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More players wanted.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 6
Date: April 25, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Reading the reviews for this game it is remarkable how polarized they are. Most either totally love or abhor the game. I would argue that a ranking somewhere in between is more appropriate.

I have been playing Vanguard for about 3 months since launch and have reached mid level, playing about 3 evenings a week. This shows that a significant commitment in time is required to make progress, more serious than some are willing to make. This is intended and in general not unusual for this kind of game. The game content and especially groups and raids, becomes more interesting as higher levels are reached, to some degree explaining the low grades by those who probably did not stick with the game long.

This game is meant to be played in groups. When playing in a good group, progress at a rate of a level every 1-2 days is normal. While soloing is possible, as I have done the majority of the time, it requires patience since group quests are nearly impossible to play solo at the experience level that they were intended to be played at in groups. While lower level quests can be done solo, the reward in experience is rather small at that point.

Group fighting is challenging and never a simple click a button and wait affair. As a tank keeping your group alive requires full attention using rescues, special attacks, besides simple hitting/taunting. Over all this is the strongest side of the game.

The graphics are in general good, the textures are more realistic than those of other games, attempting to better immerse a player into the game. Lag is present on even high-end systems mostly due to disk access between chunks, the equivalent of zones in other games, although the boundaries are invisible to the player. Vanguard does not have load screens. While lag is annoying it is usually of little consequence. A system well at or exceeding the recommended specs is needed to get decent frame rates at medium image settings in heavily populated areas. Most gamers will have systems that should get decent frame rates.

Long travel times have been mentioned as minus. While they exist they allow you to have a snack, watching the landscape fly by. Horses are obtainable already at level 10. Bugs do exist. Some of them have been fixed, many of them still exist, and while they are annoying they are not unusual in any new program/game of this complexity. Overall, they do not significantly take the fun away to my opinion.

The biggest problem at the moment is not so much a problem of the game engine or game content but the lack of people/players. While grouping is encouraged, the usually rather small server population and the sheer magnitude of the enormous continents makes it difficult to find good groups regularly. This may become a game breaker if it doesn't improve.

In general, a good game with great potential if more should be willing to play it.

Ouch my Hardware

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 6
Date: January 31, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This Game Rules, 6 years of Everquest and this is the first MMOG to get me to leave it.

It also got me to buy a Radeon X1950PRO and a new powersupply.

All in all I'm happy but broke =p

Watch those Requirements but the eye candy justifies your hard earned money.

Great Game! with unbounding potential.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 7
Date: March 05, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is not for the weak at heart. I have played MMOs going back to the days of Diablo and Everquest. I have even played World of Warcraft; which in my opinion leaves you longing for a challenge. This game is beautiful, the graphics are simply stunning. Its class system was well executed and thought out. The game mechanics overall are awesome. However, it is not without flaw, the game does need polishing. It still has bugs, broken quests, etc. (more so than a typical recently launched MMO.) However, I believe Sigil is working hard to fix these issues and get the game to its polished potential. For those that are looking for a challenge and are tired of cartoonish graphics and the ease of World of Warcraft offers, I recommend you pick up a copy of this game.

Fun game with a lot of room for improvement

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 7
Date: March 13, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I've just completed my free 30 days of play and i can honestly say i enjoy this game much more than Everquest or EQ II.
I'm playing a 16 Necromancer. I am a level 6 outfitter and i just started in Diplomacy. It really hasn't interested me enough to get involved further in it.

Gameplay is like a lot of people have already said. Very Laggy & Buggy. This however, if you can take it, doesn't draw from the fun of the game. The game is very beautiful and huge. There are a lot of open areas with nothing but just trees and grass and the occasional mob.
I am in a guild, but i prefer solo play because i have a limited amount of time to play. It's not fun to plan a raid only to have to bail a few minutes later. So for that reason i stick to solo play.
I've spent the last few days hanging around the Redcap Stronghold killing numerous named mobs for decent loot. My only concern is that all of my "Named Special" loot items sell for 0? A Tarnished Greatsword could sell for 32c but a Redcap Drum of the Ages sells for 0c. (fake item name for demonstration purposes). Last night i dragged back 5 bags full of weapons and armor and made about 3s pieces. This was for 2 hours of fighting. And none of my special items sold for anything. I don't have room so i just sold them off to the vendor for nothing.
Also, it's a bit of a pain getting around, especially when there aren't Exchange Brokers or Banks in every town or outpost. The Brokers are like the EQ system where you leave items for sale and other players can purchase them. So far the market is really soft. No one buys anything basically because there is no set value for anything because no one knows just how rare an item might be. Other than a Yellow flag for rare items and Blue for uncommon. I bought some really cheap Necro Abomination Rare grafts for my pet for just a few silver. You can list 10 items at a time. I've had 10 up now for 2 weeks and no one has purchased anything. I have everything listed for peanuts and still no one wants to buy anything. It's very possible there's just a huge glut of items in the game and no one is going to buy something they will probably just find as loot anyway. All that and the fact that i haven't even made 1g piece yet is really frustrating. Level 16 and bankroll is 76s. And after a long night of fighting you have to repair your gear which cuts severely into your profits. You always seem to be spinning your wheels making money because every paltry bit you make goes to repairing your inventory of items.

