Finally, after a long waiting time, Vanguard, Saga of Heroes offers a 14 day trial. A chance for me to see if this game is so bad like everyone says.
And my verdict is: No, it isn't. At least not anymore.
Vanguard looks like it is nice MMO in the style of Everquest. And when you seek a primary PvE MMO with long quest where the journey is the reward instead of encouraging you to rush to the maximum level so that you can grind raids and instances then Vanguard is for you.
Okay, lets be honest. I couldn't see much of Vanguard as trial players are restricted to the new starting island, so I could only see the rest of the game. Still if it is like this island then it is good. And from multiple discussions with veteran VG players that is the case. The only difference is that the starting island is a bit easier than the rest of the game.
I guess you all heard from the problems this game had when it was released. Those problems were the reason for Vanguards bad reputation, which led to a large player exodus and server merges. Currently VG has four servers. Two normal ones, an EU server and a PvP Server (Free for all).
So after selecting your server you create your character, and that isn't as easy as it sounds. Not because the interface is unintuitive, but because you have a lot of options. There are a tons of ways you can modify the appearance of your character similar to games like Oblivion. Although I don't think many people will see how your arm/leg ration is in the game.
But first you have to select your race. And where other fantasy MMOs offer about 6 different races, Vanguard lets you choose from 19 different races from 3 different nations. Each race has different starting abilities, ability bonuses, a preferred diplomacy expression and racial power. But most importantly, not every race can select every class. For example orcs can't take any caster class while dwarves can only take the sorcerer as offensive caster.
The 15 classes are divided into 4 categories. Defensive fighters, also known as tanks, offensive fighters for some direct damage, healers and offensive casters which can range from simple direct damage to pet classes.
Some of those classes have an alternate mechanic. For example druids need special magic points for some abilities which only regenerate slowly while monks need to build up power during combat to use their more powerful abilities.
Vanguard offers enough variety to last for several characters. Also pure combat is only 1/3 of the whole game.
Vanguard is build around three different "spheres". The first sphere is combat. That works like any other MMO. You take a quest and go slay some monsters. The quests are mostly the typical kill&fetch quests, sometimes with a "use inventory item on monster" component. Luckily, most of them have a interesting story.
The combat itself is rather fluid as you retain full mobility while fighting and abilities activate rather fast. Overall the combat is enjoyable, but not exceptional.
More interesting are the two other spheres in Vanguard. Crafting and Diplomacy. The difference to other MMOs is that those things are not simply an add-on to the regular combat game. Instead you can play through Vanguard as crafter or diplomat. For example on the starter island the story arch was about a human village which was under attack by hobgoblins. As fighter the quests revolve around slaying hobgoblins and gathering information inside the enemies camps. As crafter you get quests to reinforce the buildings of the village, supply the NPCs with weapons or crafting and placing a explosive rune near the enemies cave.
The crafting itself is more complex then what you know from other MMOs. There are three different crafting classes, from which you can choose one. Blacksmith (Heavy armour and weapons), Outfitter (Light armour) and Artificer (Symbols, jewellery, furniture). To craft something you first need to have the correct workstation. In total there are three such stations for each profession. One for crafting raw material into a crafting resource and maybe enchanting them, for example making timber into wood boards enchanted with magical dust, one table to craft those resources into real items and one table to upgrade items.
Crafting is action point based. You have a limited amount of action points which you can use to perform different actions. The goal of crafting is to complete all crafting steps for the item while getting the quality as high as you can.
Each crafting process is divided into different steps. First you have to decide what you want to craft. Most of the time there is only one way to craft an item, but sometimes you have more options. Do you shape an opal into an oval or rectangle shape? Each shape is associated with a different attribute or resistance so you must already know what you want to craft, especially as not all types of jewellery can use all shapes. Here you can also decide to craft multiple items at once.
Next comes the cleaning and analysing process and after that the actual crafting. The last step is polishing. Each steps offers different actions, depending on your skill level. Each action increases the progress and quality by a different amount, require different tools or components and a different amount of action points. The problem is that once you complete a process, you can't go back and use those actions again. For example when the cleaning process has an action which adds a large amount of quality you can't use this action any more after you finished cleaning. That way you have to judge if you rather use the high cost quality action now, or save your action points and add quality later during the crafting process.
To spice things up there are also random complications. Sometimes your muscles cramp or your tool gets bend out of shape. If that happens you can either ignore it and take a penalty for a few crafting steps or try to remove this complication which costs action points and sometimes also requires a specific tool or component.
