Anyone know how vanguard beta is ?

[darkeros]

I know there's a NDA, so if anyone has any comments that won't violate the NDA, please share.

I personally don't care much about following NDA's when it comes to mmo betas that already involve probably thousands of people, but I won't be the one to ask anyone to violate it.

 

[fatal!]

better have a high end pc.

 

[EvenLessSpam]

The graphics are great but requires a nasty PC. I have Athlon64 3000+, 2gb RAM, 6600GT/128mb and I'm running it at almost the lowest setting. Oh yeah, and make sure to have 20gb+ available, that's how much space it takes up.

Anyway. I only played it shortly because I still had stuff I could do in EverQuest (I usually keep to one game and one character till everything is "maxed out" there).

The UI is another WoW-clone. The quests I tried are also the type from WoW, talk to person A, he gives you quest to talk to person B. Person B asks you to collect stuff for him (which just happened to be stuff that is gotten by killing mobs in the area). Now that's about my personal experience with it Beyond that, those that played it a bit longer says it's a Lineage 2 kinda grind. You can't do anything solo, at all, beyond the newbie area.

 

[odessa]

I haven't played the latest beta but before that the game sucked really bad so I hope they changed a ton.

 

[wendel]

Well, I spent about 14 hours downloading the files(about 21 GB worth of files)
The game looks awesome, but one problem.
I get about 2.6 FPS which makes the game pretty much unplayable.

My system isn't that bad either imho, p4 3.2Gig/800FSB/HyperThreading <--- about 18 months old
2 gigs of corsair matched ram
320 Gig hard drive, about 260 Gigs free
Nvidia FX 5900XT Hoping that's the weak link, going to try and upgrade that in the next few days.
I even put the game down on low settings and still only got 4fps /sigh

 

[fatal!]

I can play it fine with my AMDx2 4800+ and dual gforce 7900's. Just noone I grouped with could keep up with me when we went somewhere.

the move to the SOE servers made things much better than they used to be, imo.

So far, nothing groundbreaking in the game. Seems decent.. but no reason to switch from anything you have time invested in.

 

[dobey]

same here, I was very disapointed so far, and my machine 3.4 gig p4 liquid cooled, 3 gigs corsair ram, and dual 6800 gts I get 10 fps if I am lucky. my vanguard folder (in same sony folder as eq btw) is over 24 gigs now. Game looks ok, but far from great, I think lineage 2 looks better, and the models suck ass imo. combat animations are 1989 as well, alot of work yet to do.

 

[Gondola]

I played to level 7 or 8... I just didn't find any motivation to keep playing. It's pretty and all, but nothing there to drag me away from my three EQ accounts.

 

[darkeros]

There isn't a game out today that I can't run with every setting turn on to the highest details, except vanguard. It's almost like they have some faulty software or something, because for the same graphic quality at their highest setting, I can get that same quality with much higher fps in other games.

 

[Ryzon]

It's still beta... They'll tune things after they got the mechanics down. Right now they're designing for tomorrow's hardware just like EQ2 and WoW did. I can now run both on my Geforce 7800 today at 1600x1400 at 30+ fps. I doubt they'll try exclude all of us AGP card people with 3GHz+ CPU's and 1GB of RAM to fork out a grand or more to upgrade to PCI-Express based machines just to play their game based on video card (the 7800 is the last and best AGP card nVidia will ever make). For that price you could buy both a PS3 and Wii and have money left over for games... I have a very high end AGP based system that plays all of todays games perfectly. If SOE expects me to fork out $1000 to buy a new PCI-Express based system (btw which none of the old components are compatible with, not cpu, memory, even power supply), I'll just skip on Vanguard. My current PC is plenty fast and I don't plan on upgrading until 64-bit is mainstream. I think there's a lot of people in my boat.

 

[darkeros]

Same here. I'm running a 6800 ultra 256 agp. F'ing card cost me 500 bucks and it rules everything I throw its way...except vanguard like I said.

 

[Ryzon]

Exactly... I plunked down a good $400 on the nVIDIA 7800GS OC because it was either that or buy a mediocre PCI-express system for $1000 that I'm going to have to replace with 64-bit system soon anyway. That's the best card you can get for AGP so might as well extend the life of my system. AOE III looks great.

 

[xierra]

There was very little content post 10 when I was playing beta. Basically, there were wide, vast expanses of absolutely nothing.

The character creation is a joke, too. The new Drakkin look better and have more options.

 

[ac1dgenocide]

i havn't followed up on vanguard at all, but does anyone know the release date of it or an estimate or any of that? I know a friend of mine is making a game called Never Ending Nights, or something like that. he had me log in and try it out and it was ridiculous. Graphics weren't great but they weren't bad either, the interface and interaction with your character was bad. i hope vanguard doesn't turn out like that!=( hopefully they're just trying to get people excited for release.

 

[TeachersPet]

I got a Vanguard beta invite, downloaded it, patched it and the next morning realized that I couldn't do more than create a character due to hardware issues.

I have faith in Brad and the gang will pull it together but as is for a Beta, I'm hearing that the game is found supremely lacking. Some have went as far as saying WoW's Alpha stages were better.

 

[Gondola]

The character creation is a joke, too. The new Drakkin look better and have more options.

Whatever you're smoking, you need to share. Character creation is pretty flexible in Vanguard. You can make some weird, and cool, toons.

 

[xierra]

Last time I logged in you had a total of three whole hair options per race.

 

[RaidNazi]

I've heard from a source (tm) that fairly shortly they will be revamping the game to try and address the graphic lag on older PC's.

But yeah I have a 3800+ Dual core, 7600 GT 256mb, and 1gb of ram and I drop to like 5fps in cities on low graphics settings atm.. Its pretty hard to play.

 

[jstbilly]

Open Beta was announced yesterday.
Game still ran pretty decent with all the new people logging in.
They changed the PVP server to PVE server until they define a def rule set.

Had around 2200 folks in PVE01 and around 900-1000 in PVE02 last night.

Lagged a little, but nothing that made it impossible to play.

 

[xierra]

They revamped the character models but the game still lacks luster and is boring once the quests run dry. There are vast open expanses of nothingness, very reminiscent of SWG.

 

[Tomahawk]

I have been playing Vanguard for about a week now. To me its WOW with a different name. The graphics are nice but most machines wont run it. It seems like a kiddies game to me, its so easy. It gets released 1-30-07. I'll be going back to EQ1 where the hard core gamers reside.