When Saga of Heroes was released, the most common complaint was it doesn’t look good on my computer. Everything from frame rate issues, to vanishing character models plagued Saga of Heroes right from the start. The best anyone at Sigil could say was that it looked fine on their test computers and that any problems were probably the result of the consumer’s computer. The tech specs for Vanguard are a bit heavy for an MMO (20GB on the hard drive…where do we find such space?), but Jeff Butler insisted in an interview with Gamespy that anyone who could run The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on their computer could reasonably run Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. That may be true now that the game has been patched several times over, but oh boy do we beg to differ when it comes to the retail release.
We also have to mention FaceGen; as the name implies, it’s a piece of middleware from Singular Inversions that games can use during the character creation process. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion uses FaceGen to great effect (though sometimes with pug fugly outcomes), but we can’t say the same for Vanguard. A lot of the NPCs wind up looking the same because for whatever design flaw-based reason, FaceGen is spitting out faces that look a lot alike. And despite there being a multitude of races to play, there are only 4 to 6 different styles of hair, body, and clothing to choose from in each character model. Multiple body ratio bars provide a vague illusion of control over character appearance—but your eyes won’t lie to you when all is said and done. This really counts against Vanguard’s fictional world of Telon as the world is supposed to have three continents with distinct racial differences between all the races. Even the animal people classes look humanoid and have the same body models with colored fur slapped on. So while it would be a gross exaggeration to claim that all MMOs using FaceGen aren’t up to scratch with character models (*cough* City of Heroes *cough*) we can say it shows a lack of imagination.
Graphics continue to be a major issue beyond the character models. While nothing so far is as bad as it was in Beta (random changes in character appearance, antialiasing not being supported for widescreen, etc.), it’s still a bit unnerving to load into an area where all you see is some un-textured world geometry. This bug quickly corrects itself as the rest of the world draws in, but in the old days of the retail release, it was possible to spawn inside of the world geometry which led to all kinds of problems (and just looked plain sloppy). Aside from that, there is some slowdown when anything extremely pretty is happening on screen. Keith Parkinson’s artwork apparently requires a lot of computer memory to do it any amount of justice. It is worth adding, at this point, that even if the character models are hideous, and sometimes your frame rate drops, the world of Telon looks gorgeous. Sweeping vistas, jagged mountain peaks, and wide open ocean all provide a colorful experience that would otherwise be very immersive to fantasy fans. Too bad the loading screens don’t look as good.
The last thing we’re going to talk about is the Unreal Engine 2.0. The Unreal Engine has powered many a game, providing a great FPS experience—but as Vanguard proudly demonstrates, the technology can be applied to MMORPGS as well. Back in 2004, Sigil announced that it would be using the gaming engine giant as a platform on which to build outstanding content without having to create a unique gaming engine. Of course they planned to modify Unreal Engine 2.0 to better suit the needs of Vanguard, but ostensibly, the inclusion of this engine was supposed to streamline development. Clearly, that didn’t work out for Sigil as it was another 3 years before Saga of Heroes was released. And in that time, the Unreal Engine 3.0 came out and 4.0 is already being used in the development of many upcoming games. So, while Sigil may have missed the boat when it comes to having a revolutionary gaming experience by virtue of gaming engine, they’ve at least pioneered the way for other MMOs in the future.
The A.I. in the game is fairly standard. Buying a Sony Online Entertainment station pass will get you access to the game and may others for a decent discount. The U.I. is somewhat convoluted, but not all that different from WoW. Character creation screens are needlessly complicated and still a bit buggy despite the newly released patches. There were lots of other technical issues that marred Vanguard’s release such as missing content, unbalanced character classes, disappearing quest items, and other such gameplay nightmares. But most of these issues have been addressed in patches, so we don’t need to whine about them here. For a comprehensive list of everything that was wrong with Vanguard, we direct you to Google Vanguard anti-review and then you’ll get an eyeful of everything awful.
A Stillborn MMO