All in all a pretty smooth launch

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All in all a pretty smooth launch

Post by Bubba Grizz »

At least from my perspective. I had no problems that kept me from playing very long. I have yet to experience a crash in prerelease or since live started. Best of all I am having fun.
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Post by MooZilla »

Same here. I really like the game so far. I have a few gripes, and at times the world can feel a bit... fake and empty. It's missing that epic feel that EQ always had, but i'll grow into it

Still, two thumbs up!

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Post by Midgen »

No crashes, no game breaking bugs (although the crafting issue that cropped up tonight was pretty serious... fortunately I wasn't working on it).

I've been having a ton of fun. So many choices for things to do when I log in...
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Post by miir »

Considering how unimpressed I was with this game in beta, I'm really amazed at how much fun I'm having.

I like that it's actually somewhat challenging. Combat is a lot more indepth than the button mashing of EQ2. There's very little of the handholding that defines WOW.

They must have done a ton of optimizations with the client in the last few weeks of beta. I can run at decent detail settings and still get acceptable framerates (on my below average system). The game looks really good.

The world is just gigantic.
Traveling around is not trivial.
There quantity of dungeons is staggering.
Diplomacy and crafting are so addictive.

Social server issues, elevator and group bugs need to be fixed.
The UI is just fucking horrible.
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Post by Ebumar »

DroxUI fixes the UI issues... :P

Otherwise, Miir is spot on in my opinion, and I've been in beta since p1.
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Post by Kwonryu DragonFist »

What server you all on?
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Post by Midgen »

I'm on Hilsbury with some friends from another board.
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Post by noel »

I'm downloading it now. I doubt I'll have much time to play, but $50 is worth it to check it out.

I checked the forums and there didn't seem to be any issues with running the game on Vista. If anyone is on the fence about purchasing an 8800, I'd be happy to let you know what the performance is like.
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Post by miir »

Theres a lot of old Veeshanites on Targanor.
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Post by noel »

Here are my thoughts so far (these are just my opinions, so don't jump all over my shit-- it's a post on a message board, not the fucking bible):

With my system, I can run it with every single option turned on, and it looks fantastic. The only time the game slows down for me is when there's hard disk activity, and occasionally the game will crash mostly when I'm really moving through the environment. It seems like the program's requirements for disk I/O are exceeding what my PC can do. By no means do I have a shitty disk subsystem, so I'm inclined to think this is a program issue. These crashes only happen once every few hours so while annoying they're not horrible, and I'd expect that they can be corrected.

The scenery of the game is amazing, and some of the NPC character models are really well done, but the character models for the different races are different, but at the same time somehow very similar. The character creation is really good, and you can definitely get the look you want. I went with a wood-elf shaman, and so far it's what you'd expect from a shaman except I'm a wood-elf...

The music is absolutely movie quality. It's fantastic. I'm going to actually say that it's too good, and feels somewhat out of place. The rest of the sound effects are good enough to not sound particularly good or bad. They're what you'd expect so that's a good thing.

The game itself... I'm going to say that this is the REAL EQ2. This game feels to me like a much more natural progression from EQ1 then there was from EQ1 to EQ2. I like the game, and see where it could be fun, but in the back of my mind I'm feeling the been there/done that that I feel every time I start playing an MMOG. This is a me thing, not a Vanguard thing, but I have trouble really getting into MMOGs anymore. If you're an individual that enjoys MMOGs, I think there's a lot to like in this, but I'll probably get bored with it, hopefully before my 30 days is up. :P

I will say that I think the diplomacy game is rather silly. Perhaps I haven't played with it enough, but it too did nothing for me. It's interesting I guess, but to me it's just a silly minigame within a larger game. My personal feeling is that if I wanted to play a silly minigame, I would have purchased a silly minigame.

There's crafting in the game as well. I haven't been exposed to it yet, but I really don't want to be. This too isn't a knock on Vanguard, but I feel like crafting is a huge waste of time, and the dev resources that go into crafting in ANY MMOG could be better used on other game systems. I think people that want shit like player housing, crafting, etc. should just go play Second Life of the Sims, and leave the rest of us with action oriented games.

I doubt you're required at present to participate in crafting, but I'm sure if I continue to play the game, at some point when they run out of content, I'll be forced to do some lame quest where suddenly my pottery skill or something lame like that needs to be a certain level to make something so I can make the latest uber-bow/spear/sword/shield/whatever.

