Vanguard: SOH; cheap and getting better.

If you are having a hard time finding a MMO to sink your teeth into and haven't found any to quite hit your fancy you can give Vanguard a try.

Its cheap at around 12$: http://www.amazon.com/Sony-Vanguard..._1?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1216089447&sr=8-1

Comes with a month free I'm pretty sure and has been improved A LOT.

Having been rushed out the gates by SOE, Vanguard was in fact extremely unpolished and had frequent server crashes and downright miserable performance due to poor optimization.


July was free for veterans, as SOE wanted to try and make some $ and so I gave it another free whirl with some friends.

The game runs SO MUCH better now and many of the annoying bugs are gone.

They have finally completely added in guild halls, houses, etc. And flying mounts as well i believe.


The main thing vanguard suffers from, at least on Sartok (FFA PvP) is a lack of players... 200 or so being high for a normal day. i hear PvE has higher counts, but I'm not a fan of PvE servers.

Vanguard was an attempt to bring the challenge back to MMO's, delivering intense group action against a wide difficulty spectrum. The penalty for dying to a monster is XP loss, signifigant at that, but if you retrieve your tombstone you gain back 75% of that lost.

This makes grouping different in comparison to say WoW due to the fact that nobody wants to lose a good chunk of hrd earned XP. Everyone tries harder or gets the boot.

For PvP, anyone can be attacked anywhere on FFA. If you kill someone with any higher level or kill someone at least 5 levels below you you get 15% of the money they were carrying at the time and cause them to lose item durability.

The level cap is 50 for all three spheres: Adventuring, Diplomacy, and Crafting.

Diplomacy and crafting are just as much a game in itself as adventuring.

Crafting is like a mini game to try and make good quality items, and diplomacy is likea mini card game to try and out wit the opponent in an arguement.


-- On a final note, VG can be downright gorgeous on full graphics, but I play at medium-low 1280x800 (the low resolution only because in some dungeons the framerates can drop dramatically from textures and mobs).

I'm a level 29 Dread Knight on sartok, come and join us and help the community grow if you have any interest at all.




My bard from when I played on my desktop over a year ago. (7900GS)

Medium-ish with laptop

 

Hmm i may give it another shot if you say it has come a long way. I played it first day it was out. Had a lot of potential, but so many bugs and performance issues i stopped after a week. Plus I didn't like how they showed how you get to a certain location for a quest.

We'll see, I guess.

 

Well you may still have the one month of july free.

 

I played on release for quite some time. I loved the game at first. First time I ran through Pantheon of the Ancients, I thought to myself "This is what I miss from EQ"
It had so much potential. Yes, the lack of players and marketing utterly ruined it.

 

Looks nice but with a busy life style like mine I am more of a fan of casual MMORPG's if any because sometimes I simply may have to leave and dont want a xp pentaly for dying if the phone rings or something

Being that its free and all I may give it a run thru just for the heck of it tho.

 

the lack of players is bad :[

It's only free for veterans of the game, and only for july.

As a marketing thing.

 

this game is "dead" the game has a horrible community!

 

If by horrible you mean small and annoyed, yes.

 

I don't know why...but recently most of your posts have become completely irrelevant.

I have two collector's edition Vanguard boxes. Me and my brother played for about a month but couldn't handle the initial bugginess of the interface, hopefully if I give it another shot things will be smoother.