| 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. |
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| I started the process on Friday. |
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| 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. |
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| 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... |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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! |
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| 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! |
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| What to do next? My choice - I turned the game off. |
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| 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! |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