If you're a hardcore crafter, I respect that, and certainly appreciate the stuff people like me have purchased from you in the past, but like I said if it were up to me, I'd leave out housing/crafting/silly minigames, and focus on the story, the lore, the charater models, and the gameplay. If you simply won't look at a new MMOG that doesn't include player housing, or if you think it's lame when there's not player housing, I pity you and wish people like you would have your keyboards taken away so we wouldn't have to put up with that hit anymore. For more information see: Star Wars Galaxies - Player run cities, etc.

Summary: If you liked EQ1, I think you'll love Vanguard provided your system can run it. Especially if you liked EQ1 and didn't like EQ2 or WoW I think you'll like this. This is really EQ2 done right.
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Post by Midgen »

Good post Noel. That about sums up how I feel about it, although I think its fair to give the Diplomacy and Crafting spheres a chance.

The card game for diplomacy does seem a bit silly, and I suspect it will probably be changed to something a little more.. appropriate? .. in the future. Right now I feel like I'm play M:tG or or Yuhgio or something.

Anyway, There will surely be quest lines that require one, two, or all three of the spheres to complete, and I believe that the future 'Player Built and Run Cities" will depend heavily on the Diplomacy system for factions, etc... There was even some talk of a PVP form of it, although I can't envision it myself.

Crafting will either suck or it wont. I actually like the way they implemented the harvesting and crafting skill trees, although my exposure to it is somewhat limited it.

Here are some screen shots that seem appropriate for this thread. (Mods, if these are too big, feel free to delete them and just leave the links, they were reasonably sized and "click to expand" for me when I posted them. Apologies in advance if the hosting is slow.).

This is "Midgen" actually using his lumberjack skill on this tree. For those that haven't experienced it, this animation is very well done, and after a fairly minimal effort, the tree will eventually fall over and can then be 'looted' just like a mob.

Edit: You may have to click these to see them in full detail. In my browser they are reduced in size to fit the screen, but can be clicked to expand them. I am adding a static link for those who may have images turned off:
http://hansenonline.org/images/vg/ScreenShot_00002.JPG
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This is just a screen shot of Midgen. He is a Wood Elf Ranger at level 8, still pretty much wearing all noobie stuff. This picture was taken just east of Ca'iel Brael (Im sure I spelled that wrong). You can see the tree city in the background of both pics.

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http://hansenonline.org/images/vg/ScreenShot_00006.JPG
These screen shots are .jpg's and are of fairly low quality as those go. My system is running at 1900x1200 with pretty much all of the settings pegged on Highest Quality (except far clip plane). Needless to say, these screen shots don't do the actual game graphics justice. In my opinion the imagery in the game is nothing short of stunning. Its just too bad you need a $500 graphics card to see them in full splendor.

I would also note that I did neglect to set the clip plane out before I took the screen shots, so please forgive the blue fog wall in the background. Operator error.
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Post by Kwonryu DragonFist »

Well, what sold it to me was that as a Monk you can choose three different masteries.

Dragon Mastery for those who want to do more DPS and have Point Blank AOE damage, they even used an attack i suggested, Dragon whips his tail (from Way of the Dragon with Bruce Lee!) :D

A nice PBAOE kick

-

Drunken Mastery for those who want to be off-tanks. Adds dodge and evasion as well as aggro-attacks to gain aggro from weaker chars etc.

-

Harmonious Body Mastery
for those who like to be more use to the group with buffs and debuffs. States and Weaknesses that open up great attacks for the other classes.

This is a damn good table for Who can make what weaknesses and who can take advantage of it.

http://home.swbell.net/coeurs/vgVuln.html

For example, click Monk and Warrior.

As you can see, Monks Deadly Adder Hand creates the Weakness Afflicted, which the Warrior in turn can take advantage of with Savage Cut!

Staggered Punch will make an opponent staggered which both the Monk and the Warrior can take advantage of with Crescent Kick and Brutal Strike.

Now add a Dread Knight and a Rogue to the mix heh

Enraged, Staggered and Vulnerable are those Weaknesses you want to keep inflicting so the peeps constantly can do their dastardly damage! :D
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Post by Fairweather Pure »

Post a site for a decent in-game movie or something please! The screenshots just make me think you all fanbois, or just have really really bad taste.

Sorry, I don't mean to shit up your thread, but please assure me that "the screenshots do not do the game justice" because those look fucking terrible.
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Post by Animalor »

Fairweather Pure wrote:Post a site for a decent in-game movie or something please! The screenshots just make me think you all fanbois, or just have really really bad taste.

Sorry, I don't mean to shit up your thread, but please assure me that "the screenshots do not do the game justice" because those look fucking terrible.
Well I never expected you to go faggot up a thread! :lol: :lol: :lol:
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Post by vn_Tanc »

Fairweather Pure wrote:Post a site for a decent in-game movie or something please! The screenshots just make me think you all fanbois, or just have really really bad taste.

