Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered

With the new expansion for World of Warcraft sort-of-vaguely-possibly-maybe ramping up for Beta in the form of a competition for those with art skills (the prize being a replica of the Lich King’s Frostmourne sword and a guaranteed Beta spot) I’ve been delving in to the sad world of the World of Warcraft beta testers.

I’ve tested games in the past, including a good twelve months spent in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes prior to release which was sadly the most exciting twelve months of my whole time in the world of Telon. Every game community differs in it’s approach to Beta, some of them are well implemented, some communities consider it to be an elite club that only they should be a part of and some are for the most part free-for-alls. I’m used to the WoW community so had a fair idea of the stupidity to expect from it’s possible Beta testers yet my expectations were far exceeded.
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A few months ago I used my Station Pass (which was originally subscribed to for Vanguard and EverQuest 2) to jump onto the pre-boarding for Pirates of the Burning Sea. I have to admit that at the time I had an absolute blast with my British Naval Officer, Rayda Skaldensen (obviously taking a break from being a Dwarf for a while) who quickly rose to level twelve in time for release, just in time to procure himself a very admirable battle ship and one of the first you can acquire with front and rear mounted cannons for a full three-sixty-degree arc of death!

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.

Just a quick update for now however I’m just hearing the news that the inevitable has happened and in a big way too.

For months now it’s been rumoured that Sony Online Entertainment is slowly taking over at Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and that Sigil Games Online have been in trouble.

This article at F13.net claims that at 4:30pm [Pacific Standard Time] yesterday all employees of SGO were told to meet outside their offices, at which point their employment was terminated on the spot.

So over the next day we will probably see SoE take full control of the game, hopefully hiring a number of SGO former employees in the process and hopefully in the next year we’ll see the game become the success it should have been.

Only time will tell.