Granted, he does that a little bit with his “they don’t do any research!” statement. But still. Progress!

I really wanted to love Vanguard. I followed the game from the Sigil Games Online forums, posted on them, and eventually moved to the Vanguard Forums. I watched the game go from stuttery piece of crap with massive potential to clone of the other games that had discarded much of potential and yet still somehow has enough potential that it could have launched amazingly.

Brad did have an idea but he got scared, or so I think. The Big Book of Sexiness was replaced with a WoW quest/ability ui. The damn interface was given gryphons on either side of a bar the same damn size as WoW, replacing the interesting layout originally used for the original styllized combat. Counters and reactionaries were trashed in favor of a mash style play style ala WoW and EQ2. Instead of fine tuning the reactiionary timer combat they gave up, instead of fine tuning their gorgeous quest tracker, lore tracker, ability and spell book, the gave up. Instead of finishing diplomacy they scrapped it for a side game. They gave up. Time was running out and instead of following their innovations they gave up and cloned the games they all admitted to playing avidly.

I am not bashing WoW and EQ2, far from it. I enjoyed both games for quite some time. I am knocking Brad’s inability to follow through with innovation. His cowardice in back peddling his words and changing his story from “The first 3rd gen innovative game” to “The first 3rd gen progressive game” somewhere along the line he lost sight of what he was trying to create. Would I have liked what he was trying to create? I will never know cause all that he churned out was a half assed regurgitation of the same old shit I can play in other games.

Kamiki
*smiles*

I figure VG will close if the evil nerf happy monster named SOE does not buy Sigil. The bottom line is the consumer has spoken and Sigil now feels the wrath of angry customers who paid $$$ for a broken POS.

My second issue isn’t that there are bugs, but the sheer quantity and severity of the bugs. I expect bugs in a new game. I do not, however, expect to get dropped from groups, randomly disconnected, dropped to desktop, logged out randomly and logged in as a different character (seriously, WTH is that all about), etc. This game doesn’t just have bugs related to the game engine, it’s just a mess that wasn’t ready for launch.

Finally, the progression of content and the pacing are terrible. I’m given no direction regarding where I should be progressing. I find myself wandering countryside randomly looking for something my level to do, and instead just running into either things that are out of my league, or barren and empty entirely. As someone said, I’d rather they had less total content, but had quality content and had a clear progression path.

I doubt I’d try it again unless it was free play time, but even then it depends on how long it takes them to sort things out. As most probably know, people don’t generally commit time to more than one MMO at a time, and I doubt I’d drop another that was holding my attention to come back even for free time after my initial experience with Vanguard.

Which is it … go back to WoW or give VG a chance?

Gave VG a chance … worked past the performance issues and still found the game was a steaming pile of shit.

I think that VG will be succesful in the future…cuz if LOTRO is any indication of how Warhammer or Conan will play……..I’ll just leave it at that.

Vanguard was horrendous. My hard disk light never stopped flashing.

It was too frustrating to bother with.