Adventuring is pretty standard stuff: go kill this guy, go bring me this item, etc. The fun part, thankfully, is combat itself. There is a wide assortment of skills and spells and the idea of chaining skills together in order to activate super powerful special abilities makes for a great time when battling enemies. Combat is a bit more strategic, and you cause damage (and lose health) at a slower rate than in most games, leaving you some time to plan accordingly.
Even your items are a bit different. The level of the item is, for the most part, not that important – it’s how much expertise it costs you to use it based on your skills. You can slap on a level piece of 20 chest armor when you’re at level 14 but it will most likely take up much of your expertise so you won’t be able to use much else.
Vanguard is not lacking for classes, races, spells, skills, items, and other tidbits that make characters unique. There’s an astounding level of variety in the game, particularly for an initial release. However, this epic design has its drawbacks. The game world of Telon is huge – downright enormous and there’s a good chance that you won’t be able to initially play with your buddies unless you all play the same race. The Orcs, for example, start on an island, isolated from other races.
A lot of the quests after you reach around level 12 or so are best tackled in groups (and none of the quests are instanced) and it can be very hard to find people depending on the race you are playing. On the server used for testing the game, finding a band of merry Orcs to do an elite group quest took a long, long time and a lot of patience. Even then, the notion that every Vanguard player is a mature gamer looking for a realistic experience is a bunch on nonsense. It’s an MMO and you’re going to play with fun players who don’t take things too seriously, and you’ll also run into social misfits who take it as a personal insult if someone messes up during a group quest. In this way, the game is very much like WarCraft. Sure, the death penalty is steep – you lose experience and are forced to do a corpse run, but you are not going to get around the fact that there are people that take these things a shade too seriously – even in a “mature” game like Vanguard.
In the end, as is the case with nearly every early MMO review – the true story of Vanguard has yet to be told. There is clearly an audience for this sort game, and the base design certainly has its share of interesting (and fun) concepts, but it was clearly not ready for public consumption. In the months to come we’ll take another look at the game to see where it is and how it’s faring – but for now, unless you simply cannot fight off the temptation or are a very patient player, it’s best to wait until most of the egregious bugs are squashed and Sigil has had time to put even the first coat of polish on it. - William Abner
