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Topic: Vanguard is live. (Read 149907 times)
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Morat20
Terracotta Army
Posts: 18529
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The bridgge that joins the wetlands and arathi highlands.
I vaguely recall being around there as I leveled -- I think I ended up shuffling between there and Duskwood, so I know I missed a lot of quests.
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Venkman
Terracotta Army
Posts: 11536
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Every MMOG has that wow-gee quest moments. WoW is replete with them, as is EQ2 and as was what I saw in my limited time with VG. I particularly liked the, err, Eastern-themed race (kojan?). Awesome beginning, great story, the sort I wish WoW had. They really don't. There's no big shockers in WoW except when you first see someone like Ragnaros in Molten Core. I don't think there's anyone I know who hasn't, upon first seeing him, gone "holy crap!". Half the time they do that in guild/raid chat :) In any case, good for VG pushing so much of the creativity with quests and stories in the early levels. I think only the Human and Night Elves in WoW had anything even close to resembling fun/neat/twisted/unexpected elements in early quests (the fact that I can still remember the Buzzbox quest line in Auberdine from the first beta is telling). They did a bang-up job with both Draenei and Blood Elves (the two new expac races) this time around, particularly good for the Horde, which outside of Undead and in some moments Orcs, by and large sorta sucked for questing variety early on. In WoW you can easily tell in which order the Races were introduced into the game. The same feeling exists in  . I didn't play every race in VG so don't know if it exists there too. I wouldn't be surprised though, given the number of races.
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geldonyetich
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2337
The Anne Coulter of MMO punditry
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I agree with what you're saying DQ, although I think it's important to mention that those wow-gee moments will vary from person to person. For example, I've been pretty mystified with the world in Vanguard, but there's people who can not see it. Many people will tell you that features such as running across a giant gnome digging device in WoW are super cool and Vanguard has nothing like that, but I've seen those kinds of features in both games. WoW is a bit more functionally stylized - they kept the poly count low and had the Warcraft style to make that work, while Vanguard's style is a bit more fully realized but at a cost of performance.
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Threash
Terracotta Army
Posts: 9171
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Every MMOG has that wow-gee quest moments. WoW is replete with them, as is EQ2 and as was what I saw in my limited time with VG. I particularly liked the, err, Eastern-themed race (kojan?). Awesome beginning, great story, the sort I wish WoW had. They really don't. There's no big shockers in WoW except when you first see someone like Ragnaros in Molten Core. I don't think there's anyone I know who hasn't, upon first seeing him, gone "holy crap!". Half the time they do that in guild/raid chat :)
Did you do the "battle of dwarrowshire" or "of love and family" quest lines? both definitely had pretty good holy shit moments. So did the onyxia key quest actually... come on, that first time you saw Marshall Windsor marching through stormwind to confront onyxia was pretty fucking awesome.
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I am the .00000001428%
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squirrel
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Every MMOG has that wow-gee quest moments. WoW is replete with them, as is EQ2 and as was what I saw in my limited time with VG. I particularly liked the, err, Eastern-themed race (kojan?). Awesome beginning, great story, the sort I wish WoW had. They really don't. There's no big shockers in WoW except when you first see someone like Ragnaros in Molten Core. I don't think there's anyone I know who hasn't, upon first seeing him, gone "holy crap!". Half the time they do that in guild/raid chat :)
Did you do the "battle of dwarrowshire" or "of love and family" quest lines? both definitely had pretty good holy shit moments. So did the onyxia key quest actually... come on, that first time you saw Marshall Windsor marching through stormwind to confront onyxia was pretty fucking awesome. Yeah that fight in Stormwind is a pretty fucking cool scripted moment - one of the best I've seen in a MMORPG. I've done it several times and each time we ended up with a small audience of lowbie's watching. Cool quest that.
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Speaking of marketing, we're out of milk.
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Kitsune
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2406
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I'm somewhat disinclined to risk money on Vanguard, though if someone gets the collector's edition and should happen to slide me one of the ten-day passes, I'd be willing to give it a shot. The fact that the all-access pass applies to it is helpful, I'd be much more inclined to pay for EQ2/Planetside/VG than VG alone.
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Venkman
Terracotta Army
Posts: 11536
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Definitely agree on Windsor/Onyxia. I also liked the Water Elemental one near Ratchet, this quest I just did in Hellfire with some bloke who got knifed (which you didn't know in the first part of the quest), Darrowshire to be sure, the 10-step series in Darkshire, and dozens of others I could recall if the stupid freakin' game would actually track your Completed quests too.
