It's good and bad.

Good: fun and interesting core systems- adventuring, diplomacy, crafting, pvp. Graphics are gorgeous, classes are interesting, etc.

Bad: way too hardware intensive, buggy as all hell, quests frequently don't work etc. Overall feeling of unfinishedness - stuff like the map window screams "NOT FINISHED" and there's a ton of stuff in game like that.

Overall: I think this game could be amazing in a couple months, but I think they are releasing it in a couple weeks. I don't think i'll be purchasing it at release, taht's for damn sure. Bonus is that it will be on station pass, so I can just upgrade my current eq1 account and pay only 10 bucks a month for it since that would be the only 2 games I would be playing. This game will be for people looking for something above and beyond WoW, but much more advanced than EQ1.

Thanks for the unique perspective.

_________________

It was fun yesterday after the patch. The kitty (kurashaa or something)newbie quest, the very first quest that you get, was bugged. The mobs that you had to kill were suddenly three dotters... which meant you couldn't solo them, needed a couple people to kill them. I felt sorry for the people that were creating a character for the very first time and got owned by the first mob they fought.

Givin was right that if you can turn it up to Highest quality, it's a beautiful game. Shame very few folks can actually do that. Still reminds me of a unix game ported to windows.
I may try this out at the end of the month. Gave up my halfass idea of trying the WoW expansion.

Bah Azzi, WoW expansion is pretty neat from what I have read / seen thus far. Everyone appears to be happy. Vanguard does have some tweakage you can use on the ini files and so forth to help your FPS. Then again, it isn't going to be near as nice no matter what you do without a certain level machine. Vanguard still needs about 6 months of heavy testing I believe. I think they'll get much better responses after they get about 150k subs running around on their servers. A lot of their issues will be exposed then. Hopefully, it won't put them under. Regardless how great EQ2 is now, their initial mistakes dug their graves. Hope they make not of that.

Muli

I am just waiting for it to be compressed and all that stuff. 18 gigs of stuff on my HD is a major no-no. I'll buy it, and play it, and keep the account just like so many other mmo's i've played. DAoC, Sb, EQ2, EQ1, Guild Wars, WoW.. DnD online, FFXI, and so on.... maybe one day it will kick ass and i will go back.

I believe it was Khan or someone that made an excellent point (assuming they are better than the current situation). The servers everyone is currently on are Sigil House Servers... they have not made the transition to SOE yet from my understanding. May have to get Migg to confirm.

Inside sources tell me that LOTRO are moving all of their stuff to their final locations . I believe it happened last weekend to start Phase 2.

Muli

The files won't be compressed past what they are now. 18 GB is nothing anyway.

18 gigs is a large chunk for just one game. Despite whatever you say, that's a lot of shit.

Didn't Miggent say things are going to be compressed/optimized before release? I'll take his word over yours.

Optimized yes, compressed? How the hell can you compress 18 gigs? Other than for download, the game will remain at 18 gigs++++++++ for installation.

I imagine it'd be like how every other game compresses files.... WoW w/ the .mpq things.

Isn't it like a .zip file? It just reads the content inside of it?

Would be cool if they did it, but they're too busy patching every single day and making everything not worth doing or too hard to do =p.

Yeh, you may be right. Hopefully the game turns out as wonderful as it could be...

btw, the game will come on 4 or 5 dvd's i guess? or ... 20 cd's? it's like old school Windows 3.1 and floppies.

Well, supposively whomever is in beta won't have to redownload, but you never know. And seeing how everyone can be in beta, or be given the website to download the client, I don't think anyone will be using the CDs/DVDs other than for the registry key.

Surely they can't be coming from that angle because why do any boxing / discs at all if they required broadband to play it?

There are reasons on both sides to get box copies and for them to release the product in that fashion.

1. If something ever happened you would not have to redownload it.
2. Organized way to sort/print account keys
3. Advertisting extras (ie guest passes, catalogs, etc.)
4. Proof of ownership
5. Prevent mass downloads (bandwidth and such)

That's what comes to my mind.

Muli

size of the game doesn't botther me much, i personally haven't filled up the harddrive on this PC since i stopped downloading music/movies.