Sorry, I don't mean to shit up your thread, but please assure me that "the screenshots do not do the game justice" because those look fucking terrible.
THat's pretty much exactly how the game looks. Moving it looks the same only a little more jerky ;)

Some of the scenery is nice. Most of the textures are awful and the character models are approx equal to EQ2.

The "omg the graphics rulz" comments tend to come from people who prefer realism and think WoW looks rubbish. Personally I think it's a matter of taste and you all ready touched on that in your post ;)
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Post by Janx »

Kwonryu DragonFist wrote:Well, what sold it to me was that as a Monk you can choose three different masteries.

Dragon Mastery for those who want to do more DPS and have Point Blank AOE damage, they even used an attack i suggested, Dragon whips his tail (from Way of the Dragon with Bruce Lee!) :D

A nice PBAOE kick

-

Drunken Mastery for those who want to be off-tanks. Adds dodge and evasion as well as aggro-attacks to gain aggro from weaker chars etc.

-

Harmonious Body Mastery
for those who like to be more use to the group with buffs and debuffs. States and Weaknesses that open up great attacks for the other classes.

This is a damn good table for Who can make what weaknesses and who can take advantage of it.

http://home.swbell.net/coeurs/vgVuln.html

For example, click Monk and Warrior.

As you can see, Monks Deadly Adder Hand creates the Weakness Afflicted, which the Warrior in turn can take advantage of with Savage Cut!

Staggered Punch will make an opponent staggered which both the Monk and the Warrior can take advantage of with Crescent Kick and Brutal Strike.

Now add a Dread Knight and a Rogue to the mix heh

Enraged, Staggered and Vulnerable are those Weaknesses you want to keep inflicting so the peeps constantly can do their dastardly damage! :D
Are you kidding me? Different styles?! Yeah I'm makin me a drunken monk I think. Gonna role play that shit up too.
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Post by noel »

vn_Tanc wrote:THat's pretty much exactly how the game looks. Moving it looks the same only a little more jerky ;)
Speak for yourself. :P E6600 and and 8800GTX is a nice equalizer. It's very rarely jerky on my PC and then only when it's thinking about crashing. As I said, it's once an hour at the very most.
Tanc wrote:Some of the scenery is nice. Most of the textures are awful and the character models are approx equal to EQ2.
I agree. The character models are either slightly better or slightly worse than EQ2, but not a lot better or worse either way.
Tanc wrote:The "omg the graphics rulz" comments tend to come from people who prefer realism and think WoW looks rubbish. Personally I think it's a matter of taste and you already touched on that in your post ;)
I would say that the environment, and even the models are kind of a hybrid between EQ2 and WoW. I do think the character models are just cartoony enough to look out of place in the scenery which is more toward realism. With everything maxed out, the scenery is just gorgeous. As I've already said, I'm not a big fan of the character models. Like I said if you'd gone from EQ1 -> Vanguard, what you'd see is what you'd expect to see.
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Post by Kwonryu DragonFist »

Janx wrote: Are you kidding me? Different styles?! Yeah I'm makin me a drunken monk I think. Gonna role play that shit up too.
Yeah thats what interested me in Vanguard, the rest of the classes i do not care about, but the Monk system with Jin (Ki / Chi / Qi) and three different Masteries was a dealbreaker for me.

Some Drunken examples

Drunken Style
Mixed Style, focused on evasion and powerful counter attacks

Drunken Mastery Stance

Attack Speed + 10%
Dodge + 5%

Drunken Sway
Dodge + 30%
Accuracy - 10%

Drunken Fist
Damage + 10%
Aggression + 25% (hate generation)

Beside taunt, better evasion,counters and such they [The Drunkards] also get the best Feign Death if i understood correctly.

-

Another thing i liked was Openers, Bridges and Finishers and Advanced Finishers.

Think Tekken etc :)
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Post by Bubba Grizz »

I haven't had any crashing problems since the game went live until last night. I attribute that to the fact that they were having some issues and needed to patch and the crash came after I got back on. I didn't bother logging in after the crash though because I figured it may be down for a while and I didn't have much time left anyhow.

A few things annoy me in the game, mainly aesthetic. First has to do with NPC voices. I can hardly understand wtf they are saying and when I do they are usually rude or comments that seem to be off a random list rather than a simple "hello" or some other greeting when you click on them. Another thing is the lack of a decent intro. WoW has some excellent introductions for new characters. I hate to compare games but when you tout yourself off as being the next "Evolution" in gaming you'd expect something more.