Aside: how the eff dumb is that? I've probably done close to 700 quests in WoW, and there's no way to look them up after the fact. I feel like the only one that cares though. I love looking at old quest achievements. It reminds me of so much.
Anyway, VG had those in the early levels, as did EQ2, and as does WoW in spotty areas.
To Geldon's point, it is subjective. But it is also there as proof of life beyond Kill/Deliver X for Y. All developers care. Some are more talented than others. Some have more money and time than others. Nobody sits back and says "today I will script the most boring waste of time ever to exist".
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Fordel
Terracotta Army
Posts: 8306
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Yeah that fight in Stormwind is a pretty fucking cool scripted moment - one of the best I've seen in a MMORPG. I've done it several times and each time we ended up with a small audience of lowbie's watching. Cool quest that.
I bet a bunch of them aren't watching, just waiting for it to finish so they can hand in their newbie quest. I think the Windsor event highlights why it's hard to make a good engaging story in a MMO. The even t was indeed cool the first time, even the second... the third was neat, the fourth so-so, the fifth was meh, the sixth time was just down right annoying. "yes yes, hero's blah, save the day blah, let them pass blah, will you just hurry it up so I can hand in my damn report from lakeshire  " -edit- Spell Check can't help you if you use the wrong words 
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« Last Edit: January 27, 2007, 12:19:48 AM by Fordel »
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and the gate is like I TOO AM CAPABLE OF SPEECH
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pxib
Terracotta Army
Posts: 4701
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I bet a bunch of them aren't watching, just waiting for it to finish so they can hand in their newbie quest. I think the Windsor event highlights why it's hard to make a good engaging story in a MMO. The even was indeed cool the first time, even the second... the third was neat, the fourth so-so, the fifth was meh, the sixth time was just down right annoying. "yes yes, hero's blah, save the day blah, let them pass blah, will you just hurry it up so I can hand in my damn report from lakeshire  " I just had a not particularly brilliant idea. The big problem with one-time scripted events is that not everybody can be there. Yes yes, it's very cool that some people get to experience something that nobody else will ever get to do again. "Why do I always miss the great moments?" World events avoid this by being spread out and generic (the scourge invasion)... but they lose their narrative power. Then I remembered Ultima Online. During... ga. I've forgotten the particular event. A bunch of mages NPC mages were running around killing people in Moonglow. Usually it was just generic groups of enemies teleported in, but every once in a while there'd be a group of titled NPCs ("Theodora the Terrible" and the like) who would shout various scripted things. I assume they were scripted, they might have been played by staff. I was running Ignatz around enjoying the chaos a group of mages teleported in with one of these named NPCs,but I thought they were just going to stay where they stood (like they normally did) but she shouted "Oh look, a mortal. Kill him." and they all came chasing after me. I shit a brick. I escaped through a crowd who'd been killing these baddies for a while, but I have no idea what happened. I was so spooked I ran all the way to the moongate. That's MY story. It wasn't some silly game event... it happened to ME. I wasn't the hero in the story... at all. It didn't matter. I was part of something big. So games would be well served to make giant, temporary events with tiny random scriped bits to throw in when there are enough people around to appreciate it. The forces of evil don't spawn regularly or predictably, but they're everywhere. Then, every once in a while they lay seige to a small town... not for long, mind you, if they stick around players will gather and the moment will be ruined. "Everybody was part of it, but not me." Maybe the guards can handle them... but a few guards die trying. The guards have lines. So do the more powerful monsters. The attacks may mostly be the same, but the lines are different. Maybe the named monsters pick particular characters "Dwarves! Kill the earth diggers!" Everyone will know somebody who experienced it first hand, and the people who were actually there will talk about it for months. They'll remember it for years. Then... and here's my not particularly brilliant idea: Record them. Have "cameras" available in a few locations near where these scripted events can happen and watch how people react. Cull the boring reactions and save the good ones. Publish them on the website. Now you have the ten o'clock news. Nothing happened to me during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 89'... the house shook impressively and we all enjoyed it and laughed until somebody said "Uh. This is big. We should probably take shelter or something. Maybe we should go outside." By then it was over. I wasn't the hero in the story, but I was part of something big. I know it was something big because we were glued to the news for days. Don't trust the players to record it. They may eventually have the forthought, but that just makes it "something that happened to that guy". Partway into the event release a "trailer" or two that chronicle the ongoing event. Give players specific events to remember, whether they were there or not. Then months later maybe they'll ask eachother "So what happened to you doing during the Scourge Invasion?" ...because even if not everybody has their own story, they'll tell about a friend of a friend because hey... ...it made the news.
