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Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

Beautiful landscapes, buggy game engine

Visually Vanguard is a very mixed bag - the concepts are fine and clearly a lot of work has gone towards designing varied landscapes and visually beautiful areas, but something has gone horribly wrong with translating the ideas to the actual game. Modeling, animation and the style of the art in general feels amateurish, and the engine's problems just make things worse. Vanguard's highly modified Unreal 2 engine is pretty advanced and capable of impressive things, but here it's painfully obvious that no amount of rendering code magic can hide bad textures and lousy modeling. The lack of any kind of terrain shadows is another huge issue; while character shadows are very nice, the illusion shatters when you combine advanced lighting effects and shading with the utter lack of shadows from any non-character object in the game. All together, the uneven textures, stiff animation and engine bugs make the game look unfinished and unpolished. Fonts and graphical UI elements also appear crude and unfinished.

In the reviewed version, the game engine has numerous silly bugs. For example, if you turn on High Dynamic Range (HDR) in rendering options, you lose all character shadows when you are standing on a objects such as rocks, buildings or underground areas, but they magically reappear as soon as you turn off HDR. If you turn up environmental shaders to maximum, you either get a corrupted screen (ATI), or you get huge rendering artifacts (NVIDIA).

Nice character shadows...

...which immediately fail as you step on an object.

All looks fine...

... unless you try to maximize enviromental shaders. Oops!

The water shader looks horrible during night and in underground, as the effect seems to be tied to a sky texture being reflected off the water - if there is no sky texture, or it's night, you get almost transparent effect that looks just wrong. Water also looks unnaturally clear when you are looking at it from above the surface, but as soon as you dive under the water, it turns into a blue soup.

Antialiasing doesn't work at all - there is no antialiasing option, and forcing AA in driver settings does not actually turn AA on in the game. Anisotropic filtering is also slightly bugged - you either have it off completely, or it automatically seems to wander to 16x setting, no matter what you actually choose. Fortunately, as a workaround, if you force it to a certain setting at driver level, it seems to work fine.

Same old, but with a few new ideas

The gameplay will feel immediately familiar to fans of the genre - most of the UI functionality is shamelessly duplicated from World of Warcraft. The quest UI actually goes one step further from World of Warcraft by offering a toggleable indicator that leads you to the quest objectives. While this speeds up questing and removes any need for quest information databases and player-created maps, it also makes things extremely easy and removes the requirement of actually reading quest lore and figuring things out the hard way - you simply select your quest objective and follow the indicator on your compass. Quests are mostly same old thing - kill some monsters, find some quest items, talk to some guy but all that is really lacking is polish.

Combat tries to be innovative by allowing limited movement while casting spells, but otherwise it's the same old system of auto-attack and firing off spells and abilities limited by cool-downs and available mana and/or endurance. In theory, combat is made interesting with finishing moves and counterattacks, but these features do not really differ from, for example, WoW combat. As a death penalty after level 7, when you die, all non-soulbound items, potentially including weapons and armor, stay at your tombstone at the spot where you died. At that point you have to run back to your corpse to recover your items, or alternatively you can pay in repair costs to have your corpse summoned to the respawn point. The problem is though, that death also causes non-trivial amount of experience loss. This drop is greatly reduced if you recover your corpse - so, if at all possible, corpse run it is - and you don’t appear as a ghost like in World of Warcraft. Say hello to Everquest-style corpse recovery horror - you will have to clear your way back to your corpse the hard way!

Item recovery from your corpse and experience loss on death - neither was a good idea when MMOs were young, and they remain bad ideas in my books. I guess Sigil is trying to entice the hardcore crowd with old school style pain on character death. Problem is, this works exactly as well as you can expect when you combine it with Vanguard’s buggy and unstable client and random server crashes. Due to this, most of the time you will be losing experience and recovering your items due to a death that was not caused by you.

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