Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered

Sony are approaching their apparent relaunch of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes so I shouldn’t have been surprised to find an invitation to investigate how the game has changed since I left so many months ago. I uninstalled in what must have been June having left the game proper sometime around April. My reasons were two-fold, the negativity surrounding the collapse of Sigil Games Online which led to fears that Vanguard would be abandoned entirely made things difficult to carry on and this was compounded by the fact that the game simply wouldn’t run at an enjoyable pace on my less than state of the art machine. Had it run smoothly, I would probably have weathered the negativity and carried on.

It probably also didn’t help that I encountered MMO Burnout, that ever present condition that many MMO players suffer from which leads to us bouncing from game to game no matter how much we prefer one MMO over the competition.

So I reinstalled and returned to Telon to see what kind of progress Sony had made in the last half a year, with very low expectations. It has to be said that at this early stage my expectations have been well and truly exceeded, with performance having improved drastically even if it has some way to go. The grind has been lessened somewhat, it only took me a couple of days of playing to go from level 18 to 19, which was made far more pleasant by the fact that I could smoothly run the game on some attractive graphics settings. It’s still not as easy as World of Warcraft (which is insanely easy, so I wouldn’t want Vanguard to lower itself that far) however the edge has been taken off.

I think Vanguard and Sony deserve a second chance. Vanguard isn’t receiving the kind of attention lavished on EverQuest 2 but progress in improving the game has indeed been steady, with the first proper raid environment introduced. Even Ex Umbris who aren’t a raiding guild have been able to have a blast in the Ancient Port Warehouse.

In case anyone was wondering from an earlier post, EverQuest 2 just didn’t recapture my attention. Fingers crossed though that Vanguard can succeed in pulling itself back up, I would go out on a limb and say that it has far more potential than it did during it’s failed launch.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Gaming, Hobbies, Rayda Skaldensen, Dwarf Paladin, Vanguard : Saga of Heroes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.