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if at last you do succeed, never try again
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Velorath
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During... ga. I've forgotten the particular event. A bunch of mages NPC mages were running around killing people in Moonglow. Usually it was just generic groups of enemies teleported in, but every once in a while there'd be a group of titled NPCs ("Theodora the Terrible" and the like) who would shout various scripted things. I assume they were scripted, they might have been played by staff. I was running Ignatz around enjoying the chaos a group of mages teleported in with one of these named NPCs,but I thought they were just going to stay where they stood (like they normally did) but she shouted "Oh look, a mortal. Kill him." and they all came chasing after me. I shit a brick. I escaped through a crowd who'd been killing these baddies for a while, but I have no idea what happened. I was so spooked I ran all the way to the moongate.
That's MY story. It wasn't some silly game event... it happened to ME. I wasn't the hero in the story... at all. It didn't matter. I was part of something big.
I'm sure at the time it was very exciting, given that it was new to you. To the MMO audience these days though, it's just some mobs (one named) randomly spawning near you, spouting off a line of dialogue, and then you trained them into a crowd of other players as you ran away. It's going to take a lot more than that to really get people to notice now. The only difference between YOUR story, and the typical MMO encounter was the randomness of it, which doesn't necessarily make it a better story.
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pxib
Terracotta Army
Posts: 4701
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I don't think it takes more, it just takes different. "Randomness" is what matters. Legendary events only a few people witness become just that: Legendary. Sophistication of presentation isn't nearly so important as implying what the player is witnessing is unique.
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if at last you do succeed, never try again
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CmdrSlack
Contributor
Posts: 4390
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Fuck Vanguard.
CoX is adding crafting in the next issue and it's double xp weekend. Oh, and you feel powerful right away.
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I traded in my fun blog for several legal blogs. Or, "blawgs," as the cutesy attorney blawgosphere likes to call 'em.
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Surlyboi
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10966
eat a bag of dicks
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Fuck Vanguard.
CoX is adding crafting in the next issue and it's double xp weekend. Oh, and you feel powerful right away.
I didn't feel powerful right away in CoX. I had to get to my travel power before any sense of, "Ok, now I'm badass" kicked in. Don't get me wrong. For CoX, the ability to feel powerful right away is cool if it hits you that way. Vanguard's a fantasy RPG, it's about building your toon. I dig that. YMMV. That said, I'm totally torn between the "Get a jump on the crowd" weekend in VG and double XP in CoX. Fuck both companies for making me hop back and forth like a tweaker between two piles of meth.
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Tuned in, immediately get to watch cringey Ubisoft talking head offering her deepest sympathies to the families impacted by the Orlando shooting while flanked by a man in a giraffe suit and some sort of "horrifically garish neon costumes through the ages" exhibit or something. We need to stop this fucking planet right now and sort some shit out. -Kail
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Simond
Terracotta Army
Posts: 6742
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Every MMOG has that wow-gee quest moments. WoW is replete with them, as is EQ2 and as was what I saw in my limited time with VG. I particularly liked the, err, Eastern-themed race (kojan?). Awesome beginning, great story, the sort I wish WoW had. They really don't. There's no big shockers in WoW except when you first see someone like Ragnaros in Molten Core. I don't think there's anyone I know who hasn't, upon first seeing him, gone "holy crap!". Half the time they do that in guild/raid chat :) My newbie BE paladin found a necklace when levelling up in the Ghostlands. I turned it in to its owner, and got... this as a reward. (Not my video, btw - just the first fraps of it I could find on Youtube)
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"You're really a good person, aren't you? So, there's no path for you to take here. Go home. This isn't a place for someone like you."
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Signe
Terracotta Army
Posts: 18942
Muse.
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You got dancing girls?
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My Sig Image: hath rid itself of this mortal coil.
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Surlyboi
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10966
eat a bag of dicks
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Update:
After bagging last night to go have dinner with the GF and her family and then coming home and being too drunk to play last night, went to bed.
I got up bright and early this morning and pushed the ranger up to 10. It was fun, my bridges and combos are kinda cool.
Needless to say, I feel a nerfbat hanging over my head as I type this...
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Tuned in, immediately get to watch cringey Ubisoft talking head offering her deepest sympathies to the families impacted by the Orlando shooting while flanked by a man in a giraffe suit and some sort of "horrifically garish neon costumes through the ages" exhibit or something. We need to stop this fucking planet right now and sort some shit out. -Kail
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Engels
Terracotta Army
Posts: 9029
inflicts shingles.
