What Happens In Vegas Stays in Vegas

Or so the saying goes. But what happens at Sigil, isn’t staying at Sigil. As I predicted, industry drama is already unfolding.

Over the weekend, one of the developers of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes dropped something of a bombshell about the events that occurred during Vanguard’s development. This forum post on the Fires of Heaven Guild message board goes into a lot more detail about those happenings. It reads like the script to a movie of the week. Drug addiction, lies and deceipt, and manipulation appeared to be part of the daily routine.

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Vanguard Server Merges Coming Up

A couple of months ago, Sony Online Entertainment announced that it was going to merge a number of the Vanguard: Saga of Heroes servers. The date for this has now been confirmed for Thirteen existing servers will be merged into four new servers.

At the conclusion of the merge there will be 2 US PVE, 1 EU PVE, and 1 US PVP server.

• Thunderaxe, Woefeather, Gulgrethor, and Hilsbury will be merged into Xeth. (PvE US) This will occur on the 28th of August.
• Targonor, Florendyl, Flamehammer, and Shidreth will be merged into Seradon. (PvE US) This will occur on the 29th of August.
• Gelenia and Infineum will be merged into Halgar. (PvE EU) This will occur on the 30th of August.
• Tharridon, Varking, and Frengrot will be merged into Sartok. (PvP US FFA) This will occur on the 30th of August.

For more information check out the news release, or the forum posts on the merges.

That’s a lot of merging going on. I have to admit though that I’m wondering if this will save the game. I don’t think Vanguard will be shut down if things don’t pick up, well not right away anyway. But if the merges don’t get the game world feeling more lively, it’s only a matter of time. After all look at Auto Assault. When I played the trial a few weeks ago it seemed there were heaps of players. Far more than I’ve seen in Vanguard. Still, NCsoft has recently shut Auto Assault down.

Whenever I’ve played Vanguard, I’ve never seen more than a few players on at any one time. This doesn’t give me the impression of a lively, dynamic world. And that’s what a MMO has going for it. Lot’s of players interacting to make my virtual-life interesting.

Getting more players together should make the world seem more alive, at least in peak times. And if the devs can fix up the issues, especially the technical ones, Vanguard might stop leaking players.

Let’s hope so. A game like this deserves better.

BTW, sorry for the lack of posting this week. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been a bit fluey, and while I’ve still been going to work, I’ve been pretty thrashed in the evenings. Hopefully things will start picking up as I shake this bug off.

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Vanguard: What’s the Point?

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.

Popularity: 19%

Vanguard Content Update 1

Some news today that Sigil are about to release their update #1 to Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. This update promises dozens of new weapon models, six brand new NPC races to battle, two new mid to high level adventuring areas, and nine dungeons with revamped art and/or lighting. Here’s a link to the announcement. It offers quite a few screenshots and accompanying descriptions for some of the creatures, weapons, and locations in question.

While new content is always welcome in a MMORPG, it does seem a little soon to be releasing all of this new content, especially considering Vanguard: Saga of Heroes was released in such a poor state just a month ago. Of course content doesn’t just spring from the imagination of the developers. Every sword, NPC, and dungeon takes time to design and develop. This new content would have been in development for several months before the game was released, and it’s now ready for primetime.

I do wonder if they’ve fixed up the problems that the game already has. I decided a few weeks ago, after only a few hours play, to put Vanguard on the backburner until it was playable for me. When I get a bit of time I might fire it up and see if some of the more heinous bugs have been fixed. If they haven’t, and Sigil are going the route of adding content without fixing bugs…

That’s the route SOE took with Star Wars Galaxies, and look how that turned out.

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Vanguard vs the 800 Pound Gorilla

World of Warcraft is indisputably the 800 pound Gorilla of the MMORPG ecosystem. It has a worldwide subscriber base of over 8 million players. It has just released an expansion pack that sold 2.4 million copies in the first 24 hours of release. It’s going strong and taking all comers.

Can anyone tell me then why Sigil Games and Sony Online Entertainment released Vanguard: Saga of Heroes in its current state, and against the recommendations of its beta test community?

