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.

Gameplay was identical to what is experienced in free Asian grind fests MMO’s. One set of “quests” (what a laughable thing to call it) had my character go kill about 12 small bears. Upon completing that task I was to go kill about 15 full grown bears. Another “quest” was to kill about 12 small wolves, then to go kill about 15 normal wolves.

Some tasks required gathering items off of the killed creatures, which is mechanically the same as the kill quests. You still have to take out 8 hoobas and 12 goobas. Or whatever the creature may be called. In one case I was to obtain a single femur from one of the aforementioned bears, and it took nearly two hours for that one item to drop. The reward was about 50 copper.

That’s all there was to it. One after another, on each character in each area that they reached the tasks were identical. The only thing that changed were the names of the creatures to kill and the number to be killed. Yes, it was as boring as it sounds.

The animations in Vanguard were just awful. I’m not even sure how to describe this.. the characters looked alien to the world. Take a high budget special FX Hollywood film and replace the actors with Barbie Dolls and you pretty much get the idea. I couldn’t help but to think of the characters in the Irth Online beta.

Combat in the game was just as dull as pretty much everything else about Vanguard. Send in your pet as a meat shield, cast your DoTs, cast your DDs, and repeat. My paladin’s play experience consisted of: turn on auto attack, hit taunt a lot, and hit the special sword attack button a lot too (which had an identical animation to that of a regular sword swing). He also had auras (buffs) to increase the defense or offense of group members.

The diplomacy is probably Vanguard’s only original idea, though it is in itself similar to other strategic card games. I will not describe the complicated mechanics of it, but what made diplomacy fun was that it really embroiled your character into the story and politics of their area. If you enjoy the RPG in your MMO then diplomacy is the way to go in Vanguard. Don’t bother with adventuring.

The bottom line? Do yourself an immense favor and get 9 Dragons instead. You’ll have an identical play experience (it’s a free Asian grind MMO), but at least the animations are really neat to watch.

~Steph