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By the way, not that anyone will care too dramatically, but the new engine patching they did upgraded performance significantly for me. I can really not complain about the game's performance in good conscience any more.
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I should get back to nature, too. You know, like going to a shop for groceries instead of the computer. Maybe a condo in the woods that doesn't even have a health club or restaurant attached. Buy a car with only two cup holders or something. -Signe
I LIKE being bounced around by Tonkors. - Lantyssa
Babies shooting themselves in the head is the state bird of West Virginia. - schild
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Surlyboi
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10966
eat a bag of dicks
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By the way, not that anyone will care too dramatically, but the new engine patching they did upgraded performance significantly for me. I can really not complain about the game's performance in good conscience any more.
Same here. Much smoother.
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Tuned in, immediately get to watch cringey Ubisoft talking head offering her deepest sympathies to the families impacted by the Orlando shooting while flanked by a man in a giraffe suit and some sort of "horrifically garish neon costumes through the ages" exhibit or something. We need to stop this fucking planet right now and sort some shit out. -Kail
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geldonyetich
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2337
The Anne Coulter of MMO punditry
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CoX is adding crafting in the next issue and it's double xp weekend. Oh, and you feel powerful right away. In all fairness, I'll point out that I do feel powerful pretty quickly in Vanguard. My Disciple (a healer) could land hits that do over 200 points of damage by level 4. (Fluttering Petal I + Critical.) For scale, that's about the same as the damage done in ten rounds of just auto-attacking at that level. A Scrapper critical + buildup = 400%, but I just landed a 1000%. My Disciple can also perform a three-hit combo that heals my target for 100% of its health (whether it's a level 1 player or a level 50 player) by level 4. 100% heals by level 4. An empath Defender has to wait for what level to do that? Perhaps the monster balance is where it's at? Well, provided I'm playing well, I can take down up to three 2-dot targets that are on me at once. I consider them "minions" in CoH balance. I took down a three-dot target that was a level above me once. Three-dots are intended for duos/trios, but like a "boss" in City of Heroes, some players just find them a challenging solo encounter. Abandon all previous assumptions of EQ clone balance, ye who enter Vanguard. Either that, or I'm overdue for a nerf.
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geldonyetich
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2337
The Anne Coulter of MMO punditry
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By the way, not that anyone will care too dramatically, but the new engine patching they did upgraded performance significantly for me. I can really not complain about the game's performance in good conscience any more.
Same here. Much smoother. Out of curiosity, are you both using NVIDIA cards? I suspect the enhancements didn't influence ATI much. Oh well, I did say I thought it was playable at 5 FPS.
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Venkman
Terracotta Army
Posts: 11536
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I don't think it takes more, it just takes different. "Randomness" is what matters. Legendary events only a few people witness become just that: Legendary. Sophistication of presentation isn't nearly so important as implying what the player is witnessing is unique.
Yes. WoW uses 'Invasion' series akin to the anecdotes from UO. They're triggered events that take on a life of their own, with the occasional surprise. People by and large liked this in UO because the genre was different then and there were just fewer people. We were mostly the trendsetters. EVERYTHING was new. Nowadays though the genre has grown by the influx of achievement-based gamers. To them even the UO events would have been just a bunch of walking sources for gold and drops. There's still as many people who care about the uniqueness and lore, but they are a steadily-declining percentage of the overall playerbase in diku. So it's really all point of view. I liked the Invasion events for what they brought to otherwise static zones AND because they were a good source of rewards (depending on event it was faction, money or drops). Others lean one way or the other, but I prefer the balance. I'm in WoW to continually grow, and like that. But when it has become work, I leave. Dynamic events or even dynamically triggered scripted events remind me of the uniqueness possible in these games. And that's not just in WoW. VG has this too of course. But that's today. A year from now when the newbie areas haven't been completely redesigned, it'll be like the dialog event before Rags pops in MC: the first time it's cool. The 12th time it's just a wasted 70 seconds :)
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Morat20
Terracotta Army
Posts: 18529
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Yes. WoW uses 'Invasion' series akin to the anecdotes from UO. They're triggered events that take on a life of their own, with the occasional surprise.
Bloodplague for the win. "Why are all these corpses he....ACCCK!" That was awesome.
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SnakeCharmer
Terracotta Army
Posts: 3807
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I actually had a good time in VG last night, surprisingly. My preconceived notions were that I would hate it, but after about 5 hours of messing around with it, then hooking up with some old SWG buddies, I came away feeling pretty satisfied.
