Vanguard: Saga of Heroes


The Everquest designers return with a new world for hardcore massively multiplayer online gamers.

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By: Allen Blue

So there we are, killing a couple of giant bees on a cliff overlooking the city of Khal. Guildmates are chatting about traveling across the vast and magnificent landscape of Telon, the setting for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Someone jokingly suggests Druid Circles, which allowed players in the original EverQuest to teleport quickly around the world. Immediately, one guildmate responds: "I don't want any teleportation. The harder they make this game, the happier I'll be."

That's the guy who will call Vanguard home, six hours every day for the next three years. Sigil has created a game for hardcore MMORPG players who want full immersion in another world. While World of Warcraft proves you can attract millions with a polished but simple approach, Vanguard hopes to fulfill the dreams of MMORPG veterans with its intricate, challenging, and unforgiving experience.

On the back of the box, Vanguard encourages you to "set yourself free." You have lots of options: first choose from 15 professions and 19 playable races, then customize every detail of your nose, chin, arm length, and waistline. But once you jump into the game world, you'll see what they mean by freedom.

Whether you're in green and hilly Thestra, the jungles of Kojan, or the rocky deserts of Qalia, you're in a world that feels almost like a real place. There are no bright colors or cartoony textures; just hard, realistic scenery and natural geography. And you can explore it from one end to the other. It's a world that demands to be taken seriously, like The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Vanguard has set the standard for an immersive multiplayer game world.

However, that beautiful landscape has a price: poor performance. Even on a moderately powerful system the graphics are slow, and group combat in a dungeon against several foes requires turning off many of the visual effects that make Vanguard so beautiful.

The gameplay will feel familiar to anyone who's ever played a MMORPG, and especially familiar to those who played the original EverQuest. While the user interface borrows extensively from World of Warcraft, the game mechanics, professions, skill system, and even the typeface used for the name floating over your head come straight from the EQ playbook.

Vanguard does make several evolutionary changes to the MMORPG formula. In addition to standard MMORPG auto-attack combat, spellcasters can interrupt or even reflect the actions of enemy spellcasters, and tanks (tough characters that absorb the most damage) can target both a primary enemy and a group member to protect simultaneously. This, along with the fact that group members can see information about all of the monsters attacking them, may lead to a richer set of tactical options when fighting.

A set of crafting professions lets users create everything from armor and weapons to housing and ships. Characters can devote themselves entirely to crafting, gaining levels, and skills just as they do while adventuring. Crafting an item follows steps that a real craftsman would recognize, and work orders from a handy NPC let you build skills without burning all your cash.

Vanguard also experiments with a new kind of NPC interaction: diplomacy. Some NPCs will reward you with information or treasure if you can best them in a war of words. Both player and NPC enter a "parley" with five rhetorical skills, chosen from all those they have acquired. These skills are represented by playing cards, each with costs, attributes, and effects. By playing these cards, you try to keep the conversation in your favor. You and a few friends may even be able to shift the attitudes of many NPCs in a city, earning area-wide bonuses. But as it feels strangely artificial in an otherwise immersive game, the jury remains out on diplomacy for now.

If you're looking for interesting quests to propel you through the game, you may be out of luck. Only a few quests have storylines -- in fact, a backstory for the world itself is hard to find. The NPCs mostly give out brain-dead "kill 10 rats" quests, and those are poorly written and include uninspiring snippets of voice acting.

And the thin content is part of a larger problem: Vanguard feels like it wasn't quite ready to launch. While free of crash bugs, problems in interface, gameplay, and content abound.

But if you're an old-school player, or a WoW player who's ready to delve deeper into a more complex MMORPG, then Vanguard was made for you. Clear your calendar for the next 18 months and get ready to "set yourself free." But remember: freedom isn't easy.


Vanguard may be a very good game a few months from now, but it's not quite ready for prime time.

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By: Gerald Villoria

In the age of World of Warcraft, MMORPGs have become newsworthy for even the most mainstream of publications. Vanguard: Saga of Heroes was recently profiled in the New York Times with some interesting quotes from Sigil co-founder and executive producer Brad McQuaid. "People ask me, 'are you launching a finished game?' and the answer is 'no, we're launching a game that is good enough to launch, but it's not finished.' And that's why I love these games: because they should never be finished."

On this point, I have to respectfully disagree with Mr. McQuaid. By their nature, online role-playing games are constantly evolving, but they should still bear some semblance to a finished product. Even by the standards set by other games in this segment, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is plagued by more issues than the growing pains that all MMO's experience after launch. These issues are unfortunate for Sigil and SOE, as much of what the game currently offers is entertaining stuff and many players are having a great time exploring the world of Telon. The question now is whether or not players will be patient enough to stick to the game as it improves.


If you were a fan of the original EverQuest, or find World of Warcraft to be unchallenging to the point of boredom, then Vanguard was made with you in mind. It's a game for those who don't mind or even crave punishment when things don't go according to plan, for those to whom mishaps must be disastrous for victories to have meaning. You will be penalized harshly for character death. Many times in your adventuring career, you will find it difficult and time-consuming to fully recover from these deaths, having to trek back to your tombstone and then make up lost experience. Your level progression will take time, and it's slow going past the initial levels if you're not the type that plays well with others. While you can play Vanguard on your own, it's far more efficient to level in a group.

