Vanguard – Initial Impressions

My first free month in Sigil’s MMORPG, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes (now bought over by SOE), just ended.

I got it for a nice deal on Ebay (under SG$40, incl. S&H), so I didn’t mind trying it out, despite the launch and business troubles surrounding the game. And after a month of dabbling in various aspects of the game on the Flamehammer server, I have to say that I actually kinda like the game.

The graphics are nice and more “EQ2-ish” than “WoW-ish”. Trees bending in the wind, clear blue skies with wispy clouds, eerie moonlit nights, as well as atmospheric sound and evocative music make for a very nice environment to play in.

The combat system is similar to most MMORPGs out there today, being mostly driven by spells and abilities triggered via a bank of in-game hotkey bars. There are a few subtle differences though. Key mashing (continuous pressing of the hotkey so that the ability triggers as soon as it’s available) will cause you to miss certain “combat opportunities” that are a tremendous help in ending a fight sooner. These opportunities can only be taken advantage of by using a special set of abilities, and activating a normal ability instead will cause you to forgo that opportunity.

The skill system is pretty cool, somewhat reminiscent of EQ and Ultima Online, where skills go up with usage. In certain skill groups, where specialisation is important (such as weapon abilities and crafting fields), increasing a skill will have to come at a cost of decreasing another, since you don’t have enough points to max them all out. The game allows you to set each skill as “decreasing”, “increasing” or “locked”.

The game has 3 spheres of activity; the traditional combat/adventure sphere, a crafting sphere, and a unique diplomacy sphere. I’m glad to say that I’ve managed to try them all out, and they are all rather nice distractions, that appeal in different ways.

Unfortunately, despite my general enjoyment of the game, several bugs and inadequacies annoyed me throughout my stay in Telon. Getting caught in terrain and object meshes was a contant, albeit somewhat infrequent, irritation. The more frequent occurrence was lag spikes, mainly when running to a new area or revisiting an old area. This would happen about 6 to 10 times in an hour of play, depending on how much you traveled. And this is after I’ve tweaked game settings down to run smoothly on my 3GHz Intel C2Duo, 2 GB DDR2-6400 RAM and 512MB ATI X1950GT.

Other inconvenient issues include buggy diplomacy strategies when using temporarily granted cards, worn equipment visual clipping problems, item swapping in bank slots and chat channel bugs.

Still, I see myself in Telon again, one of these days. I don’t think I’d settle for just a 1 month tour.