VanguardFollow

They already made that game. It's called Final Fantasy XI.

My fiancee just bought Burning Crusade and keeps trying to get me into WoW. She gave me the free 10 day trial too, but we don't have the original install disks on hand...

Be ashamed of youself. You just sold me on trying the game out for many of the same reasons you have. I'll be going out to get it today. I just hope it's not as slow, FPS wise as some say.

I just made a toon and ran around a bit, and at least in the newb area, it runs way better than I expected after being inundated with horror stories for the past couple months. There was a bit of choppiness when I ran into a large group of NPCs, but nothing too horrible, and I haven't begun to mess with my settings yet, at all. I must say, I'm pleasantly surprised after my first few moments in-game, but that's all I have to go off of so far; about two minutes of running around like a dork. I'll write up a little first-impressions review after tonight when I can actually sit and play for awhile.

As far as my PC goes, I've got a dual-core AMD Opteron running at 2.6 gigs, 2.75 gigs of RAM, and a geforce 7600gt at 256mb. I was afraid the game would be totally unplayable, but I'm thinking I'll be fine. I even saw four other level one toons as soon as I entered the world, and they didn't lag me at all, and encouraged me that if there were four other high elves being born at the same time as me then maybe it won't be the ghost-town I'd heard, either.

I'm sort of giddy, and I wish I didn't have close to fifty animals to go feed right now, so I could start playing instead of laboring for the next three+ hours.

Yeah, from what I've read most folks who are satisfied with their performance have at least 2 gigs. The box I bought this week came with two gigs and I threw the .75 I had in my old PC in and am very pleased.

I've only played a little bit tonight so far, but got a half-elf bard named Luciano to level four and I'm very impressed thus far. I had low expectations, but still, the game is running flawlessly with the clip plane turned all the way up with medium-high settings. The game-play is pretty simple at this low a level, but I like how I can combine different elements into songs and then even name the songs. I have "Luciano's Lullaby", a regen song, and "Luciano's Little Ditty", a plus damage, plus dexterity and plus vitality song so far. It's kind of neat for someone who really misses their old carpal tunnel inducing bard from EQ to be able to selectively choose what effects to use. I'm going to experiment alot tonight with my race/class, though, and in the end I may not stick with bard, just because I want to have a reason to have a horse, and bards apparently run faster than mounts at level six.

The starter area for my half-elf was cool, though. I spawned on a white-sand beach, and in the distance there was a village of Asian-styled houses, many of them in ruins and burning. Some scary looking dude riding a dragon sat on the beach, and gave me quests to head into the village and stel from the poor villagers, motivate lazy imperial troops and, of course, kill innocents. All the while soldiers are killing these civilians and the townsfolk keep saying things like "I see the guilt in your eyes" and "It's not too late to change your ways". Then the commander has me kill these monks who he admits won't attack unless provoked, just to make me extra guilty. At last, I'm sent deep into the village to kill the old master, but when I meet him he's a totally enlightened dude, and he strips me of my imperial weapons and armor and ports me to a nearby fisherman village, where I set about on some quests to redeem my damaged soul.

I'm having fun. We'll see if it gets better, or worse, but either way I'll post here and infuriate those who could give two Shits what goes on in this game.

Edited, Apr 14th 2007 9:31pm by Barkingturtle

This is Vanguard you're talking about, right? The discussion seems to veer about at times. I wonder what V would play like on my system, with a P4 3Ghz, 2GB RAM and an ATI x1300 Pro.

I get that, too, not sure what the deal is with it.



I actually read on Silky Venom, I think, that removing a third gig could improve performance, but I went ahead and threw it in there, anyway, because more RAM has got to mean my **** is huge. If the game ran like **** I was planning on taking it out before I changed anything else, but since it's playing so well I'll just leave it in there, for now.

I tried out a high-elf bloodmage this evening, pretty cool. The high-elf starting area has you spawning underneath this tree with rotating rings of glyphs overhead and leaves falling all around you. The leaves were the best part, though, because playing in third person they would fall between my toon and, well, me, and it was one of the coolest 3D effects I've ever seen in a game.

So, what server you roll on, Git? I rolled on the one Bhodi suggested, Hilsbury, and was planning on rolling there anyway because I had seen a recruitment post for a PST-based guild. If you decide to roll a toon there, look for Luciano, in one form or another, I'll more than likely be rerolling over and over again in the next few days till I settle on something.