I won't comment on crafting because i've only just begun. From what i've seen so far, it's tedious at best. It could be good for the market but from what i've seen on the brokers i doubt it. The only that seem to sell well now are handmade bags and saddlebags. No one buys armor or weapons at all. I've upgraded my bags twice now. The only other thing i've purchased was pet grafts. Everything else can be found by killing and a lot of patience.

To wrap up. Fun game but still needs a lot of work to get it in the upper echelon of games. It's still too laggy and buggy to be a truly great game. The market is really soft right now and i don't think anyone is happy with it. There's really no money to be found. (Yet. I'm level 16 so maybe it gets better at level 40). To sum it up. The game is really just a grind. You can bust your butt all weekend and you still wonder what you have to show for all your hard work? I've come across no really cool, rare items, only backpacks of total junk.

17 GB size?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 21
Date: February 05, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Almost a 7gb download, then 17 GIGABYTES ON MY COMPUTER? Wow. Just wow. Forget this game... way too much space.

Excellent MMORPG Launch

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: April 27, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is pretty amazing. It has had no server side lag issues since launch which is simply amazing given that most games of it's genre are simply unplayable for their first few months.

The graphics are amazing, it's the best looking virtual world you'll find. No cartoon like graphics here. The game is deep with tons of stuff to do, crafting is very deep and intricate, diplomacy is a fun alternative to adventuring and crafting.

The only con is the player base is still underdeveloped so it can be hard to find a group if your not playing with friends. This should change with time.

I'm glad I bought it here for less than half the retail price!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: September 04, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Because it is definitely not worth full price. I'd been wanting to try this game for a while, hearing about being able to ride dragons and things and control the flying parts of the game sounded cool. It was fun for a while, after I spent two days going back and forth with tech support trying to figure out why it did not work. After their ideas bore no fruit, I decided to take matters into my own hands and looked at the INI file. It was as simple as changing the default resolution from 1280x1024 to 1024x768, my monitor is the only part of my computer that has remained the same for the last 12 years and does not support higher settings. From there it was just a matter of making a character and starting the game. It was fun for a while, I played it for two days before I ran into some major problems. One more day than I played WOW before I gave up on it, but that was only a demo and cost me nothing. Anyway, the first problem was that there are nasty things too close to the newbie area. I saw the only hostile creature in the area two seconds before it saw me, and since it was 4 levels higher it made short work of me. The second problem is a lack of exact location determination, your waypoint is marked on your compass and on your map but only a general idea of where that person or place is will be shown. The mini map does not zoom in enough to detail where it is, and I gave up on the game all together when I was told my trainer was in a temple that I spent 20 minutes circling the solid rocks that the map and compass said contained him. A simple trail like the EQ games have would have made this situation not become so frustrating. I'll keep an eye on VGPlayers for updates, but my last 25 days on the free 30 are going to be unused and I'm going to be sure to cancel the subscription until I see an update that fixes these problems. I was not looking forward to the bad parts of other MMORPGS (which were patched to remove them) like corpse retrieval and harvesting to make little pieces to be combined later, but now I don't have to worry about that.

Vista

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 13
Date: February 03, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Ok, EQ II is playing wonderfully on Vista.....Vanguard will not even load after Launchpad. I know Vista just came out, but Vanguard did as well, pretty much the same time, why is it not playing with Vista? And I dig Vista, just got ultimate edition and it sure is perty :)

Wasted Potential

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 4
Date: August 04, 2007
Author: Amazon User

What could have been a good game is ruined by laggy play and the inclusion of all the worst "time wasting" parts of RPGs... interminable travel times, body recoveries and endless "Kill X number of X beast and report to me" quests. Everything just moves sooo slowly...

Worst online game I've ever played

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 4
Date: August 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Even with an above average computer, I had to reduce the graphic settings down to a bare minimum, making it so ugly that it was painful to look at. Even then I had terrible lag when I was near a congested area or town. Very very grahpics unfriendly game. The gameplay and quests weren't great either. When my level 4 character died the game spawned me in a place next to much higher level creatures and it was impossible to safely return to the newbie grounds without asking for help. At that point I quit in frusteration and never went back.

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