Deep Inside My Thoughts

I’ve talked about how much I enjoy playing Vanguard in a few past entries.   I still rather enjoy it, but the appeal is slowly wearing off.  Yes, Vanguard, the MMORPG that was supposed to put the hardcore back in gaming, is dying.  The game as it stands now, is nothing of what it was supposed to be.

Yesterday, Brad McQuiad, the creator of Vanguard, and President of Sigil Games made an announcement on a newly created Sony Online Entertainment forum.  This announcemnt basically confirmed the rumors circulating around the Vanguard sites that SOE would be forced to step in, and take over control of Sigil to get the game back on track.  In fact, SOE has a legal obligation to shareholders to do this, in the hope that they can recoup the investment they have already made towards the game.

Now, what hasn’t been made public is the extent of this ‘takeover’.   Will Sigil Games still exist as a company this time next month?  Or will SOE simply provide programming assistance to them, and hope that is enough?  These are the unanswered questions that everyone who play’s Vanguard wants to know.

Vanguard shipped early, due to lack of finances.   Essentially it was a sink or swim type of choice; either go broke trying to get the game ready, or release early with bugs and half-completed content.  Sigil Games chose the later.   This was the beginging of the end.

When release day for Vanguard came, I rushed to GameStop before work so I could get a copy.  All that night, all I could think about was getting home and trying this awesome game I had been waiting for, and counting the months til its release.   I wasn’t in any of the Beta tests, but I followed it from its website, and other game review sites.  Sigil promise us a world that none of us had seen since the original Everquest.

They promise a challenging game—a game that you could feel achomplisment in.  This was to be no World of Warcraft, for it was to be hardcore.  We were told of a massive world, with no teleportation systems, where you had to ride your horse or take a boat  to get to your end destination.  And most importantly, we were told that this would be just like the old Everquest, where we would try to kill the dragon fifteen times, and finally slay him, and feel so damn estatic when it happened.

None of it rang true.  It was all a lie.  Vanguard, which is build on the Unreal Engine, runs like crap! Anti-aliasing doesn’t exist on it.  My old Geforce 6800 Ultra video card barely gets 30 frames per second, and I have to have the graphics near low to get it to play.  But I could excuse poor graphics, and poor preformance, if only there was compelling content.

But there is none.  I fall through the world when walking on mountains.  I repeat the same quest over and over, killing the same 14 mobs for 3% of a level every nine minutes.  I’m forced to harvest plants and skin animals endlessly in the chance of a skill up.  There are dungeons I’ve walked into, at least I think they were supposed to be dungeons, where there was nothing.  No monsters, no loot, just emptiness.

All of this could be excused.  We were told to ‘keep the faith’ at all costs.  After the first month, when time for resubscription came up,  we were told that it was going to be a double xp weekend, to make up for bugs and losses.  Oh, and it’s going to start the day after you need to resubscribe! Sadly, it was a thinly veiled attempt to get more cash out of the community.  And we fell for it, even when bitching and pointing fingers.   We all kept playing.

I leveled up six levels that weekend.  I leveled up another four more the next weekend, when the same thing happened again, supposedly due to someone forgetting to send a mass e-mail out).  So we leveled faster than we planned on, thats fine, whatever, we can deal with that.   But we leveled too quickly, and found there wasn’t very much to do at higher levels, because none of the content had been finished.

There were tons of level 40’s in the same zone, killing everything that moved.  At least you saw people back then.  I would kill for a crowded zone now.  I’d kill for a group too.  Because of all the bugs that kept killing people, because of dying, and fighting back to your corpse, only to realize corpses were coded wrong, and you gained all your xp back fighting to your corpse, people left.  The world started to empty out.  Bad things happen when people can’t see that many other people on a game that’s four months old.

This last patch brought in another ‘wow-ification’.  Now that meaningful traveling on horseback and exploring the land was exchanged for rapid transit via a network.  All you had to do was visit each location one time, and you could return there at a later date.  It sounds exactly like…World of Warcraft.  And those people who wanted another WOW, they have another WOW.  I’m not one of those people.

I was Reconstructed.  I was in the top raiding guild on My Everquest server.  I meant something.  Everytime we killed something that we shouldn’t have been able to, I experienced a high.  I liked the challenge.  I liked sitting for hours in Kod’taz killing everthing that moved, just grinding alternate advancedment points.  In a way, I liked dying to some insane monster we tried to kill, and I remember fondly wiping the entire guild of 50 people when I screwed up.  Yes, 50 people died because of me, and six hours getting there were wasted.  But that’s what was cool about Everquest, and thats why Vanguard won’t furfil that high I once felt.

My subscription to Vanguard is up mid-month.  I’m  not so sure I’m going to keep playing. It might be best to vote with my money, pack up, and go else where.  I’ve been looking at EVE Online again lately.  I played the 14-day trial they offer, and despite Eve’s game mechanics being damn complicated and not user friendly at all, I remember it fondly.  EVE is one big huge server, not like the typical MMORPG where you have people divided up into 10 or twenty.  It also features more out-of-game conversation than Vanguard or EQ or anything else.  I’ve heard people say that the actual game of EVE is only 40% of the fun, the rest is on the forums.

And maybe thats what I need now.   Maybe I need a sense of community; a sense of belonging.  Hell, maybe I need another time sink.  Vanguard started out as a time sink I loved and enjoyed, but over the past few months, I despise it more and more.  Part of me really wants to see Sigil and ultimately SOE take a nose dive on it, just for the chaotic aspect of it.  But, I’ve invested 350 hours into Vanguard in four months, and thats alot of time to just throw away.

So what do I do?  Stay with the shitty game, or go to the cool ass Sci-Fi with ship-to-ship combat one?  Decisions, decisions, decisions.