Vanguard: What’s the Point?

Posted by Stropp on May 31, 2007

The last few days I’ve been revisiting a few of my MMOs. It’s been a bit of a housekeeping session. I thought it might be a good idea to get everything up to date with all the patches. So, I’ve downloaded the patches to Everquest 2, and World of Warcraft. I even had a bit of a play with EQ2 in the new zones with the Fae and their evil cousins. Very well done with lots of great content.

Anyway, it occurred to me that I should check Vanguard again. When I first tried it at release (Vanguard vs the 800 pound gorilla) it was in pretty poor condition, and I was going to give it a month or two and see what had changed or improved. It’s actually been four months since I first tried Vanguard (time flies) so I decided to do an update and have a go.

The first catch was the patching process. It was way less than smooth, certainly less trouble free than the EQ2 patching, and much longer than it should have been. After this was done, I loaded up the game.

My biggest beef at the Vanguards initial release were the graphical bugs. At that time, I had problems getting the resolution set to my native monitor resolution which made the game look like crap. The other issue was that whenever I opened a GUI window, the graphics would be corrupted for a brief time before the window appeared (in the wrong resolution) and then resized correctly. At the time I made sure to install the latest drivers.

Sorry to say. This graphics issues haven’t been fixed. The windows still have the graphics corruption. The screen resolution was still incorrect when I got into the game, and even with 2GB ram, I had to tune the game for performance rather than visual quality. Even worse, it was like pulling teeth just to open the settings window. I’d click on the settings button, the window would then open and immediately close. It took several tries to get it to stick.

Sorry Vanguard Devs. After four months, basic graphics bugs haven’t been fixed. This is unacceptable.

It’s no wonder there was no one playing while I was on. I didn’t see any sign of life on the chat window for the hour that I was on before I gave up in disgust.

It’s a pity. Vanguard had some good ideas. The diplomacy system in particular was a really good idea. I’m a proponent of mini-games in MMOs as a diversion from the main game. (I’d love to see WoWs fishing turned into a fishing mini-game, but that’s another topic.) But the implementation of Vanguard has fallen short, and if it’s left much longer before the issues are fixed, Vanguard will just fade away.

I doubt I’ll bother with it again.

 

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