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Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

Today there are two types of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). There is World of Warcraft, and then there is the rest. Every development team working on a MMOG has no choice but to try and improve on WoW in some way, or end up being discarded as low grade knockoffs. Blizzard has set the bar of entry to the market pretty high with their finely polished masterpiece, and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes tries to evade the ten ton gorilla from Blizzard by going for a niche market - the hardcore crowd.

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is clearly an evolutionary offspring of the original Everquest, duplicating many of its core flaws as important features. The Grind is back with a vengeance. While you could powergame a character to the maximum level in less than two weeks on World of Warcraft, expect to spend a lot longer here. After you get by the first few levels bashing newbie zone bunnies - which won't take more than couple of hours - the harsh truth is that leveling in Vanguard is a very time-intensive affair. Grouping is also effectively mandatory by the time you reach level 10-15, as most of the content after that is designed for group play.

Vanguard's world consists of three large continents, Thestra, Qalia, and Kojan. Thestra has its roots in ancient Europe, with medieval-style castles, and looks closest to a polished game area Vanguard has to offer. Qalia is inspired by middle-eastern history with deserts and Arabic-style palaces and lots of unfinished empty areas and non-tuned content. Kojan is the lame duck of the continents, drawing ideas from the orient. Only a very small portion of Kojan zones can be called ready for play by any standards. Across the continents, even the starting areas have wildly varying amount of work applied to them, and most of them are, at best, beta-quality. A player starting from a "wrong" area most likely either quit the whole game in a hurry, or figure the problem out and reroll a new character that starts in another area. Most of the higher level zones are also missing quests and monsters across the game world, and a large portion of each continent is blocked off and marked for "higher level areas" - probably for future expansions. In any case it's painfully obvious that Sigil simply ran out of time, and had to release a beta-level game into the stores for paying beta testers… I’m sorry, customers.

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is though extremely ambitious in its scope. The game world is absolutely immense, with massive land areas, 19 races and 15 character classes to choose from. Travel distances are equally daunting, and while the continents are not quite "real world scale" (it won't take days to walk across a continent), even with a horse that you can obtain very early, you will be spending a lot of time travelling across the vast areas. No flight paths, no teleporters, and the only way to travel from continent to continent is by boat. While Vanguard can show breathtaking vistas and boasts an engine that can truly render large outdoor areas with a stunning draw distance, it's also a non-trivial job to populate such a large world with landmarks, quests, NPCs and creatures in a way that makes sense and makes the world feel alive, and all is not well...

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