Community will be a big issue for me to play vanguard, at least on the server i am on in WoW, the community is total shit. Maybe i was spoiled by what was present on Lanys?

Vanguard requires community, or else you won't be able tocomplete 80% of the stuff out there, most of the quests post lv15 require groups of 3 people or more.

sad but no they already transitioned over to new servers awhile ago if I recall. So that won't be helping the case. No debugging will though!!

I dont think well get many posts from Miggent since the release date is only 11 days away.

_________________
"Creating Havoc and Pie Since 2001!"
My Website: http://www.anthonyhays.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cakvala

I hope to god it's optimized. I run a dual P4 3.8 xeon with 4gig of ram and a 8800GTX, and i STILL couldn't put it to max.

I have a feeling we were playing without Dx10 optimization as well.

_________________
"I'm the best there is at what i do, bub, and what i do isn't very pretty"

That's weird Sola, because I have less of a machine than you do (Core 2 Duo E6300, 2GB RAM and a X1900XT, all overclocked) and I'm able to play in highest settings everywhere but the big city areas, then the hitching causes a slide show. (So I don't go to town much.)

The optimizations need to continue, but it's a lot better than it used to be. That of course, doesn't mean much to a person that has bought the game and logs in the first time, I know. The lead graphics guy on the game has said that optimizations will continue after launch until they get it right where they want it. He also said that most of the optimizations so far have been for the lower end computers, not so much for the higher end ones.

DirectX10 optimizations are non-exsistant as far as I've read. I run Windows Vista, but still had to install the latest DirectX9.0c update from Microsoft for the game to run. The game is running DirectX9.0c exclusively until the DX10 client is released. I wouldn't expect that for a good while though.

You guys have monster machines...

6600GT, Athlon 64 3000+, 1 Gig of Memory...

Jesus.

your computer is much more powerful than mine, skycrasher

p4 2.8, geforce 5200, 512 ram

i won't be buying vanguard until i buy a new computer, if that happens this year or not...

-cc

Oh and Sola, it appears there may still be some issues with the 8800 series of cards, at least from what I'm reading on the forums. Maybe Fin may have more information on it, I dunno.

Yeah I jsut got mine last week and I'm continuing to fiddle with it. The driver support right now is really kinda blase to be honest.

I think we won't see this card really shine for another month or so.

_________________
"I'm the best there is at what i do, bub, and what i do isn't very pretty"

AMD Athlon XP 2000+, ~1.7GHz
1gig ram
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 with AGP8X

rawr.

that computer sola is going to shine for a while, esp when dx10 comes out more prominently.

Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E6400 (2.13GHz,1066FSB) with 2MB cache
2GB DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz
256MB NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS
250GB SATA II Hard Drive (7200RPM)

That's what I have. I run it at the highest settings. It stutters a bit in cities but not enough to want to turn the settings down.

Yeah the 8800 seem to have a memory leak. Filling up the system ram used for video caching. It should not shutter that much.

Is the 8800 able to handle the current lag fest with the wyrms? Or are we going to need a 9xxx series? =p.

It's capable.
But there is a bug that make it a slide show when it should be smoother.

What is worrying me is that as late as Monday I was *still* having random crashes to desktop. I would be running along and crash. I hope that some of that will be resolved.

Well my last log in had my cleric bot getting full mana everytime i used my special melee attack that gives mana back.....if that is there during live im leveling up my damn cleric bot as a prime untill they fix it (magic 8ball says "no chance" of it still being there).


Tomorrow i work out of the house, going to get everything done early then optimize my computers and defrag and all that gay shit that fin will tell me what to do and yell at me on vent for not knowing wtf a jpegfjxafinbitemedpl.cpr file is. Then i load up for the weekend of 3 days with no sleep hopefully with mass amounts of totino's pizza, tostiedo' cheeze and chips and morgan and coke with a lil pina col's on the side!

Gona be a good day tator!!!

heh yeah that cleric bug is (was? haven't played in a week) funny

it sort of fucked me because i was going to try out all the healer classes but just ended up playing cleric since it was so hilariously overpowered - could kill anything i could channel a heal against

Was

So, upon release are the devs going to give back the newbies their quest armor with minor stats or no?

