So… I spent a few days playing the Open Beta of Vanguard. It’s supposed to be released sometime at the end of January.

There are very many comments on the ‘net that describe this game. This post by “Manveru” sums it up nicely.

The graphics in Vanguard were generally ho-hum. They were nothing special and nothing particularly awful. While some areas did look very nice, such as under the tree at the high elf starting location, there was simply nothing impressive to the game’s visuals. Nothing about the graphics of Vanguard made me think, “this is a new game”.

In fact, the dark elf newbie area was a so boring to look at that I lost all interest in logging in to that character.

For the curious, I had the game set at the highest quality graphics option. The lighting options (Bloom, HDR, and Tone Mapping I think it was called) were disabled, and average FPS was between 12 and 20, depending on my character’s location.

Character customization was severely limited. There’s a slider bar that you use to select from a limited number of faces and hair styles. You can then use identical sliders to increase or shrink the size of the eyes, nose, mouth, and so on, but the end result is merely a question of how absurd you want it to look.

For example, there were characters running around in the game that looked as though their heads had been smashed between two flat surfaces, but aside from that oddity their faces were still the same as everyone else’s.

The body customizations allowed you to make the character fat, tall, muscular, and so on. These were better than the facial options and allowed some variance in your character versus that of someone else’s.

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It has been over a year since I last had anything to do with the original EQ. Even today I have no interest in that game. As I sit here typing this I find myself wishing that I had not logged into it tonight.

Not simply because I don’t like the game itself, but because I now sit here slightly depressed. It’s odd because I can’t quite put my finger on the reason, but it was a genuinely depressing experience. Perhaps I would have slept better had I not messed with it.

If you know me - and to be honest only the few of you who I know will read this - then you know that I can be very curious. I was sitting at the computer tonight trying to think of something entertaining when it occurred to me that I haven’t looked at the original EQ in over a year.

After asking myself several times if I even wanted to bother with it I finally allowed my curiosity to get the best of me.

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I commented on my system’s performance in my first post about EQ2’s “Play The Fae”. Using my single core 32-bit AMD XP 2.1 Ghz processor produced incredibly low frame rates, topping out at around 10 or so frames per second in Kelethin on the “Balanced” setting.

Jumping up to the Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 has been a great experience. Even installing it was fun as I had never dealt with a processor that has no pins. I was also impressed with the look of the stock CPU cooler.

The performance increase in EQ2 was significant. I was able to switch from “Balanced” to “High Quality”, and even tinkered a bit with the “Very High Quality” option. I feel that V/HQ would have been playable with faster RAM, but as it is, the system memory is one of the legacy components that I’m currently tied to. Loading objects (NPCs, tables, what have you) frequently caused the system to stop and think for a moment.

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The new processor will need something for stress testing. I’ll get 3DMark as usual, but I’d also like to see how it handles certain games. EQ2’s 3D engine is something of a beast, and what do you know, they’re running a new free trial called “Play The Fae”.

It needed a couple of days to patch (!!), but I’ve been tinkering with it a bit as I wait for the hardware to arrive. Here’s a screen shot of my little fae:

She’s pretty cute, though I am getting tired of the Barbie Doll style breasts in games. Why are people scared of women? ::shrug::

Anyway, the color of certain wing sets are customizable while others are static. The colors on these particular wings were customizable.

The hair selection in EQ2 is generally down right awful, but they’ve put more effort into the Fae’s hair. There were a number of them that I thought were kind of cute. I went with this style for that “short & spunky” look, but after seeing some of the other styles in the game I’ve wondered if I shouldn’t have made a different choice. It’s not a huge deal, though, because there are now NPC hair stylists in the game (judging by the tags under certain NPC names).

These fae don’t necessarily “fly”, rather they hover just above the ground (as shown). The good news is that they do not suffer fall damage. So you’re free to go floating off of Kelethin’s platforms to your heart’s content from any height that you’d like. Which I did.

Weee!

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My FFXII characters are now in a situation where they have encountered Judges from the Final Fantasy Advance setting - and in a none too polite manner.

In fact, I’m now in a situation where I need to grind levels for the first time during play. Since there are no random battles in Final Fantasy XII the experience grinding takes the form of walking back and forth between “zones” (or “maps”, if you prefer). Doing so will typically respawn the creatures on that map, though I have learned through experience that they do seem to eventually stay dead… eventually… on some maps at least.

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It has been a long time since I’ve played Final Fantasy Advance on the Gameboy Advance, so I didn’t immediately recognize the setting. FFXII, in short, is kind of / sort of like mashing Final Fantasy Online with FFA and making a single player game out of it.

In fact, it’s a lot like that.

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Today I set out to buy either Neverwinter Nights 2 or Final Fantasy XII Collector’s Edition, and NWN2 was not yet at the store.

So sitting on the desk in front of me is FFXII CE. ^_^/

It’s significantly different from any of the other FF games, with the possible exception of FF Online.

The similarities between XII and the online grindfest is that XII has no random battles. The monsters in the world are positioned in much the same way as they are in the online version of the game. Additionally, my character has found a few “wind stones” so far.

Also, you begin the game in a desert area and this reminded me a great deal of FFO.

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This is an interesting bit of news that I just noticed from my RSS feeds. May as well pass it along:

Vidgame adaptation rumored to be too pricey — It’s game over for Universal’s and Fox’s participation in the feature adaptation of Microsoft’s “Halo.” — Both of the studios that agreed to co-finance the screen adaptation of the popular Microsoft game have abruptly backed out of the picture.

Source: Variety.com article.

I completed my review of the TripleHead2Go and the Viewsonic VX922 LCD monitor. It’s now available on the MMORPG.com forums in accordance with the agreement that I made when I won the competition for this hardware. You can read it by clicking here.

Here is collection of 27 WoW screenshots that were taken at the widescreen resolution of 3840×1024. This file is essentially 12 MBs in size and each image has been converted into a JPG (otherwise these files would total about 400 MBs).

Download the widescreen images (click here) of World of Warcraft. Hosting provided by Filefactory.com. Hosting of the file is not permanent so you should get this archive sooner rather than later if you are interested.

~Steph