Why all the nerd rage against Vanguard

Lyenae said:

Shadowbane solved this problem with the healer ability Summon, which is basically a world-wide Call of the Hero on a 5 minute re-use timer.

Simple and it worked.

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Realistically, I don"t think something that simple would be enough to resolve Vanguard"s issue. What if its a healer, or whatever class would get that ability that the group actually needs? Or perhaps the group is shy 2 or 3 members? They"re still looking at upwards of 10 minutes to assemble in one area. Single player enabled summoning stones, or clicky portals, etc., in relatively close proximity to the games dungeons would make assembling a group much easier.

Class specific port spells would be even better. Because even if the player providing the ports isn"t going into the dungeon with the group, theres still some player interdependance there. The group needed others to assemble. The others provided a service to the group.

And the bonus side effect? It further supports an interactive community. And those communities are what spawn friendships within the game. There are simply far more positive reasons to implement this than there are negative effects to negate it. Sigil simply needs to open thier eyes and see it. Players WANT to connect. Now provide them the means to do so in a timely manner, and this game might start to get itself on the right track.

Stop worrying about shrinking the world. From what i"m reading, it certainly seems to be big enough to support an easier travel system. So just be done with it already.

Sithro said:

Okay, so I got the game working and I started playing around.

Yeah, it"s not worth buying yet, in my opinion. The game is still to jerky in many areas. One thing I"m dissapointed about is the lack of commotion in the villages that I"ve been in. In EQII, you"d occasionally see NPCs talking to one another. In Vanguard, they kind of stand around. Also, I went into the Dark Elf village, and almost had a ceisure. D: The colors were changing constantly. It was like my character was high on acid or something.

The good thing is, that just about all of that can be fixed in time.

One thing I have to say was amazing, as the Dwarf city "Bordenor"s Cleft" I think it was. I went in and almost shit myself. It"s HUGE. The game itself is HUGE... So that"s one big thing it has going for it.

Anyway, I might wait another 6 months and then check back. By then the game should have simmered a while, and the price of the game will have likely dropped.

In short, it has a lot of potential. It just has to be realized.

Now, off to bed.

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So after weeks of boring us with your complete inability to operate a computer and your total lack of knowledge about a video card installation, you get the game installed and somehow you create a char and your expert opinion is: "Game is too jerky, colors changing like mad."

Impressive.

Faranor said:

So after weeks of boring us with your complete inability to operate a computer and your total lack of knowledge about a video card installation, you get the game installed and somehow you create a char and your expert opinion is: "Game is too jerky, colors changing like mad."

Impressive.

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Whats even more impressive is his persistence. Hundreds of people with specs far better than his came to the same conclusion 3 weeks ago. Yet he still HAD to see for himself

I gotta give him credit though. At least he was bright enough to use a free trial

Yeah, but if he had just decided to not try the game because of all the people who knew better telling him so, the vanboi warparty would have all been up in arms about how he should try things out for himself and just buy every game and try it because reviews from peers are pointless, amirite?

Zehn - Vhex said:

amirite?

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Absolutely.

Zehn - Vhex said:

Yeah, but if he had just decided to not try the game because of all the people who knew better telling him so, the vanboi warparty would have all been up in arms about how he should try things out for himself and just buy every game and try it because reviews from peers are pointless, amirite?

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I"m just hoping he goes away now.

I see people talking about bad performance but my experiances have been pretty smooth sailing . Sure at the start it was rough but now the hitching is all but gone.

You are not going to run this game at the higher settings without top of the line tech. Just not gonna happen. If you do have the tech the game looks and runs a whole lot better than eq2. Look at the screenshots I post . Look at the upper right hand corners. Most of the shots outside are getting id say avg 80fps inside is sometimes double. In groups and high populated areas where more than 2 groups are playing i get an average of 60-70 fps.

You are not going to run the game at near full blast without the top tech out there today dont bother trying. Dont come here and complain when your running a 7600gs. Save your money.

Blacken {Talisman}
Flamehammer server

Me? I"m running a 7800GT.

I"m still messing around with the game, and I definately plan on playing it. I"m just going to wait a few months until the game is a bit more finished.