It can be difficult getting a proper group together, as one of Vanguard's main strengths is also one of its greatest inconveniences. The world of Telon is absolutely enormous. Characters begin in many different starting towns, divided by race, and unless players who know each other make a concerted effort to congregate to the same cities, it can be very difficult meeting up. There's a definite appeal to discovering new lands, and for some, the feeling of adventure would be lost if the world were shrunk by convenient methods of transportation that would allow the bypassing of so much travel.

With such a huge world to explore, it may be difficult deciding where to start, especially considering the wide array of race and class combinations available. Character races are divided into three groups, one group corresponding with each of Telon's three continents. Whether you decide to hail from Thestra, Qalia, or Kojan, you'll be able to choose to be a protective class, an offensive class, a caster, or a healer. Goody-goody Paladins and evil Dread Knights are protective classes, for instance, while the self-mutilating Blood Mages and Clerics are healers. Each class has a different approach to their main role, but all classes seem quite capable of handling their specialized duty. Character creation itself allows you to tweak a large number of sliders to select everything from your character's eye color to the size and lift of her bust. There are only four hairstyles for many of the characters (a point of annoyance for many fashion-conscious players) but aside from that, your avatars can be made quite unique.

If you have a high end machine, you're going to want to turn up many of the game's details to see the most that the game has to offer. Even on our office's high-end machine equipped with a GeForce 8800 GTX we still encountered stuttering frame rates and assorted other graphical issues. Trees would flicker in and out of view, and the clip plane distance was often auto-set to 0, forcing us to set our options to the default settings and/or restart. With all our details maxed out, we were still unimpressed by the game's bland textures. Vanguard takes a realistic approach to graphics, shying away from World of Warcraft's more cartoony feel, but the realism seems to have stymied the creative direction of the game's visuals. What should be gloriously impressive fantasy architecture instead looks uninspired. There are a few interesting set pieces to discover, but much of the game has you exploring muted backgrounds and boring environments ad infinitum. It feels like an awful waste of the 17GB (if you can believe it, the minimum system requirement is 20GB) that Vanguard is currently occupying on my hard drive.

That isn't to say that Vanguard isn't worth playing. This is the kind of game that one could easily spend a handful of hours of every day for the foreseeable future on and still not discover all the world has to offer. The sheer scale of it all is quite daunting. Dungeons aren't forty-five minute affairs to blow through on your lunch break; these are massive multi-tiered jaunts that will keep you entertained for an entire evening at the very least. There are few experiences as fun in gaming as clearing through a challenging dungeon with a good group, and the feeling of accomplishment one derives from doing one's part to keep the well-oiled machine running is hard to beat. Questing, on the other hand, can get old really quick, considering that most of the game's quests revolve around the repetitive killing of mindless creatures for body parts.

There are some interesting game mechanics at work in Vanguard, which bode well for the game's future from a combat perspective. When you or any of your party members gain the notice of an enemy creature, and it becomes aggressive, a window pops up making it simple to lay down some crowd control without fumbling with mouse clicks around a crowded melee. Casters and tanks can set defensive targets as well, allowing you to concentrate on the action without constantly staring at bars for targeting purposes. Much like Final Fantasy XI, there's a system of chained attacks that comes into play, and the best groups play off each others' strengths in order to fight efficiently. There's even a free-for-all PvP server available for those who really enjoy a challenge, where players can steal a portion of your coin and otherwise ruin your day.


Besides adventuring, there are two noteworthy pastimes for budding adventures. The crafting system is quite deep, involving the use of many different reagents, tools, and skills. Whether you choose to make clothing, craft weapons and armor or even build a boat for your guild to travel on, there are plenty of opportunities for you to toil for hours over a workbench. You can even fill out work orders without providing your own materials, allowing you to raise your skill without doing all the time-consuming harvesting, if profit isn't what you're looking for. Currently, crafting is incredibly difficult due to a high rate of unfortunate events that may occur, but it's likely that this is being tweaked.

The diplomacy system works like a miniature card game of sorts, where you play against an NPC in order to play out a conversation. To win a conversation, you need to play cards that provide compelling arguments and assertions. You can build a five-card hand custom-tailored to the type of parley you wish to engage in, and it's quite fun once you get the hang of it. Unlocking bits of conversation at a time through this gameplay mechanic is an interesting way of handling some of the more story-driven quests in the game and it's a shame that you can't engage in diplomacy with more of the NPCs that you encounter.

There are no official "community" forums for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, just an SOE technical support forum, currently overflowing with complaints and bug reports from the retail release. These range from the aforementioned graphical issues that require extensive configuration of the game's settings in order to work around to problems related to the chat servers and issues zoning from one area to the next. The list goes on and on. Don't expect a sympathetic ear from the player base as well, especially if you let on that you've played World of Warcraft. It's hard to find any newbie zone that doesn't have its own street preacher proclaiming the virtues of his newfound game and the evil that is Blizzard Entertainment.

As a former EverQuest junkie, it pains me to see an unfinished product like Vanguard: Saga of Heroes released before its time. There's potential for a very good game here, and we've had our share of both highs and lows with the gameplay, but the sheer number of gameplay bugs, graphical issues, and poor technical performance make it difficult to recommend in its current state. It's clear that the developers are working hard to improve the game every day, but at best, the day where it might get a strong recommendation is still far off in the future.

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