time was total shit. I would launch the game, I could hear the music, but all I would see is my normal desktop. Turns out that I had to edit the VGclient.ini file and enter in my screen resolution. What the flying fuck? The game wouldn't even play until I manually edited a file. Unbelievable.

Once I got past that stupid shit, things got a little better. I have a GTX 770 and I can play with everything on max with no problems at 2560x1440. I didn't notice any chunking, but that may be due to using an SSD. I started a dorf Pally, but so far, the gameplay is dull. I'm just swinging a sword and mashing the same couple of buttons. I may switch to a sorcerer.

Is there a way to make the quest-givers text any larger? Things get kinda small at this high resolution.

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play disciple / bloodmage / DK / shaman / rng /bard or psionist.. pally and src are not the best of the classes ( they are OK ) but you won't see the best stuff unless you pick one of the ones i mentioned. src is tough because you have to really manage aggro alot

I'm so depressed by the Giants game today, I'm going to download VG and play it this afternoon as self punishment.

Stick with the pally, they are more fun than sorc, if you want interesting combat anyway. It just takes some time to get going, but so do all the classes now. Some idiot during the f2p change, nerfed all the classes and moved half of their spells to level 10 and beyond, so that it was easier for retards to pickup and play. The result is that from 1-9 you barely have anything. At 10 you get what you used to have at like level 6 or something. Some classes are fun anyway, but some classes require that you wait until the late teens until they start getting better.

And even at the best of times, you still are going to lack a lot of the more advanced stuff until 30 ish or beyond. That's how EQ was too, but the journey was so long that people just resigned themselves to getting whatever they were given. Nowadays the journey is so fast, it seems weird when you have to wait.

The resolution thing, no idea what happened there. The game always defaults to something low but you can just change it in the game, as soon as you log in you are at character creation and you can change it from there.

And Draegan you will probably hate it lol. The game has so many bugs and quirks and a weak population, if you go in with any mindset other than determination to try to have fun, you will probably rage quit by level 12. Really if you want to give the game a good shot, you should at least do Khegor's End from about 13-18 and then do Renton Keep and that kind of area. That is all Vanguard is, indoor questing and outdoor questing. If you enjoy yourself that far, you can play all the way to 55. If you don't enjoy yourself by Renton Keep, then nothing beyond that is much better.


p.s. Before you guys quit, you should check out the Blood Mage and Shaman (including picking a Patron). They are really good classes. Bard too.

Played for 30 minutes. Combat was too slow and unresponsive. At least as a shaman. Feedback is off.

I started playing my Ranger again and paid the $14 gold membership fee, I hit 37 last night. The gold membership exp increase + the potion increase makes leveling a breeze. I downloaded EQ2 last night (because I want to punish myself) and I seriously have no idea how that game has more players than VG.

Because anytime VG gets more than 100 players all the old bugs crop back up (chunks crashing, chunking taking forever, etc) and runs everyone off again.

Vanguard is pretty good these days. Yeah it does have bugs or lag from time to time, some people don't have the lag issue but some say it's a constant nuisance. The problem the game has though is that nobody knows it exists. It's down to just 1 server now and even that is only partially populated. The game didn't get much promotion even when it was new, but now it's a 6-7 year old game that nobody has heard of, and I'm sure when people inquire and hear the mixed reviews, that doesn't help. But still, the zero promotion now really harms it. It literally relies 100% on word of mouth, and that's not enough.

But anything else and it just wouldn't be Vanguard. The game is all about tragedy, the horrible beta that people started rage quitting in huge numbers in beta 1 and 2, the complete combat overhaul, the super lame switcheroo with the quests, the horrifying release, the 6 years of utter abandonment by SOE, and now the super messy F2P conversion which brought along this lag issue and a bunch of new bugs. Tis a tragic existence, but anything else and it wouldn't be Vanguard.

For those of you who were in early beta , what was the major difference in gameplay terms ? Just curious , as I got in right at beta 3 , which was the start of the "new" form of VG , which was what it was released in , I think I got in around May of that year and it launched what the next Jan (early access maybe late Dec or something if remember close to it anyway ).

Dahkoht_sl said:

For those of you who were in early beta , what was the major difference in gameplay terms ? Just curious , as I got in right at beta 3 , which was the start of the "new" form of VG , which was what it was released in , I think I got in around May of that year and it launched what the next Jan (early access maybe late Dec or something if remember close to it anyway ).

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It was quite different. There were only a few quests, the game worked like EQ so you would start and you would travel around exploring and killing mobs, and that's how you progressed. The problem was, the former WoW players they wanted to attract, noobs, and idiots of various types, all had no idea what to do or where to go. And even some of the old EQ type people would do ok in their starting area and then not know where to go beyond that. If you went a certain direction you would be faced with mobs too hard for you. Only people who had a pair of balls and a decent brain would actually bother to explore and find other areas that were suitable. In the end there was so much whining about it, they just developed 1000+ quests. It gave people the WoW clone experience they seemed to want and it lead them by the hand through the starting areas and then told them where to go beyond that.

