May

16

Un-installed Vanguard just now

May 16, 2007 | Leave a Comment

I guess it was the recent announcement that Sony had acquired Vanguard developer Sigil Games that was the impetus behind the decision to finally erase the already dusty and unused Vanguard: Saga of Heroes from my hard drive. Not that I needed to reclaim the space for anything, but just because I figure that I likely won’t be going back in the near future.

I had already canceled my subscription because Sony decided to hike up the rates on their Station Pass, which I was a subscriber to despite only playing Vanguard at the time. I hadn’t even thought about it since then, I can’t believe that was only back in March, it seems like such a long time ago that I played it.

But to finally un-install it made me just a touch melancholic. Maybe it’s the rainy New Hampshire evening that’s got me a bit down already, or maybe it’s the idea of “the Vision” which could have been, but never quite materialized from the murkiness of the wonderful daydream that it must have been and that many of us at one time shared.

I can still remember how excited I was when Sigil Games was formed. At the time, I had even sent Brad McQuaid, the CEO, an exuberant email inquiring about possible employment, which he took the time to respond to personally.

I was excited for this game from the beginning, although I didn’t much care for the title. I heard the wonderful ideas and plans and I imagined great things to come.

Of course, I knew the reality would never live up to the utopian game I had imagined Vanguard would become, just as a movie seldom plays out exactly like you imagine it would from reading the book. There is always a lot which gets lost in translation. But even as I was ready to acknowledge that in my head, I still was waiting for something great.

When Sony took over the publishing role for the game, there was such a hue and cry among those who were excited about the game, and there was much hand-wringing done in the forums over the switch. It would be the death of “the Vision,” some said. And looking back, maybe it was. But personally, I didn’t see Sony as that much worse of a partner than Microsoft. After all, what wonderful Microsoft published MMOs have there been? Asheron’s Call? Sony almost seemed like an upgrade to me.

By the time I was selected for the beta on August 29, 2006, my anticipation was still running high. I spent nearly 2 days downloading the client and I completely quit playing Lineage 2. Once I had it downloaded, I found that my system couldn’t really run Vanguard all that well. I was using a AMD Athlon 3000+ and an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro in an AGP slot. I was disappointed in the performance and although I desperately wanted to play, the horrible frame rates made it nearly impossible.

So, I upgraded my system. Did I upgrade solely for Vanguard? No, but it was a factor. I bought a brand new Core 2 Duo 6600 to put in a 680i chip-set motherboard and GTX 8800 video card on the day they were released (November 8, 2006).

On my new system, the textures rendered incorrectly on the 8800 video card, but after a couple weeks it got sorted out and the game ran very well in 1600×1200 resolution. But although Vanguard was pretty, the game wasn’t compelling enough for me to stay interested in to test. The combat mechanics felt like a step backwards from EQ2 and other games, the world felt flat and lifeless and I just couldn’t get into it. I did like the diplomacy part of the game, but it didn’t feel integrated enough. I felt like a bolt on extra time-killer rather than a real path of advancement. I was pretty disappointed. So, I more or less dropped out of the beta a few weeks later and I imagined that there would have been plenty of angry folks on the forums to know that one of those coveted slots had pretty much gone to waste.

When the announcement came from Sigil in early January that the game would be released on January 30, I logged back into the beta to see what kind of progress had been made. What I found is that it was still a very buggy game. Even in the last stage of beta, each game session could be counted on to have a) a crash and b) at least one falling through the world episode. The forums were full of posts wondering what the heck Sigil was thinking rushing the release of a product destined to piss off people who purchased it and Brad McQuaid posted that the launch was driven by financial concerns and major work on game bugs could continue after that point.

I wasn’t going to bother with Vanguard, I knew it would be a mess, but against my better judgment, I bought it on release day anyway through direct2drive.com.

On my system, the released game was still unstable and would crash randomly or crash as a result of certain repeatable circumstances (like if I received two pieces of mail in my character’s mailbox… crash), but most of those bugs started disappearing by the end of the first month.

It took me longer to stop playing than it should have, I think I quit in mid-March. Ultimately, there wasn’t all that much which was new, different, better or whatever. I guess that realization came to me at a little earlier than it did to Sigil, but they soon learned that the wheels were off the wagon themselves a month or so later.

Then there was the announcement by Brad McQuaid which read more or less like an obituary for Sigil where he admitted that in retrospect, things should have been done better and that Sigil would need significant help from the Sony partnership in the future.

It really came as no surprise to hear today that Sony has acquired them outright.

I imagine that Vanguard fans out there will be hoping that Sony will attempt to right the ship, improve the playability of the game and make it relevant in the currently crowded MMO space. Someone let me know if they do.


 

 

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