"Vanguard: Saga of Heroes" Beta Impressions

I was accepted into the fourth phase of the 'Vanguard: Saga of Heroes' Beta last week. I was pretty excited to be accepted into the beta. I have not played a MMO for several months - they tend to suck away my life (or, at least, my sleep!). The one, however, was reported to be 'casual player' friendly, so I thought I would check it out.

I started the process on Friday.

Before I could download the game, I had to apply for a 'Station' account (which is a Sony account) and a Vanguard forum account. A bit of a hassle, but OK, no problem. I fired up the bootstrap patcher and said 'Cool...twenty five minutes to install...pretty big, but OK. No problem'. To pass the time, I fired up 'Neverwinter Nights 2' and played my Rogue/Warlock for a bit while allowing the patcher to download. Note that, although many people have performance issues with NWN2, I was playing with the Vanguard patcher and WinAMP streaming tunes from my favorite internet radio station (DnDRadio) in the background without any glitches.

Anyway, after about an hour (my Warlock was on a roll), I checked on download progress. That's when it hit me - it was 25 HOURS remaining on the download, not 25 minutes (as I originally thought). Frak! Oh, well...

On Saturday morning, I didn't get a chance to check the download. Sometime during the night, the download server must have reset, stopping my download. I resumed the download (13 hours remaining). Oh, well...at least, I now had time to watch some playoff football.

Not wanting to make same the mistake on Sunday morning, I checked the download as soon as I woke up. Sure enough, there was a 'file mismatch' error and the download was again stopped. After a little tinkering, I restarted the patcher and was down to 30 minutes remaining. Sweet! The patcher finished and (after a quick detour to installed the latest and greatest version of Direct X) I finally connected with the game server! Total elapsed time for download...approximately 2 days.

Woot! Or...maybe not. As I watched the game initialize, I was thinking 'Hey, is that hand-drawn artwork?...it's not very attractive...maybe they are making a statement that this is a beta and is unfinished and the splash screen artwork is symbolic of its unfinishedness?' It be clever if that was the case. My musing was halted when I was given the choice to pick a server - which then took me to the character creation screen.

The character creation process is detailed and quite well done. The options are plentiful, from nose width to head size and from cheek height to waistline size. With patience, I think you could obtain any look that you desired(except for hair style, which was pretty limited). I created a very manly looking character (just like me!) and hit 'Finish'...which, evidently, removes all of your character customization selections and gives you the default character look. I knew I should have hit 'Save Template'. Sigh. Oh well...let's go into the game!

I entered the world. It looked a little dark, so I upped the brightness a bit. It might have been nighttime, but I couldn't really tell. I walked over to some of the NPCs and talked with them a bit. I was achieving about 12 frames per second, which means that my character was lurching around the screen and the controls were glitchy. Oh well - it was still playable and I could optimize for performance later. I decided that the manly man should kill something with his sword. I found a 'Level 2 Horse Fly' just outside of town, which I promptly smacked with my sword. 'Horse Flies' are evidently tough little buggers for level 1 manly men to kill, but I did eventually kill the insect. Yeah!

What to do next? My choice - I turned the game off.

Why? I was underwhelmed. Sure, I know it's not reallly a fair assessment - I mean, I was only in the game world for about 30 minutes. One could correctly comment that I barely experienced the world. That said, I am still unlikely to return. Setting aside the installation and perfomance issues, there was a lack of anything to immediately pull me into the world. It's all about First Impressions - and, they have to be GREAT!

In the MMO market, I think you have pull the player in - a great intro screen, a cutscene, a NPC that greets that player immediately. There must be some way to bring you into the world as soon enter the game; there must be some larger theme that is immediately apparent. Vanguard did not do this for me, and now I am gone.

Unfair? Sure. Sorry about that. I know that it is a beta and that Vanguard may implement all of these features at release. But, I have seen too many of these games go to market before they are ready, and they inevitably fail because of it. And, with the time requirements that a player must invest in this type of game, I can't settle for anything less that greatness.

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