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Choose My Adventure: Farewell, Vanguard

krystalle voecks
Contributor
Updated ·7 min read

It's been an interesting six weeks in Vanguard, but the time has come to wind down and leave the lands of Telon behind. From massive landscapes to odd bugs, it has been a varied adventure. For the final week I'd wanted to tackle one of the larger in-game dungeons as opposed to the mini-dungeons that Orin and I had been taking on, but sadly that wasn't to be. Despite attempting to look around in the LFG tool and sending requests over continent chat, I wound up spending the remaining time soloing or checking out things like player housing.

Curious about my final thoughts on this MMO? Join me after the break as I look over the last six weeks and give my impressions on the adventure you chose for me!
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As mentioned earlier, Orin wasn't feeling too well this weekend, so despite a valiant effort on his part to come guide me around for a bit, I wound up soloing most of the time. That's really not too bad, as Vanguard seems to have been designed so that if you find yourself soloing due to lack of groups, there are an obnoxious amounts of quests to do. Really, just sticking with Veskal's and moving out from there, I've never thought to myself that I was going to have to grind mobs just to get a level or two in. When it comes to quests, there is absolutely no shortage for adventuring. However, this solo-ability may be a double-edged sword.

Admittedly, over the last six weeks, I did get the odd invite for a group (sadly, quite a few just as I was logging off, or when I was working in another window) but trying to find a like-level group proved to be incredibly difficult the majority of the time. Indeed, had it not been for Orin running with my main character over the last several weeks, I dare say I wouldn't have seen the smaller dungeons we did run until I'd leveled to the higher-end of the applicable range and then pursued them solo.

Disciple is a great solo class, but, as I've said a million times before, I don't play MMOs to solo. I have tons of single-player games for that. MMOs essentially lock a certain amount of content behind "group" walls, and without a group you generally won't see it. I'm also a social creature who loves to get a chance to group. As such, it's not a good value (at least to me) to play a game that I'm blocked from seeing (or enjoying) in full simply because I can't get a group.

Indeed, if there's one major criticism I can level at Vanguard, it's that there are simply too few people in the lower levels to make friends or group with. That's not to say the game is a complete ghost town: Vanguard has a small but fairly active population in the game. The only problem is that most of them are L50+. If you're perfectly content to solo up to the higher levels, and don't mind the game being difficult, then I can recommend Vanguard to you most heartily.

As to why there may not be as many new people around, I'll be blunt. Vanguard is not a game that holds your hand and explains itself to you as so many other MMOs do. Vanguard is the pretty MMO coquette that keeps you guessing as to whether or not it likes you and wants you to stick around -- almost to the point of annoyance. It's also not really the type of game where you can log in for an hour or so and feel like you've made significant headway towards building your character up. Sure, the redesigned isle does a good job of explaining the game in broad terms, but beyond that you'd better be willing to post on (or dig through) the forums, or figure it out on your own. There is a rather obscene amount of minutiae that powers the crafting and diplomacy portions of the game -- so much so that at times it felt more like work and less like play to me. I'd also say you could Google for more help, but to be honest, short of finding the odd item description (which I could read in-game) what's out there is largely dead links, outdated info, or largely worthless for a newcomer.

Now, with that said, it's not all sour grapes. The landscapes are absolutely gorgeous. The handprints of SOE are all over this, as the game looks like a slightly different version of EverQuest II. The storylines are interesting and, as I've said many times, the sheer amount of things to do is mind-boggling. The community, while small, is very friendly, and are really a pretty shining example of why smaller communities generally tend to be better ones.

To sum up:

The good:

  • Tons to do between adventuring, crafting, diplomacy, harvesting and wandering around the world

  • While the world is large, quests are generally centrally located in each hub

  • Rift quick-travel system is excellent

  • The playerbase, while small, is friendly

  • Graphics are quite nice in an EverQuest II-type fashion

  • The Isle is an interesting (if a bit info-limited) tutorial that keeps lower-level players together so they can find groups.

The bad:

  • Death penalties (having to chase your gear, loss of XP, dragging "corpses") is old-school. The ability to recall your corpse to a bindstone is somewhat useful, but still doesn't conquer the annoyance of finding your corpse despawned while you were fighting through a dungeon to get back to it. I simply don't like harsh penalties in PvE.

  • Bugs: I hit a very bad bug with nVidia graphic cards causing the trees to strobe in and out. Considering this is a known issue for some years (turn off your hardware occlusion, folks) and still hasn't been addressed made me wonder why it hadn't. Beyond that, I managed to get stuck in terrain, rocks, and even stuck after taking a rift stone to the point where /stuck didn't work, and camping or rifting weren't options. (You can see that at 41:05 on the last livestream.)

  • The difficulty: The Isle does a good job at attempting to explain the game, but the overall game is just difficult. There's no getting around this point. While some people love this type of difficulty (as witnessed by the small but passionate playerbase in Vanguard) they tend to be the minority these days. In my opinion, this game feels like it was designed to be an updated EverQuest (including an extra helping of old-school difficulty), and it succeeds. However, if you ask many of the vets who love EverQuest if they want to go back to all the difficult, time-intensive, and often annoying systems that were in the game just to get to the nuggets of fun, many of them would say no after they'd had their 15 minutes of nostalgia. The ones that do want that difficulty are still playing EverQuest or games like it that predated Vanguard.

  • Population: Once you're off the Isle, it's very lonely for lowbies.

In the end, that's perhaps the best way to sum this up -- this game leaves me feeling like it's the love-child of EverQuest and EverQuest II, only without the benefits of either game's larger communities and updated mechanics. Could this game benefit from going free-to-play? Possibly. To be honest, with the current difficulty curve and lack of easily-referenced information versus dozens of more immediately rewarding fantasy games with bigger communities and more reference material out in the market, I'm not sure that would help.

Ultimately, Vanguard has the unenviable issue of being built for a old-school, super-hard PvE MMO playerbase that is either quite happy where they already are, or simply no longer have time to muck around with all that any longer, instead preferring to keep their difficult games in nostalgic "remember whens" over beers with long-time gaming buddies.

Join us next week as Jef Reahard takes over the reins on an all new series of Choose My Adventure postings, as always, dictated by you!