Vanguard was supposed to be a World of Warcraft killer. I've explored the game for many, many hours. I doubt that will be the case. The graphical limitations alone will do it in. It lacks FSAA (full screen anti-aliasing) and instead opts for HDR (high dynamic range).

Brad McQuaid will be jobless soon. Sony will end up taking over a failed game and take the brunt of the blame for it. The financial squanderings of Sigil are Sigil's own fault. Sony, stupid is as stupid does.

Gameplay

It's an MMORPG. It plays much the same as EverQuest, EverQuest II, and World of Warcraft. You get quests, complete their objectives get cash, experience, items, or any combination of those. It's relatively mundane, just like all of them. Primarily because the lower levels are always the worst to play.

Graphics

Fabulous environment. The visuals are outstanding. Although, on nvidia based systems you can't use HDR (High Dynamic Range -- see below) and FSAA (Full Screen Anti-Aliasing) at the same time. Hard edges are simply ugly on nvidia cards. ATI's higher end cards have the ability to do both HDR and FSAA. I'm betting the world is even more beautiful on those cards without the jagged edges.

They obviously spent a tremendous amount of time making a fantasy world where trees glimmer, and rocks shimmer. There's a metallic film on some rocks. Since it is supposed to be a fantasy world, I don't really question this. The water effects are really bad, though. The water looks more like transparent liquid mercury -- if there were such a thing. It jiggles more than waves. They need to slow down the procedures that generate their water effects.

After all the work they placed into the world on rocks, trees, fauna, and architecture... They forgot the single most important part of the game; the players. The characters in the new character creation screen look great, facially. Their bodies are horrid. They have extraordinarily high polygon counts on the characters. This means they could have used really advanced animation techniques (motion capture?). Instead, they obviously used industry standard hand controlled kinetics to animate the characters. This resulted in the most unconvincing elements to the environment; the characters.

The birds look like those wind-up birds you got at the state fair with the rigid wings. The player characters, and humanoid non-player characters walk like they're in bullet time, with an uncomfortable stiff object rammed up their south end.

How could they go to release and believe this game was all it was touted to be? Even in EverQuest the characters look like they belong in the environment. They're well grounded to the environment. They don't look like paper-dolls pasted in a scene. The shadowing is horrible. I felt like Peter Pan with my own shadow being a separate entity. They use all of that processor power, and require the high-end specifications; and then they use procedural textures to render the shadows? Why not use the actual lighting?

Perhaps they'll borrow the character animation technology from EverQuest II at some point and get it right. But I doubt it. And why? Because they repeated an inherent shortcoming that EverQuest had... a global model file. Only this time it's 3 gigs in size. Hardly something you want to ever patch again and require all of your player-base to have to download again.

So, can we expect a Luclin type of expansion where the characters finally catch up with the technology?

FSAA and HDR
(the oversimplified version)

If you look at a pitched roof in Vanguard you'll notice the angled edges are jagged. There is a way to fix this on all modern graphics cards. It's called "Full Screen Anti-Aliasing", or FSAA. What FSAA does is approximate the average color between the edge and the surrounding environment. This softens (almost blurs) the edges, making them blend more naturally with the surroundings. Vanguard, however, has no option for FSAA... Even World of Warcraft with it's infantile graphics engine has FSAA.

That brings us to HDR, the conflicting technology on most graphics cards. The very latest ATI graphics cards can handle doing both HDR, and FSAA. But, what is HDR? Well, HDR is how we live in the real world. It has to do with how we see things in very bright light. Until recently, this was a very costly effect to render. If you go outside on a sunny day and look out to the street there is a very sharp contrast between the lighting on the sidewalk and the asphalt. The sidewalk is very, very bright, while the asphalt is very dark and seems to just absorb light. The difference between those two lighting extremes is the dynamic range. The dynamic part is when you change angles. The contrast between the two will change based on the viewing angle.

I haven't seen enough daylight in Vanguard yet to judge HDR. I just know that with HDR I can't have FSAA. Both add to the realism. Frankly HDR is rather ugly without FSAA. I hope nvidia has addressed this on the latest cards.

Performance

First, the specs on my system:

My system is not overclocked in any way. Not the CPU, the RAM, or the GPU. It's all stock. The RAM, however, is under-clocked. For stability I have my RAM running at CAS3 instead of CAS2. That's because it's not really CAS2 RAM as Corsair claims. Rather, it is CAS3 RAM that tested stable at CAS2. In practice, in 3D games, the system is very unstable. This is my rant against Corsair; jerks.

I have everything except the "buggy feature" set to maximum. I mean everything is at the worst possible settings for performance.

Away from cities I get about 40 FPS. In cities it can drop down to 12 FPS, but only briefly. The average FPS in cities or crowded areas is 25 to 30 FPS. The game is definitely playable under these circumstances. Over time, I will discover which settings mean less to me and will start turning things down. With everything at minimum I get about 70 FPS constantly.

There has been a lot of whining on the Vanguard forums about it running poorly. Most of the whiners have minimally charged machines. For example, people with old low-end 5000 series nvidia cards, or people with old ATI 9000 series cards are complaining the loudest that the game is unplayable. I had no such problem. If I turned all of my settings to about half I was able to get it to run on an AMD2700+ (32-bit) based machine with an nvidia 5600 GPU. I was getting about 30 FPS no matter where I went.

The bottom line is the gaming developers need to push the envelope again. They can't keep back-stepping for the majority that can't, or won't upgrade their machines. Yes, I know what I said was backwards. They're ignoring the majority. Well, way back when, the majority felt women should not vote. But, a very vocal minority believed otherwise and were right (as in correct) in moving us forward.

Conclusion

The game is just as fun as WoW or EverQuest. The upside is that it does seem to attract a more mature crowd than WoW does. The immature will quickly burn out for the more instant gratification of WoW. I'll reserve final judgement until the game matures a bit.

We can't blame SOE for this one. In this case, they only distributed it. This was all Sigil's doing -- these shortcomings. The bottom line is it is not impressive enough for me to sacrifice the time I've put into my characters in World of Warcraft. I'll pretend the game is set for release in July sometime, and try again then. In the mean time I have to settle for the boring instant gratification of World of Warcraft.

I'd rather be in a world where there aren't so many miscreants, infants, and griefers. I think, like EverQuest I & II, Vanguard will be unattractive to the infantile weenies that are drawn to WoW. I can't believe that Brad "The Vision" McQuaid actually thinks Vanguard is even close to production quality work worthy of our $15/month. I am in the market for a new game. A sampling at work shows that quite a few are. There are 21 World of Warcraft players in my office. Only a handful were happy with the expansion (Burning Crusade). The rest are disillusioned that after 3 years, and $40 later this is all they got...

They long for the challenging days of EverQuest. Someone will demand they fix it.

I can hope...