There are a lot of different tools in the game. Fortunately your character automatically switches to the correct tool if it is in his active tool belt You can have up to three tool belts and if the needed tool is in the wrong belt you have to switch them which also costs action points. Components are consumables used during crafting which are cheap and can be bought from NPCs. The problem here is that the workbench is not indefinitely big so you have to decide before you start crafting which components you want to have ready. Each recipe requires at least one component so that is a no brainer. But besides from that, do you want to have bandages at hand in the case you cut yourself or water to doze a eventual fire? Decisions, decisions.
As you see, crafting in Vanguard is complex and requires a lot more micromanagement than in other games. Fortunately you don't have to use your main inventory for all the crafting components. Each sphere has its own backpack and clothing which you change automatically. Also when you just want to do work orders you don't need any crafting materials besides the components. The primary resources are provided by the quest giver (as quest item). If you want to craft something for your private use you have to get the resources by yourself which leads to gathering (or buying them from other players, but lets ignore this for now).
There are four different harvesting disciplines in the game. Lumbering, mining, quarrying and harvesting. All resources spawn randomly in specific areas of the map, so you only have to click on them to start gathering if your skill is high enough. But there is a catch. You normally don't directly gather raw material, but scraps which can be converted into raw material. Every 10 scraps give 1 raw material. This is done automatically during gathering or by a simple click in your inventory. Additionally you have to decide when you want to stop gathering. You can only gather once from a node. When you start to gather a bar counts down from 100% to 0% which represents the chance for you to get a secondary material or enchanting dust from the node when you stop gathering. The longer you gather the more primary material you get. But in turn the chance to get enchanting dust or a secondary resource gets lower and lower. Its always a trade-off.
Each crafting profession requires two different resources. But as you can have two gathering disciplines you can gather everything for yourself if you want.
The third sphere of Vanguard is diplomacy. Diplomacy works like a card game. There are four different types of expressions, demand, reason, insight and flattery and you have several cards for each of those expression. The cards either give you a quick amount of influence with the downside of giving the opponent points in multiple expressions, give you points in one or more expressions, remove points from the opponent or give you a large influence boost, but costing you expression points.
You have a limited hand size depending on your level, but you can freely play every card from your hand. Each card also has a refresh time so you can't spam the powerful cards.
The goal of the card game is to reduce your points to 0. You do this by creating influence which slides the influence slider into your area. As long as the slider stays on your side your point value is reduced by 1 each turn and you see another sentence of the conversation. The opponent also has a point value which must not reach 0.
The problem is that some conversations don't allow a certain expression to be used. Sadly you can't have 5 different hands at the same time, one for each type of conversation. That means that before and after such conversations you have to rearrange your hand. A slight disadvantage of the diplomacy system.
Diplomacy is a full sphere if Vanguard, meaning that you can progress the storyline as a pure diplomat. Many opponents you meet during the story quests require a certain strategy as they have unique, powerful cards. Other than that you can also converse normally with other NPCs. That has two effects. You might either get informations and items when you win the conversation or increase and decrease some civic buffs.
Informations can be traded for diplomacy items at certain brokers and serve as a form of diplomacy loot. Civic buffs are city wide buff spells which can be activated by diplomacy. Each city has several possible buffs, some of them are competing against each other. Whenever you win a conversation associated with a buff, the value of that buff increases by one point while the value of competing buffs decrease. When a buff reaches 20 it gets activated for one hour. That means everyone entering the city in the next hour automatically gets this buff which also stays active when the person leaves the city again. The buff effects can range from increased attributes over faster walking speeds to increased harvest skills.
Also some dungeons require a good diplomat to unlock some doors for extra nice loot.
Those are the three spheres of Vanguard. And a character is not limited to one sphere, he can at the same time participate in all three spheres.
Now about the technical and stuff. The graphics look very good, comparable with Lord of the Rings Online and certainly better than what World of Warcraft or Warhammer Online has (unless the graphic was improved since the beta). The downside is that the performance is not all that great. Still even one low settings the game looks good. Just don't use a resolution below 1280x1024 as the UI is huge. The worst part of the graphics are the character models. They look rather lifeless, like dolls. Here is definitely room for improvement. Also the clothes look like they are glued to the characters skin. A bit of cloth simulation would be nice.
As I mentioned in the beginning, the game is primary for PvE gameplay. While you can do PvP (duels) or play on the PvP server, this style of gaming is not supported very well and most people playing the game have no interest in it. So for PvP gamers Vanguard is not a good game. But when you want nice PvE gameplay then you should check out Vanguard. Things to achieve in the game include building your own house on your own piece of land (no instances like in Everquest 2) or even build your own ship which you can steer over the sea. Or you maybe you want your own Griffon or Wyvern mount? The raiding at maximum level is a bit limited as there is only one big raiding dungeon is in the game but a other equally large dungeon is already in development.
Still, you can find Vanguard in the bargain bin for $10 and for that price the game is definitely worth it.
