Written by Jeff Buckland, 2/13/2007
Played on:
Windows
2GHz Pentium M CPU
2GB DDR2 RAM
GF Go 7800GTX Video
Minimum System:
2.4GHz P4/AMD CPU
512MB RAM
PS2.0, 128MB Video
20GB Free HD Space
Recommended:
3GHz P4/AMD CPU
2GB RAM
PS2.0, 256MB Video
It's been over two years since World of Warcraft has been released. Blizzard took the MMORPG world by storm with their game, racking up millions of sales and subscriber numbers no one thought possible. And since the release of WoW, very few American-made competitors have been released and none have had anywhere near the success of Blizzard's juggernaut. One might think that MMO developers have been scared to release something. Well, that's not really true; it's just taken developers a couple of years to come up with a truly competitive game to sit alongside World of Warcraft on store shelves. One such game is Vanguard: Saga of Heroes from Sigil Games and Sony Online Entertainment.
Vanguard's development team is headed up by Brad McQuaid, creator of (and much of the brains behind) the original Everquest. Back a few years ago after Sony bought EQ developers Verant and turned into Sony Online Entertainment, they actually fired Brad from his own company and game and he went on to form Sigil Games. Now, it's a pretty sad state of affairs that no one other than Brad's old "friends", Sony, would publish Vanguard, but let's just get onto the game.
Vanguard is a fantasy MMORPG with a massive world and tons of character classes and races to choose from. There are a couple of elves to choose from, Orcs, many flavors of humans, and one or two animal-style races. Honestly, if you've played a few major MMORPGs before, nothing will be much of a surprise here. Same comes with the character classes; there are holy warriors, sorcerors, monks, druids, and necromancers, plus quite a few more that everyone's probably seen before somewhere or another.
Character creation is more detailed than we've seen other past MMORPGs. You can change many body proportions and quite a few parts of your character's face, even if the end result for me always seemed to be something ranging from ugly to downright hideous. Once you get in game you'll note that every race has their own starting area, and sometimes these areas are actually built to show your character's "old life" and how it ended - then there's a rebirth into a new way of life in Vanguard.
The world of Vanguard is colorful and often lush, but there's just something missing in the art design that I feel holds the game back. There are few places that require you to "zone" and the overall look is one of realism rather than the cartoony charm of World of Warcraft, but I still feel that the world is missing something here. Maybe it's that charm, but I do know that whatever the world of Telon is missing, the worlds of Star Wars Galaxies didn't have it either. And with Vanguard's steep system requirements, you'll find that anything that's considered slow for today's games isn't going to be happy with Vanguard. On these computers, many of which do actually meet the minimum requirements on the box, Telon is going to look more like a muddy, boring version of every other half-made MMO world out there. When you see the "Recommended" specs, consider those the minimum instead.
And don't forget to clear up some hard drive space. Vanguard takes up a ridiculous 17GB of space on your hard drive, more than EverQuest 2 (plus all expansions) and World of Warcraft (plus its expansion) combined. It's not an issue if you've got 300GB free just sitting there, but if you're playing on a laptop it's going to make things tight. If you have a technical problem with the game, you'll find that Sony did supply a tech support forum (but no other forums). Unfortunately, no one seems to be finding many solutions there, and I've heard pretty ugly stories about cutting-edge computers getting iffy performance and even some players getting their CD-keys banned before the game even lets people make an account, which of course would be really frustrating since most stores won't take returns on opened games, so if you've got bad luck with technical problems, you might just want to pass on this one altogether. But for those that will be able to get into the game, let's talk about that some more.
