New Worlds

So in an attempt to play some new mmorpgs after growing bored of WOW and EQ2 I got into the beta for Vanguard Saga of Heroes and Lord of the Rings Online. I knew what to expect from Turbine with LOTR. I figured there would be some instancing and your standard quests of killing wildlife in big areas. In some alternate universe online game developers live in, Deer and Bears don't spook when you approach them and in fact will kick your ass if you dare poke them with a sharp stick or sword even.

With LOTR one of the things that put me off was the world just didn't seem alive. Trees didn't sway in the breeze. The ambient sound track wasn't well done either. That goes a long way with me as exploring and adventuring is what I get out of these games. The character models just looked plain goofy. I have no idea why developers can make a female avatar look nice and move fairly realistically but the male ones jerk along like they have spent three days with out their cocaine. One thing WOW got right was armor and equipment. You can visually see your character improve when you get the fabled Dragon Sword of +5 whoop ass. So I left the beta thinking it isn't for me. Plus the notion of adventuring with a group of people constantly referencing places and creatures to the books does not sound appealing.

Him "Halt, thy be the cave of Eramoore, home to the foul swine beast"

Me "Does though beast have thy crystal shard for me quest? Cause I been looking all day for this damn cave and I have to make dinner here soon"

Him "Aye, twil be a long and difficult journey for the lair is frought with many dangerous encounters along the treacherous way"

Me "Ok, well look, can't we wall hack or something? Maybe you could just run through and aggro all the trash mobs then I could just nab the shard while he isn't looking or whatever. Anyways lets just get on it with it"

Him "Awe, can't, mom is telling me I have to clean up my room, thnx 4 grp, bye"

So a few weeks ago I found out Sigil Games were giving out beta invites for Vanguard to all those who had a Fileplanet subscription. I signed up for Fileplanet which was like six bucks and immediately cancelled. I had been looking forward to Vanguard for a year or so. They were promising wide open lands filled with things to explore. I thought the characters looked good in videos, armor looked very nice, a little too similar but nice all the same.

Now I understand betas are not finished product. I am one of the ones that geniunely tries to help the developers. I provide honest feedback on quests and spawn rates and everything. This game is literally 6 months behind in production. When I started beta it was 30 days before launch. Now bugs in games especially in online games are one thing but this game just didn't have things right. Spawn rates of mobs were terrible. There would be five or six people standing around waiting to kill a mob as soon as it spawned.

There was a quest in the gnome starting area to kill spiders. They would spawn like three at a time every ten minutes. You would see a shout and all these crazed gnomes with their knives and swords out running like hell towards these spiders. Very scary indeed. Also in these games it is important to have different types of enemies that are about the same level so that you can kill different things and they can have the same types of quests for different mobs. It keeps repetitiveness low. They didn't have that. You would get a quest and kill a certain type of mob then kill them for the next half hour to level. Then you would notice there aren't other mobs that are your current level to kill so you go back to the other mobs that are a level lower and grind kill those.

I see this problem as Sigil Games at first were going with an Ultra hardcore mmorpg alot like the original Everquest was. Somewhere along the way they stopped and thought of the following:

WOW - 6 million subscribers at the time
WOW - Not Hardcore in most aspects
WOW - Not a big death penalty in game

Vanguard - Hardcore
Vanguard - Not many other hardcore mmorpgs are successful past 500,000 subscribers
Vanguard - mmorpg players tend to always look for the next big game to try because they want something different and new.

Vanguard - We have screwed ourselves, we need to be different but alot like WOW as well.

So what you have is a mix of a hardcore grindy game that didn't really guide you along the way that got added with more quests and user friendly functions that blends as smooth as oil and water. The game will be good if they improve the new player experience and add more mobs to all that empty sprawling landscape they created and improve spawn rates. So I will be tempted to check the game out but it will be three or four months after it launches.

Everyone has a different opinion on what happened with Sigil switching from Microsoft to Sony but I would say Microsoft seeing the game was to hardcore and wouldn't trump WOW which is the only reason Microsoft gets into something, which is to kill the competition told Sigil to hit the highway. Sony seeing they would be able to get some hardcore players they had lost over time back into the fold and EQ2's reputation of not being the true sequal to Everquest decided they would add another game to their roster.

I have said it before and will say it again. If you are going to make an online RPG you need to stray that muthaf$%^&er as much away from WOW as possible. The market is already flooded with traditional fantasy mmorpgs as it is. Would it kill ya to maybe, Oh I don't know.......come up with something new?