As for the bug, I"m dead serious. You remember the game Turok 64? They had levels that kept changing colors. That"s what was happening.

I treked all the way to New Targonor (I wanted to see it) at level 1, from Tursh, and holy shit!... It"s huge... Bigger than I thought, really.

Really cool.

The 7800gt is still kinda weak for this game. I used to use a 7800gtx and i remember not being able to run the game very well in beta at med settings, but that was beta so....

Personally, I think the EQ2 strategy of planning for the future with the graphics engine really isn"t going to serve them well in the long run. It limits them to a pretty small share of the PC gaming market, and frankly I"m not sure it results in a much better looking game. If Vanguard was built using the LOTR or WAR graphics engines, would it really look too much worse? If anything, they"d likely have had more time to implement better animations.

Still, I suppose it"s subjective...so, what defines "good graphics" to you? Detail, animation, overall design, lighting?

woqqqa said:

Personally, I think the EQ2 strategy of planning for the future with the graphics engine really isn"t going to serve them well in the long run. It limits them to a pretty small share of the PC gaming market, and frankly I"m not sure it results in a much better looking game. If Vanguard was built using the LOTR or WAR graphics engines, would it really look too much worse? If anything, they"d likely have had more time to implement better animations.

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Yes, it would have look a hell of a lot worse, imo.

xregg said:

The 7800gt is still kinda weak for this game. I used to use a 7800gtx and i remember not being able to run the game very well in beta at med settings, but that was beta so....

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It shouldn"t be weak, especially considering I can run EQII at extreme and get lass lag than I am in most of VG. I think it"s more of a optimization problem than my video card.

It"ll get better, it always does. I remember when EQII ran like absolute ass, now the game runs really well. Not to mention it"s a really good game, now.

r.gun said:

Yes, it would have look a hell of a lot worse, imo.

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While LOTRO may not have textures as large as VG, it definitely looks better imo. It has "atmosphere" and feels much more alive. Vanguard just feels sterile and objects just don"t mesh with the world. The whole thing just looks like a half-finished photoshop job.

Yeah, I ran across this article a couple of days ago, not sure if the link"s been posted here before, but here goes...

More on Vanguard and world design | The Cesspit.

Sithro said:

It"ll get better, it always does. I remember when EQII ran like absolute ass.

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You"re right. It does always get better. Unfortunately, graphics improvements/optimizations will have ZERO effect on gameplay issues. I played EverQuest2 on its lowest setting for 6 months. Sure, it looked like shit, but I enjoyed it because the gameplay was able to keep me logging in regardless. Thinking back to when I got my new graphics card, I remember the game being "that much better" when I was able to finally make it look better.

The point is, the player "hook" begins with the gameplay, not pretty graphics. Fuck the "next gen" technical graphics bullshit. Fix the damn gameplay complaintsplayers are quitting overfirst. Because most of them want to enjoy the game they paid for.

My personal favorite:

I am not leaving because of the bugs, painful XP gain, huge timesink, 1st generation gameplay and mechanics, bad character models and animations, idiotic quests, or the awful performance.

They may or may not fix those things in 2-3 years. None of that can be done in in under 2 years by the way.

I am quitting because this game is not fun! Video games should be fun.This one is worst than being at work.

Now I have really "Set myself free".

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Fuckin" amazing.

I thought the game play was a strong part of the game, thats why i still play. Running through dungeons surviving a 5-6 mob pull. Saving my healer with defensive targeting abilities. I haven"t had more fun in a video game since about PoP in EQ. I guess to each their own though. Hell, my main reason why i quite WoW was because it was focused on to much of a single player game until the higher levels. Different people like different things.

I never was able to get the game to stop stuttering/hitching. I have a 7800gs and I reformatted, defragmented, used the various .ini optimization guides, uninstalled/reinstalled drivers, ran a memtest, fixed my paging file, etc. etc. Regardless what setting I ran the game on, it was never smooth and that was frustrating to me. The game just wasn"t fun enough for me to ignore those problems. Perhaps if I had more time to play and a regular group to level up with....

EQ2 however runs smooth as silk on Extreme for me (without shadows) and the game is indeed fun.