Look up a guild named 'Bane'.

Probably not a huge group but definitely one of the best groups I have ever played with in my MMO career. Bunch of old EQ1 types who played EQ2 then went to VG.

I am heading out tomorrow and will probably pick up the game, I know Git and BT are really fickle ***** who probably won't stick with the game longer than a month or two but I need something other than WoW and my attempts to contact Frys/Gamestops customer service to talk about the Lotro pre-sale was less than fruitful and finding an actual retail location with presale up here in canuckistan is worse than impossible.

Yeah, the half elf disciple I made is probably my favorite combo. The story lines (half elf starting scenario and disciple) just synch together nicely.

Gnome blood mage is fun, too. Druid is more of a nuke than a healer in this game, so quite a change there.

I picked it up today, patching as we speak.

I was less than impressed with the beta as well. Think I have been fairly vocal in my criticism of the launch and Brad McQuaids complete lack of business acumen. The simple fact is that WoW is killing me. I did it for two years on and off. TBC doesnt bring enough to the table to make me want to play it more.

Lotro, I might pick it up but my attempts to pre-order it have been more than a little annoying since I am in canada and not a single chain up seems to have it on pre-order and attempting to pre-order out of the states strikes me as a complete cluster f'uck waiting to happen, plus the shipping charge is obscene. So I will wait to pick it up when it goes live, to hell with founders offer.

So here I am at VG. Which is the game I want, challenging, incredibly deep, multifacted, involved and everything else that the MMO's out there aren't. However it is definitely full of bugs. Guess I will see if 4 months is enough to make it playable or not or if it is still a POS.

Just finished creating my race/class combos. Definitely looks and plays a bit better than when I was in beta but I haven't gotten too far into yet.

For those of you playing, here's my toons if you want to add them to your friends list:

Snorre - Dwarf Paladin

Haemish - Halfling Bard

Drunkyn - Half Elf Disciple

Whiffy - Gnome Necromancer

Skwish - Half Giant Warrior

Shrubbery - Halfling Ranger

Wallop - Gnome Cleric

Stryffe - Dark Elf Monk








Edited, Apr 21st 2007 1:31am by Snorre

That I am! I'll probably redo some over time as well. Current levels and comments:

Snorre - Dwarf Paladin - Level 13 - Will spend more time on him tomorrow night.

Haemish - Halfling Bard - Level 3 - Nice Halfling area and the bard seems like a really cool class.

Drunkyn - Half Elf Disciple - Level 7 - This may become my favorite class - monk fighting and healing all in one - very cool. Will spend more time on him tomorrow night. Too bad Dwarves, Gnomes and Halflings cannot be Disciples or Monks...

Whiffy - Gnome Necromancer - Level 5 (Oh..my...Bob...Necros are amazingly powerful - talking 2 shot kills every now and again on some equal level mobs). And the pet (abomination) is the coolest necro pet I've seen ever (looks sort of like Spiderman's Venom character). One criticism is the pet tended to wonder off/warp in one area and I couldn't get it to attack my target until it finally warped back - again, just in one area this happened...pet was awesome everywhere else I played.

Shrubbery - Halfling Ranger - Level 1 (haven't played yet).

Wallop - Gnome Cleric - Level 1 (haven't played yet).

Skwish - Half Giant Warrior - Level 2 (haven't played much yet, but pretty cool so far).

Stryffe - Dark Elf Monk - Level 2

I actually had a much better experience playing today than I did in the beta (towards end of beta). The various areas of the world I explored with my newbie toons was pretty impressive. Beautiful areas.

I'm pleasantly surprised they've improved so much - yes, it's still a bit buggy and has a ways to go on getting it more polished, but the bugs I encountered were tolerable if not trivial. My social chat system thing crashed once later in the evening, but I never was thrown out of the game.

Not many folks in the newbie areas - I think I came across maybe 3 people the whole night and that was one person per toon I played. I'm sure I'll see more once I get closer to civilization hubs.

Then end of my night was capped off by one of the goblin trainer npc's saying to me, "I don't care what she says, I'm not your daddy!" Hysterical.

Now to make time for both this game, LOTRO and WoW...oi!





Edited, Apr 21st 2007 1:31am by Snorre