And my verdict is: No, it isn't. At least not anymore.
Vanguard looks like it is nice MMO in the style of Everquest. And when you seek a primary PvE MMO with long quest where the journey is the reward instead of encouraging you to rush to the maximum level so that you can grind raids and instances then Vanguard is for you.
Okay, lets be honest. I couldn't see much of Vanguard as trial players are restricted to the new starting island, so I could only see the rest of the game. Still if it is like this island then it is good. And from multiple discussions with veteran VG players that is the case. The only difference is that the starting island is a bit easier than the rest of the game.
I guess you all heard from the problems this game had when it was released. Those problems were the reason for Vanguards bad reputation, which led to a large player exodus and server merges. Currently VG has four servers. Two normal ones, an EU server and a PvP Server (Free for all).
So after selecting your server you create your character, and that isn't as easy as it sounds. Not because the interface is unintuitive, but because you have a lot of options. There are a tons of ways you can modify the appearance of your character similar to games like Oblivion. Although I don't think many people will see how your arm/leg ration is in the game.
But first you have to select your race. And where other fantasy MMOs offer about 6 different races, Vanguard lets you choose from 19 different races from 3 different nations. Each race has different starting abilities, ability bonuses, a preferred diplomacy expression and racial power. But most importantly, not every race can select every class. For example orcs can't take any caster class while dwarves can only take the sorcerer as offensive caster.
The 15 classes are divided into 4 categories. Defensive fighters, also known as tanks, offensive fighters for some direct damage, healers and offensive casters which can range from simple direct damage to pet classes.
Some of those classes have an alternate mechanic. For example druids need special magic points for some abilities which only regenerate slowly while monks need to build up power during combat to use their more powerful abilities.
Vanguard offers enough variety to last for several characters. Also pure combat is only 1/3 of the whole game.
Vanguard is build around three different "spheres". The first sphere is combat. That works like any other MMO. You take a quest and go slay some monsters. The quests are mostly the typical kill&fetch quests, sometimes with a "use inventory item on monster" component. Luckily, most of them have a interesting story.
The combat itself is rather fluid as you retain full mobility while fighting and abilities activate rather fast. Overall the combat is enjoyable, but not exceptional.
More interesting are the two other spheres in Vanguard. Crafting and Diplomacy. The difference to other MMOs is that those things are not simply an add-on to the regular combat game. Instead you can play through Vanguard as crafter or diplomat. For example on the starter island the story arch was about a human village which was under attack by hobgoblins. As fighter the quests revolve around slaying hobgoblins and gathering information inside the enemies camps. As crafter you get quests to reinforce the buildings of the village, supply the NPCs with weapons or crafting and placing a explosive rune near the enemies cave.
The crafting itself is more complex then what you know from other MMOs. There are three different crafting classes, from which you can choose one. Blacksmith (Heavy armour and weapons), Outfitter (Light armour) and Artificer (Symbols, jewellery, furniture). To craft something you first need to have the correct workstation. In total there are three such stations for each profession. One for crafting raw material into a crafting resource and maybe enchanting them, for example making timber into wood boards enchanted with magical dust, one table to craft those resources into real items and one table to upgrade items.
Crafting is action point based. You have a limited amount of action points which you can use to perform different actions. The goal of crafting is to complete all crafting steps for the item while getting the quality as high as you can.
Each crafting process is divided into different steps. First you have to decide what you want to craft. Most of the time there is only one way to craft an item, but sometimes you have more options. Do you shape an opal into an oval or rectangle shape? Each shape is associated with a different attribute or resistance so you must already know what you want to craft, especially as not all types of jewellery can use all shapes. Here you can also decide to craft multiple items at once.
Next comes the cleaning and analysing process and after that the actual crafting. The last step is polishing. Each steps offers different actions, depending on your skill level. Each action increases the progress and quality by a different amount, require different tools or components and a different amount of action points. The problem is that once you complete a process, you can't go back and use those actions again. For example when the cleaning process has an action which adds a large amount of quality you can't use this action any more after you finished cleaning. That way you have to judge if you rather use the high cost quality action now, or save your action points and add quality later during the crafting process.
To spice things up there are also random complications. Sometimes your muscles cramp or your tool gets bend out of shape. If that happens you can either ignore it and take a penalty for a few crafting steps or try to remove this complication which costs action points and sometimes also requires a specific tool or component.
There are a lot of different tools in the game. Fortunately your character automatically switches to the correct tool if it is in his active tool belt You can have up to three tool belts and if the needed tool is in the wrong belt you have to switch them which also costs action points. Components are consumables used during crafting which are cheap and can be bought from NPCs. The problem here is that the workbench is not indefinitely big so you have to decide before you start crafting which components you want to have ready. Each recipe requires at least one component so that is a no brainer. But besides from that, do you want to have bandages at hand in the case you cut yourself or water to doze a eventual fire? Decisions, decisions.