The combat was different too. Brad is a big Magic The Gathering fan and he wanted that kind of depth and strategy for the combat. The early combat was totally different to how it ended up. For a start you could attack different parts of the body which was cool - arms, legs, head, etc they could all be targeted specifically and attacked. But the big thing is that as the mobs fought back, your character could learn to read what the mob was doing, and you were supposed to counter it with your own move or spell. So there was a kind of queue where the mob would smack you and then plan another big hit and you had to prepare to use a defensive move. And magic was largely about counter spelling. Like a mob would cast a spell and you would know what the spell is he is about to cast. Then you can counter the spell and choose to do different things with it, like shoot it straight back at the mob or convert it to a heal or just dispell it or whatever. But it was slow paced so you had time to think about what you were doing, and again, there was a lot of whining about how it was slow. And I think most of the people who complained just didn't understand it. They were trying to play it like EQ2 or WoW but if you just pressed your abilities it wouldn't do you much good. You had to use them to counter what the opponent was doing and your characters skills would increase in perception and stuff.

I think because they ran out of money and maybe because Brad wasn't around.. they were struggling to make it more fun, and there was also so much whining, in the end they just scrapped the entire thing, and threw in a traditional system instead.

About to hit level 38 on my Ranger, I stopped playing for a few days to try out EQ2, fffffffff. I wonder what the daily server population is currently at, I really feel like I am the only person playing the game when I am on. The only nice thing about being a ranger is that I can solo most 4-dot quest mobs that I would normally need a partner for.

Vanguard beta was a classic lesson in not listening to your fanbase. If they had stuck to their guns the game would've been way better off for it. Still a buggy mess, but there were a good number of people (myself included) who were more than willing to grit their teeth at the lag and glitches because they saw an amazing game in there. Then Sigil made change after change that went against the spirit of the game we were falling in love with, basically a load of compromises to try to tap into the WoW audience with last-minute changes. I guess it was one of the first MMOs to die the death of a WoW clone, but what made it die so hard was that it was never intended as a WoW clone (like, say, Rift); instead it was hacked and misshapen right before release (possibly from the sudden temptation of taking a piece of the WoW pie), leaving a game that nobody wanted.

I still played it for a couple of months after release, and have a lot of fond memories. But even after release, every change they made was going in the wrong direction (instant travel etc), so the few loyal fans that persevered through it all saw no hope for things turning around, and left too. That was pretty much what killed the game for good. Maybe if they had backtracked and started going in the original direction post-release things could've still worked out.

Fish1_sl said:

It was quite different. And even some of the old EQ type people would do ok in their starting area and then not know where to go beyond that. If you went a certain direction you would be faced with mobs too hard for you. Only people who had a pair of balls and a decent brain would actually bother to explore and find other areas that were suitable.

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This was a serious problem. It wasn't always about being smart and brave, it was odd. I remember doing the 5 or six quests around my starting huts, then walking up the hill only to see level 25ish mobs at the top. So I wandered back down and started exploring. I walked and walked and walked through fields of grass for 10 minutes. There was nothing around. At level 6 ya got to be pretty careful just wandering around aimlessly. Obviously eventually I found another town, but the lack of content was an issue moreso then the player simply being retarded and scared. Vanguard was frikkin HUGE. They could have filled it with content a bit better around the starting areas.

At the same time though it was kinda refreshing how every single square meter of land wasn't desperately filled with "CONTENT". When the world is divided up into progressively higher-level segments of content it feels a lot less like a world. Having areas where there just isn't much stuff besides scenery, especially if that scenery is really nice looking, isn't always a bad thing imo. Not an excuse for an unfinished game just food for thought.

Tmac47_sl said:

So, do they have housing or farming or anything?

If not, having a huge landmass, that has zero potential, is a waste. What's the purpose of having tons of space?

I've always wondered why MMO's didn't create Age of Empires type guild housing...

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I played VG at release and there were vast beautiful landscapes with no purpose. Gigantic, artfully crafted cities with no NPCs. The game gave a sense of isolation and that is not something you ever want in an MMO. It is like they just created all the zones but completely ran out of time to actually populate them. To this day I feel like VG was the best MMO at the concept level but failed in almost every possible category of execution.

Tenks_sl said:

It is like they just created all the zones but completely ran out of time to actually populate them.

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Uh, it's not "like" that, it IS that. It's exactly that.

Tmac - they have housing, but I think it's restricted to a certain area or something? I don't believe you can just put a house wherever you feel like it.

There are specific areas you can plant houses. It's fully non instanced, so there was a land rush early on to get the plots in the best locations.

I enjoyed exploring some of the empty areas, it felt kind of like ghost towns where the population had fled to due a plague or war or whatever.

Cerzi_sl said:

At the same time though it was kinda refreshing how every single square meter of land wasn't desperately filled with "CONTENT". When the world is divided up into progressively higher-level segments of content it feels a lot less like a world. Having areas where there just isn't much stuff besides scenery, especially if that scenery is really nice looking, isn't always a bad thing imo. Not an excuse for an unfinished game just food for thought.

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I 100% disagree that a lack of content is a good thing