[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants

[Mike Rozak]

Lachek Butalek wrote:
> Hard to say without knowing what flaws you saw with the game. Care to
> elaborate on that?

These are my initial impressions of Vanguard. Be aware that I'm probably not 
in their target market:


The fundamental flaws in vanguard are:

1) Been there, done that. I've played many-many DikuMMORPGs and CRPGs where 
you run around killing monsters and making armor.

2) Been there, done that, with better specific implimentations, such as WoW.

3) Vanguard's unique-selling points (ships, vistas, flying mounts, diplomacy 
game) are not immediately accessible and/or demonstrated to the user. (I'll 
go into more detail below.)

3a) Although I haven't played with it much, the diplomacy game feels like 
it's bolted on. (More below.)

4) Vanguard's eye candy (shiny/bumpy surfaces, long vistas, and trees), 
whose purpose is immersion, is completely ruined by the wooden nature of the 
NPCs, including their lack of recorded audio, AI, movement, etc. It's 
further ruined by static monsters standing around a killing field. In movie 
terms, the design error is like producing a movie with excellent special 
effects, but lousy acting.

5) Because of said failures and an early/negative release, Vanguard is 
looking to be a niche game... but niche games don't get shelf space, and 7 
gig downloads don't get downloaded by too many people, especially if they 
just want to have a quick look. (At 100 kBytes/sec, 7 gig = 20 hours).



My initial experience:

I create a fox character (as described in my setup rant) and end up in a 
valley. Several things are wrong about the valley:

1) It's a valley! Where are my sweeping vistas that are USPs for vanguard?

2) Whoever created the valley doesn't actually know what a real valley looks 
like. Oblivion did a much better job of making their valleys look like 
valleys, and their mountains look like mountains, not rounded heighfields. 
(From now on, unless I say so, just assume that Oblivion did a much better 
job of everything, and EQ2/WoW merely did a better job of everything.)

3) This valley has elves standing around... that's all they do. Some of them 
are shopkeepers, trainers, etc, but they all look exactly the same, aren't 
standing in front of shops that would give away their profession, aren't 
standing near any building except a gazebo, and did I mention: they just 
stand around. They look real (except that they don't move), and it's very 
obvious that they're vending machines.

4) I talk to a shopkeeper for a quest, and he (or she?) spew some standard 
pre-recorded nonesense about "Are you lost?" or "If you only knew the power 
I had" that has nothing to do with the quest. The NPC then displays some 
small text next to them that describes the quest. I don't even bother to 
read the quest backstory because (a) I have no emotional attachment or 
belief in these vending-machine NPCs, (b) I don't care about the ugly 
valley, and (c) I've killed too many foozles already in other MMORPGs. Any 
work put into quest backstory is nullified. To me, the game is just a poorly 
modelled terrain with monsters standing around and waiting to be be killed; 
it has no meaning.

5) Of course, my quests are to kill foozles, but not in any new and unique 
way. The valley is filled with foozles that are just standing around and 
waiting for me to walk up to them and attack. (This particular scenario was 
stretched to the limit with the second character I created, where the NPCs 
claim "We're trapped by these monsters and can't get out!", but I can walk 
through a huge valley-floor of 100's of demons/gargoyles without them ever 
raising a finger.)

6) When I finally get out of the valley and into a "city", it has the same 
problems with NPCs standing around, except that there are 50+ NPCs, 
all-alike, standing around, pretending to be shop-keepers in front of 
non-existant shops. I can't tell which is which.

7) For my second character, I do a short diplomacy training tutorial. The 
game mechanics seem interesting, but it's not really integrated into the NPC 
interaction. Instead, the game is abstracted into a card game, and described 
as a card game... Why didn't they abstract combat into a card game too? When 
I enter combat with a monster, does the monster stand still and pull out a 
card table, asking me to select which card to play?

8) I could spend pages and pages describing a lot of nits that add up to 
fairly signficant issues in the end.

... eventually ...

My third character was a halfling. That startup zone was much better than 
the other two I tried, but EQII/WoW still have done a better job. And while 
hobbit holes with round doors are expected, they're a little bit cliche, as 
well as the elven "city" being in giant tree from the first character.

Even my short stay in the hobbit village uncovered sillyness: One NPC wanted 
some will-o-whisps killed for their fairy dust. Another one wanted them 
killed because they were scaring his cow (which was wanding nonchalently 
among the wisps). I got annoyed when WoW made me kill blue harpies, then 
green ones, then red ones. I got really annoyed killing the exact same 
monster in the exact same killing fields.



Again, my opinion:

1) Everyone who plays vanguard has killed more than enough foozles in their 
life, and cast more than enough fireballs. While monster killing might still 
exist in the game, it should NOT be part of the first 30 minutes of 
experience. As a general rule, monster killing should be a significantly 
smaller part of the game than it has been in previous MMORPGs, because (a) 
most players have long gotten bored with it, and (b) Vanguard has all sorts 
of nifty new USPs that players haven't gotten bored with.

2) Within the first 30 minutes, I should have seen an awe-inspiring vista. I 
have yet to see one. My first two characters appeared in impossiblly-deep 
valleys. Even the halfling village (a cliche clone of hobbitton) seems to be 
in a shallow valley.

3) Within the first 30 minutes, I should have been given an inflatable raft 
and started enjoying Vanguard's USP ships. (Or better yet, I could have 
built my raft using vanguard's crafting system, which I haven't been 
introduced to yet. Supposedly crafting is half a USP.)

4) Within the first 30 minutes, I should have had a ride on a flying beasty, 
even if it was an inflatable raft filled with helium. Again, show me the 
USP! You don't have to give me the dragon mount right away, but show me the 
potential. This is important for every game, but INCREDIBLY important for a 
downloaded game. In download games, you only have 15-30 minutes to hook a 
players, 20 hours of which have already been taken up by downloading 
vanguard!

5) If Vanguard had spent only half the money on the combat sub-game (which 
includes monster models, spell effects, combat skills, etc.) and put the 
other half of the money into dipomacy, they'd actually have a unique and 
interesting feature. (Oblivion's "diplomacy" game wasn't very impressive 
either.)

6) NPCs should be signficiantly improved, as per Oblivion.

I'm sure I could ramble on further, but this is plenty. Why the reviews and 
rants didn't point out these flaws is beyond me. Maybe I'm expecting 
something that a MMORPG isn't supposed/expected to deliver.