I have no beef with the graphics of the game. It is nothing more to me than "different". Some folks won't play a game due to the way characters look and that's fine. For me though it was never a matter of if I liked the cartoonish look of WoW or DaoC or the modeled look of EQ2 or VG. All that mattered was that I could tell which one was me and if I could tell the difference between my group mates.

Diplomacy for me was fun because it was something different. I never experienced that in a game before so the novelty had me interested during beta. The full effects of diplomacy have yet to be realized I think. Access to chunk wide buffs could make a difference if your raid is happening in that area or not. Also allowing access to certain quests due to your diplomacy skills could be a factor. I didn't persue this for live because I had my eye on crafting.

Which brings me to the biggest pain in my ass. Crafting. My goal when starting live was to be a dedicated crafter. Pick a craft, level it up, own the world with my leet skills. That would be all well and good but the game had other plans. The system itself is very cool and it works really well except for one thing, complications. During the process of crafting(which has too much detail for me to go into) you can get complications. These are resolved in a number of ways and are generally a pain in the ass as they are meant to be. I have no problem with that. The problem I have is with the frequency of which these complications occur.

Quality of a crafted item is based on an 'A-D' scale being A is the best and D is barely acceptable. It is not uncommon to get between 5-7 complications during a work order which will prevent you from ever getting close to B quality let alone A. As a result you either fail the work order or you get a product of lower quality and worth even less in exp or reward.

The truly frustrating part of this is that the Crafting Designers seem to think that this is all "Working as Intended". I suppose if by replacing any kind of Fun in crafting with Rage then yes it is working as intended. I will continue on in hopes that it will get better but I wouldn't recommend anyone with the intent on doing some heavy crafting to do so unless they have a big ol bottle of Mylanta at their computer and something nearby to punch.
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Post by miir »

vn_Tanc wrote:THat's pretty much exactly how the game looks. Moving it looks the same only a little more jerky ;)
Spoken like someone who hasn't played the game since beta.
There's been loads of optimizations and the jittery, chuggy laggy framerates from beta are long gone.

Some of the scenery is nice. Most of the textures are awful and the character models are approx equal to EQ2.
The environment is better than nice. I'm constantly in awe of how nice some of the environments look. I take screenshots but when I look at them later they really don't do the game justice. It's how everything flows together. Trees swaying, shadows moving, water rippling, lights flickering... the world just feels alive.
By comparison, WOWs environments seem like they were built to look good in screenshots. Textures painted with shadows, tinted to emulate coloured lighting, structures that look great from a distance but up close look like crap with their low res textures and jaggy angles.. nothing is really dynamic in WOWs environments.

I'm not sure how you can say the textures in Vanguard are awful. The detail, quality and resolution of the textures blows away everything out there.

The character models I guess are similar in quality to EQ2. I'm not a huge fan of them but they are very customizable and armor textures are very good.

The "omg the graphics rulz" comments tend to come from people who prefer realism and think WoW looks rubbish. Personally I think it's a matter of taste and you all ready touched on that in your post ;)
No, I think they come from people who can actually tell the difference between good graphics and low quality but higly sylized graphics.

Technically, WOWs graphics would have been cutting edge 4-5 years ago.
The engine doesn't do shadows, it has rudimentary lighting, no specular, low poly character models and low res textures.

I'm not being subjective.
Technically, WOWs graphics suck.

I know a lot of people who love the style of WOWs graphics.
I know a lot of people who play WOW despite the shoddy graphics.

I was tempted to pick up TBC but after looking at some screenshots, I just couldn't bring myself to play a game where the graphics make me want to gouge my eyes out.
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Post by noel »

If we're just talking about the environment graphics, there is NO comparison between the three games. Vanguard is superior in virtually every way. I'm looking at a screen right now with swaying trees, moving grass, moving water, and shadows that are nearly perfect for every goddamn thing. The only thing I'm not in love with is the character models, and even those are better than EQ2.
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Post by miir »

Noel, turn on volumetric clouds, max out shawdows and stand under a tree. :wink:
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Post by noel »

EVERYTHING is on and Maxxed out sir.

It's glorious.

I actually pumped up my system for Assassin's creed, but it's doing great in VG. :)

Edit: Anyone know of a way to view FPS?
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Post by miir »

ctrl+P
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Post by noel »

Thanks.
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Post by noel »

Averaging about 38-42FPS most of the time. :)
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Post by MooZilla »

Damn. Your machine must be a tank :D Mine starts lagging when i turn on Max quality. High quality does me just fine :D
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