EQ2 and VG always reminded me of "Look what we can do with this fabulous new tech and awesome tools!!!!" more than anything. That doesn"t mean its bad...but it presents a lot of jarring or very odd inconsistancies when you look at them.

I know that we get screenshots in every VG thread to "prove" how good things look and tech wise they do look decent....but it always feels odd to me. Well, EQ2 does as well. I run around and oooh and ahhhh at individual pieces but eventually I start seeing a whole picture and start noticing more and more that just doesn"t seem to mesh well together.

It "feels" to me that many of these artists and stuff rely way too much on the tools to create these games and not enough on the overall artistic feel and vision. They make individual things look nice and pretty but it tends to feel a bit like an slightly wrong jigsaw puzzle. While each piece may look pretty decent, when you put them all together you see all the lines, some things don"t fit right, and some pieces just don"t seem to be from the right puzzle at all.

<shrug> Nothing new.

Gaereth said:

EQ2 and VG always reminded me of "Look what we can do with this fabulous new tech and awesome tools!!!!" more than anything. That doesn"t mean its bad...but it presents a lot of jarring or very odd inconsistancies when you look at them.

I know that we get screenshots in every VG thread to "prove" how good things look and tech wise they do look decent....but it always feels odd to me. Well, EQ2 does as well. I run around and oooh and ahhhh at individual pieces but eventually I start seeing a whole picture and start noticing more and more that just doesn"t seem to mesh well together.

It "feels" to me that many of these artists and stuff rely way too much on the tools to create these games and not enough on the overall artistic feel and vision. They make individual things look nice and pretty but it tends to feel a bit like an slightly wrong jigsaw puzzle. While each piece may look pretty decent, when you put them all together you see all the lines, some things don"t fit right, and some pieces just don"t seem to be from the right puzzle at all.

<shrug> Nothing new.

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One thing (amongst quite a few, actually) that I think World of Warcraft did right is that they went for stylized graphics, instead of trying to be realistic. I might not like the insanely cartoonish look of the character models, but the fact is that many people on a retarded computer like HP could run the game. Hell, I had a old PC with 512 megs of RAM, like 64 MB of video memory, and an old P3 processor, and it ran decently well.

I"d like to see an MMO adopt a style similar to WoW"s, but have the character models not be as unrealistic. Something with a mix of style and realism would be cool, but without the insane bump maping like in EQII.

The truth is, stylized just lasts longer. You"re not expecting insane tech, just something pretty to look at. So in that way, it lasts.

Gaereth said:

EQ2 and VG always reminded me of "Look what we can do with this fabulous new tech and awesome tools!!!!" more than anything. That doesn"t mean its bad...but it presents a lot of jarring or very odd inconsistancies when you look at them.

I know that we get screenshots in every VG thread to "prove" how good things look and tech wise they do look decent....but it always feels odd to me. Well, EQ2 does as well. I run around and oooh and ahhhh at individual pieces but eventually I start seeing a whole picture and start noticing more and more that just doesn"t seem to mesh well together.

It "feels" to me that many of these artists and stuff rely way too much on the tools to create these games and not enough on the overall artistic feel and vision. They make individual things look nice and pretty but it tends to feel a bit like an slightly wrong jigsaw puzzle. While each piece may look pretty decent, when you put them all together you see all the lines, some things don"t fit right, and some pieces just don"t seem to be from the right puzzle at all.

<shrug> Nothing new.

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As objective as I can try to be...

A massive premium was placed on the "overall artistic feel and vision" of Vanguard. One way in which the large world helps, is by allowing for more gradual transitions from area to area to avoid sudden and jarring landscapes. I agree that the placement of objects and certain terrain elements looks very hard-edged. However, the "fix" for this will inevitably be a tech solution that blends seams and lines of static mesh objects in with the terrain. It would be awesome if the engine realized there was a "boulder" placed on "dirt" and created a custom mesh where the rock meets the ground that makes it appear like the rock is inset into the terrain instead of just plopped on top. The same solution for waves that need to blend more naturally into the shoreline with perhaps a slight particle foam or white water. But who knows, I am not a visual artist. I do know that the artistic vision of the game is held in very high esteem and is alive and well.