I have been thinking about how to word this post ever since they made the announcement that Vanguard would be shutting down and I still can’t seem to find the proper words. I played in beta and immediately fell in love. The open world was my first experience of the sort, and even though we constantly “chunked” across zone lines, it was still amazing to me. Yeah, there were bugs, but I never spent much time getting upset about them because I was busy having too much fun.
I was one of a small handful of guides for Vanguard for almost three years. Our job was to interact with players and run quests and events for them to partake in. Vanguard may have been a dying game but it had a fiercely loyal fan base of players who would log in and it made my day a lot more fun to see them interacting with one another.
Some of my favorite guide events to run included transforming all of the players into frogs and shooting them into the air. We had quests where we role played that we were zombies and were unable to talk, requiring players to some how cast a spell on us and “cure” us from our ailment. My favorite quest was a fortune telling one. Since I was a dark elf I would always tell a fortune about how the player was going to be meeting a beautiful stranger – and then proclaim the fortune telling device worked because low and behold, there I was, a beautiful stranger.
I stopped just before the announcement of its closure was made, and I have no regrets. I met some of the most wonderful people, explored some of the most beautiful zones I have ever seen, and my blood mage will probably always be one of my favorite characters to play. Finally a game that got healers right, where we could participate in DPS and keep a raid up. The crafting was top notch, complex but not too complex. I took pride in my creations. My house, which was there until the end.. I built by hand, brick by literal brick.
Goodbye Vanguard. You will be missed.
(Note: I had a post about Blaugust scheduled for today, but I’m moving it to tomorrow instead, so keep an eye out here for that).
Vanguard is one of those games that I never quite got into. I played it off and on and enjoyed what I played of it, but I was missing the large group needed to really dig into the content. Mainly I will mourn its loss because of the grand scale of world building that existed there. It was a really interesting environment to move around in, but at the same time that level of depth made it feel almost like too much to wrap my head around.