First impressions of Vanguard
stargrace 
My first human
So. Even though I know Vanguard has issues, I’ve heard about them almost none stop for months now, I decided to give it a shot. It’s part of my station access deal which I actually like. $24.99 a month and I have both Vanguard and EQ2 on there. Gives me some extra characters as well, and for EQ2 it means the adventure packs are free of charge. I’m expecting this price to go up over time though.
The game is pretty. I can run it very well on balanced settings, and if I go one higher I can still play but get a little lag. I have a brand new video card though, before I got it the game was barely moving at all. The world is pretty, but I found it lacking any sort of opening story. I sort of felt like I was plunked down “here you go, we need you to kill scorpions and collect weeds” right away. Only one of the ‘starter’ places seemed to have a story line where you work and beat some soldiers and then betray the emperor and get stranded naked in the next little area. I wish every starting character had something like that.
The games UI is exactly like WoW. Makes me wonder if they had to pay royalties it looks so much alike. In fact, a lot of it is the same. You hit escape to bring up the menu much like WoW.
I don’t like the fact that as you cast a spell, there is no graphic at all. It looks like you’re standing still until .05 seconds before the spell lands. So for half of my battles I look like I’m just glancing off into the distance.
The characters themselves.. well. They’re horribly ugly. Try typing the /sit command, and see what I mean. Who on earth actually sits like that? With their arms jutted out at 90 degree angles. In an mmo world, looks matter a great deal. Not that we’re all shallow and selfish people, but you want to play something that looks good, lets face it. Even if your view of what looks good verses someone else’ view is completely different.
I only played for ten minutes or so before I decided to give it a break. My eyes were starting to hurt from looking at the screen. Is there a mini map? Mine seemed to be missing the whole time, maybe we don’t get one and I just never noticed. It’s frustraiting to remember where my quests came from. Telling the level of some things was annoying too as I tried more then once to take on something one or two levels higher and they squished me soundly. I like both EQ2’s and WoW’s method of displaying mob level.
Anyhow, we’ll see how it goes. For now I’m on 30 days free before they start charging for it. It has potential, everyone I know says that. But who wants to wait 6 months for a game that’s already released to finally get some where.