I would say no, but all you really need at low level is AC and a non suck weapon.

Even though it started looking like they finally balanced it so overall gear level was more signifgant for melee then just having uber weapon but when i ran through lower lvls on my cleric and my tank the difference between having a low noob weapon and a semi good one is just night and day.

Which kind of pisses me off because as a castor i have no ability to give myself such a mass increase by gear. The spell damage focus they had going was decent (its capped /rude but at lvl 25 if i recall before the last patch i had 300/270 which was 20% increase in damage. This was decent at least....but now they took a shit ton of damage focus off all items so in one patch i lost 150 damage focus.

But that is how its always been with castors so i cant bitch, i just had hopes for fucking once they could make it much more stat dependant or effects on items played much larger roles so it wasn't the typical model of having a melee have access to a good weapon and become a super stud and a castor has to have a complete good set of gear to probably have the same effective increase as just one item for a melee.

Which goes back to my point about the retarded anti twink system that still fucks with mains. Even if you were talking twinking here again....you get 1 stud weapon that takes 20% of your equipment ratio but has a HUGE ass effect on you, where as for a castor 20% items had minor amounts of upgrades for us, especially since they fucking killed damage focus and unless they changed it post end of beta "int" does complete jack for additional spell damage.

Thus the retardation of a system that allows one item that takes 1/5th of your total pts to have huge effect vs a castor item that does jack and shit for the same price. I hated level caps with all my heart but i rather see that in play then this.

And i have 2 reasons i bitch, 1) just the overall aspect of it nothing to do with my personal play, just like to see a better system in place.

2) ill be having a cleric bot that does crafting so it will definitely be lvl'n slower but it would be nice to pass on some of my stuff to them but the current system restricts it.

But in their defense they losened it up enough that you still can be pretty well equiped so its not a game breaker or anything, just a petty annoyance.

I remember when I twinked my warrior when he was low level (5-8), he could take on 10 mobs at once just because of the weapon and the awesome 25% shield.

So yes, I agree with you, that casters get the shaft since no weapon/shield can ever let em take on 10 mobs at once.

I'm just hoping they return the newbie quest armor as they were before, I mean they were not even overpowered, they had like +2 str, or +2 con and +10 hp and so on, simple stats that just made people feel "uber" by completing the quest.

By removing armor they really cut a lot of people actually 'sticking' with the game. "Boohooo I'm lv10 and my armor has no stats, and I'm so unlucky the 5% chance mobs have of dropping some armor never gives me shiat" I can see this happening to a large population of new comers and them deciding to leave because since they were not in beta they won't know that armor comes back at 11+ quests. Fucking devs. I rather have chimpanzees running the game (then again, this can be said for every single fucking game).

Wow I managed to log in to the character select screen and I have 100FPS and i'm limited to this max because I use Vsync with my monitor in 100Hz.

1600x1200
All slider to 100% very high etc... the release client look very ver fast compared to the beta... probably all that debug code removed. I can't wait to run around in game tomorrow.

Would that translate to better FPS for everyone or just for the 8800s and their glitches? being fixed?

I am pretty sure everyone. You can try, log on. You can reach a pseudo char select screen and then Press CTRL-P

Well i have a 8800 but on max settins i just logged into almost 130 ave fps at char screen (obv less in game id imagine but still improvements).

I haven't even done any ini file things so after many months of people bitching at least come release the good comps are going to truly enjoy the beauty that is VG. The real question is the computer next to me....if i can run that even medium quality with decent fps i will be tickled to death.

Oh it shows races stat break down now with tool tips.

They showed that tooltip for a while now.

Fin/turbo, what used to be your FPS before this new client on the character select screen? I can't compare mine to the new one because I didn't note the fps before =P.


edit---

Rofl, I get 30 fps on highest, and only 85 on lowest. I need a more powerful card =(.

It was like 30 - 40 at the char select screen before.


Edit -- yay! new patch 125 fps at this screen now with vsync off. And Sigil / SoE / Nvidia logo at the start of the game... I Could have lived without those eh.

Edit 2 -- Nm it had reset the INI so the game was set to 1280x1024.