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Second Wind: Vanguard
Welcome ladies, gentlemen, and small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri to the premiere edition of Second Wind, where we'll be taking you through the annals of time to revisit some of the past's greatest (and not-so-greatest) MMOs to see how they hold up today. In this installment, we'll be checking in on Sony Online Entertainment's Vanguard. Here's a quick backstory for you: Vanguard originally launched in January of 2007 when Massively was still months away from its inception, and it was a mess. Bugs as far as the eye could see! Believe me -- I know because I was there. I played Vanguard at launch and lasted about a month before I grew tired of the never-ending parade of bugs and glitches and left. In the six years since Vanguard's launch, it's been sort of the red-headed stepchild of SOE's stable of MMOs. Content updates have been few and far between, and most patches the game has received have been (sorely needed) bug fixes. And of course, the game ended up going free-to-play back in August of last year. Now, six years after my first foray into Telon, I decided to jump back into Vanguard to give the game a fresh look. Did I find a diamond in the rough or just a big lump of neglected coal? There's only one way to find out: Follow me past the cut!
City of Heroes re-review for Issue 12
If you haven't noticed, recently Eurogamer has been doing a series of re-reviews for the most popular MMOs, especially older ones. The City of Heroes/City of Villains games are a perfect candidate for this re-review, since they're a little over four years old now, and have just released an update. So in this re-review, Eurogamer takes a look at a few major points of the game, including the state of the server population, the most recent update entitled Issue 12: Midnight Hour, and their general view of how the game held up over all these years and where it could be headed.Their consensus for the server population is grim, stating that the game seemed empty in the lower-level areas. This is quite common in MMOs of this age, as high level "end-game" content is usually first priority on the developers' agendas. But perhaps the underlying point that Eurogamer reiterates to us here at the end of the article is the fact that Champions Online "will inevitably take its throne". That's a whole new blog post in itself.