In spite of some of the things that I’ve read about Vanguard, I decided to give the game the benefit of the doubt. I went to Sony’s web site and purchased the digital download. I then proceeded to download about seven gigabytes of install files. Once the files were downloaded I started the install. Unfortunately the downloads didn’t go well and the install failed. I re-downloaded the two corrupted files, two gigabytes each, and then managed a successful install. Yay!

Upon starting the game, familiar Sony Launcher dialog appeared and checked all the files before downloading the first update. Incidentally, the launcher always checks the files on startup even if nothing as changed. It’s a bit of a pain since it delays getting into the game. To be fair Everquest 2 does this as well.

When the game finally launches the next problem occurs. The screen blanks and the monitor gives me an Invalid Input message. This means that the video card is talking to the monitor such that the monitor can’t understand the signal. Okay. Alt-Tab doesn’t work. Restart the computer. The next attempt is better. The monitor still flashes up the message, but it quickly disappears and the game boots up normally.

Vanguard has a decent selection of races and classes. All up there are twenty races and eighteen classes. I created a Vulmane Dread Knight called Stropp. The character creation provides a whole lot of sliders to tweak your characters appearance. I think this is where it scores a point over World of Warcraft. I like lots of choice.

Getting into the game after creating my character was pretty easy. There was a little bit of lag, but it wasn’t too bad. I didn’t see many other players either, but being in an Oceanic timezone that’s not unusual. I did the first few quests without any problems, no complaints there.

Where I do have complaints is the user interface graphics. Every time I opened a user interface panel, it opened with completely corrupted textures. Random coloured snow isn’t something you want to see in a user interface. Moving my mouse over the panel caused it to resize and then display properly. This effect reminded me of some problems I had in Neverwinter Nights 2 before I updated my graphics drivers, which by the way are currently up to date.

The graphics didn’t really impress me either. I couldn’t play the game over the balanced setting, and on this setting I thought the graphics and textures were somewhat dull. My machine is just over a year old, custom built with a 3.4 processor, 1GB ram, and a 6600 GT video card. Not exactly cutting edge stuff, but it plays EQ2 like a dream, and EQ2 looks much better than Vanguard.

One part of the game that I did think was very well done was the Diplomacy mini-game. Sigil’s idea to use a card battle game to allow players to engage in non-combat gameplay is very innovative in the MMO gamespace. It’s always irked me that World of Warcraft, amongst other MMOs, implements non-combat gameplay in the most basic crude terms. Case in point, WoW’s fishing. That should have been implemented as a mini-game. Vanguard scores high here.

I haven’t really done more than scratch the surface of Vanguard yet. I’ve only spent a few hours, and have done a few quests. I want to spend some more time in the game and experiment with the crafting. I’d like to do a bit more adventuring.

Now back to my question. Why did Vanguard get released so early?

There are a substantial number of reasonably high profile games coming out in the next few months. These games, Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings, Stargate, Tabula Rasa, are all looking at World of Warcraft. They are all aiming to steal a few bananas from that big monkey. The competition is heating up.

It’s really important to impress your customers early. First impressions do count, and bad press can hurt. If your players are faced with bugs, they are going to complain. If there are other choices, they’ll take those.

So why release a game that is simply not ready?

Popularity: 52%

MMO Beta News

A couple of announcements were made today regarding current and up-coming betas.

Vanguard: SOH

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes have opened up their Beta 5. Vanguard is a very Everquesty style of game. The developers have attempted to capture the feel of the early EQ days, with the look of a modern MMO. You can access the beta by downloading it from Fileplanet.

While Beta 5 is not quite a public beta, you have to be a resident of the US to participate, it is open and the NDA has been lifted. So we should be seeing a lot more info about this game soon.

Tabula Rasa

Tabula Rasa has started taking applications for their first beta.

Destination Games and NCsoft are looking for a few good testers – and now is the time to enlist for the early rounds of Tabula Rasa
beta testing. We will be selecting testers based on system
specifications, game experience, location, and date submitted. Please
note that processing your beta application will take some time and we
have a limited number of beta slots available. Closed beta slots are
limited to players over the age of 18 and require acceptance of a
Non-Disclosure legal agreement.

My understanding is that the Tabula Rasa beta should up and running in about a month. At that time I expect that it will be a select few only to test the basic functions. Later beta phases will increase the number of beta testers accepted.

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