As you see, crafting in Vanguard is complex and requires a lot more micromanagement than in other games. Fortunately you don't have to use your main inventory for all the crafting components. Each sphere has its own backpack and clothing which you change automatically. Also when you just want to do work orders you don't need any crafting materials besides the components. The primary resources are provided by the quest giver (as quest item). If you want to craft something for your private use you have to get the resources by yourself which leads to gathering (or buying them from other players, but lets ignore this for now).
There are four different harvesting disciplines in the game. Lumbering, mining, quarrying and harvesting. All resources spawn randomly in specific areas of the map, so you only have to click on them to start gathering if your skill is high enough. But there is a catch. You normally don't directly gather raw material, but scraps which can be converted into raw material. Every 10 scraps give 1 raw material. This is done automatically during gathering or by a simple click in your inventory. Additionally you have to decide when you want to stop gathering. You can only gather once from a node. When you start to gather a bar counts down from 100% to 0% which represents the chance for you to get a secondary material or enchanting dust from the node when you stop gathering. The longer you gather the more primary material you get. But in turn the chance to get enchanting dust or a secondary resource gets lower and lower. Its always a trade-off.
Each crafting profession requires two different resources. But as you can have two gathering disciplines you can gather everything for yourself if you want.
The third sphere of Vanguard is diplomacy. Diplomacy works like a card game. There are four different types of expressions, demand, reason, insight and flattery and you have several cards for each of those expression. The cards either give you a quick amount of influence with the downside of giving the opponent points in multiple expressions, give you points in one or more expressions, remove points from the opponent or give you a large influence boost, but costing you expression points.
You have a limited hand size depending on your level, but you can freely play every card from your hand. Each card also has a refresh time so you can't spam the powerful cards.
The goal of the card game is to reduce your points to 0. You do this by creating influence which slides the influence slider into your area. As long as the slider stays on your side your point value is reduced by 1 each turn and you see another sentence of the conversation. The opponent also has a point value which must not reach 0.
The problem is that some conversations don't allow a certain expression to be used. Sadly you can't have 5 different hands at the same time, one for each type of conversation. That means that before and after such conversations you have to rearrange your hand. A slight disadvantage of the diplomacy system.
Diplomacy is a full sphere if Vanguard, meaning that you can progress the storyline as a pure diplomat. Many opponents you meet during the story quests require a certain strategy as they have unique, powerful cards. Other than that you can also converse normally with other NPCs. That has two effects. You might either get informations and items when you win the conversation or increase and decrease some civic buffs.
Informations can be traded for diplomacy items at certain brokers and serve as a form of diplomacy loot. Civic buffs are city wide buff spells which can be activated by diplomacy. Each city has several possible buffs, some of them are competing against each other. Whenever you win a conversation associated with a buff, the value of that buff increases by one point while the value of competing buffs decrease. When a buff reaches 20 it gets activated for one hour. That means everyone entering the city in the next hour automatically gets this buff which also stays active when the person leaves the city again. The buff effects can range from increased attributes over faster walking speeds to increased harvest skills.
Also some dungeons require a good diplomat to unlock some doors for extra nice loot.
Those are the three spheres of Vanguard. And a character is not limited to one sphere, he can at the same time participate in all three spheres.
Now about the technical and stuff. The graphics look very good, comparable with Lord of the Rings Online and certainly better than what World of Warcraft or Warhammer Online has (unless the graphic was improved since the beta). The downside is that the performance is not all that great. Still even one low settings the game looks good. Just don't use a resolution below 1280x1024 as the UI is huge. The worst part of the graphics are the character models. They look rather lifeless, like dolls. Here is definitely room for improvement. Also the clothes look like they are glued to the characters skin. A bit of cloth simulation would be nice.
As I mentioned in the beginning, the game is primary for PvE gameplay. While you can do PvP (duels) or play on the PvP server, this style of gaming is not supported very well and most people playing the game have no interest in it. So for PvP gamers Vanguard is not a good game. But when you want nice PvE gameplay then you should check out Vanguard. Things to achieve in the game include building your own house on your own piece of land (no instances like in Everquest 2) or even build your own ship which you can steer over the sea. Or you maybe you want your own Griffon or Wyvern mount? The raiding at maximum level is a bit limited as there is only one big raiding dungeon is in the game but a other equally large dungeon is already in development.
Still, you can find Vanguard in the bargain bin for $10 and for that price the game is definitely worth it.
First off, sorry for the English, if you can call it that, but its not my first language or even my second