*Note - I will concede that hooking up with some old 'friends' may have influenced my perceived enjoyment of VG, and was willing to overlook the game itself.
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Surlyboi
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10966
eat a bag of dicks
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By the way, not that anyone will care too dramatically, but the new engine patching they did upgraded performance significantly for me. I can really not complain about the game's performance in good conscience any more.
Same here. Much smoother. Out of curiosity, are you both using NVIDIA cards? I suspect the enhancements didn't influence ATI much. Oh well, I did say I thought it was playable at 5 FPS. NVidia and a mobile Radeon x1600. (I loaded it up on my Macbook Pro for shits and giggles and found it still semi-playable even on 256megs of VRAM.)
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Tuned in, immediately get to watch cringey Ubisoft talking head offering her deepest sympathies to the families impacted by the Orlando shooting while flanked by a man in a giraffe suit and some sort of "horrifically garish neon costumes through the ages" exhibit or something. We need to stop this fucking planet right now and sort some shit out. -Kail
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geldonyetich
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2337
The Anne Coulter of MMO punditry
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Here Targonor, Targonor... Unlock for Geldon. Oh dear, you are down again. Come on, be a good server Like the other ones Yes, Yes! Finally! Loading! Oh, you locked again I see. Why do you taunt me? Here Targonor, Targonor...
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Ixxit
Terracotta Army
Posts: 238
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By the way, not that anyone will care too dramatically, but the new engine patching they did upgraded performance significantly for me. I can really not complain about the game's performance in good conscience any more.
Same here. Much smoother. Out of curiosity, are you both using NVIDIA cards? I suspect the enhancements didn't influence ATI much. Oh well, I did say I thought it was playable at 5 FPS. I have noticed a pretty big performance increase as well. I am now running the game in my monitor's native res (1650 x 1080) and it is pretty smooth. The godawful caching seems to be gone which accounted for much of the choppiness . I am using a NVidia card and have only a middling system. Athlon 3200 socket A(400 fsb), 1.5 gigs of ram and a BFG GT6600. [Edit] Using the default high performance settings (second for the bottom) with the view distance at max, without any of the ini tweaks. Game looks decent at these settings and will do the job until I upgrade at the end of the summer.
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« Last Edit: January 27, 2007, 04:21:56 PM by Ixxit »
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I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
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Ixxit
Terracotta Army
Posts: 238
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I actually had a good time in VG last night, surprisingly. My preconceived notions were that I would hate it, but after about 5 hours of messing around with it, then hooking up with some old SWG buddies, I came away feeling pretty satisfied.
*Note - I will concede that hooking up with some old 'friends' may have influenced my perceived enjoyment of VG, and was willing to overlook the game itself.
It's really starting to grow on me as well. Personally the substandard performance and pretty glaring bugs at the beginning of the open beta were the reason I was a little hesitant to pick give the game a chance. Now with those problems pretty much resolved some of the quite enjoyable gamplay elements are bubbling to the surface . Tried some resource gathering tonight for the first time and I must say that Vanguard has the best lumberjacking ever. 
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« Last Edit: January 27, 2007, 04:18:19 PM by Ixxit »
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I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
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Venkman
Terracotta Army
Posts: 11536
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Please. You guys just want your own sub-forum.  *runs*
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geldonyetich
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2337
The Anne Coulter of MMO punditry
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In time, there will just be a Vanguard forum and a World of Warcraft forum. The WoW forum will be barely used, but left open out of pity for the few players still playing WoW.
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Velorath
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In time, there will just be a Vanguard forum and a World of Warcraft forum. The WoW forum will be barely used, but left open out of pity for the few players still playing WoW.
That's only because the Vanguard forum will also double as the Den.
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hal
Terracotta Army
Posts: 835
Damn kids, get off my lawn!
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Geld, its one thing to be in love. Nothing wrong with that. Enjoy, Sadly it won,t last. It is alltogether another thing to be in love and blind. Meditate on that sir and enjoy your self while knowing the world around you. after all "nothing is happening" is the net effect.
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I started with nothing, and I still have most of it
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are still on backorder.
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geldonyetich
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2337
The Anne Coulter of MMO punditry
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Well, there's two posters who don't understand green text is complete sarcasm. Or was I mistaken about what green text meant?
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Velorath
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Well, there's two posters who don't understand green text is complete sarcasm. Or was I mistaken about what green text meant?
I understood. I just don't think there's a color for "smart-ass reply to sarcastic comment".
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geldonyetich
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2337
The Anne Coulter of MMO punditry
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Vanguard will be a solid contender, but it won't displace all other games on the face of the planet. Despite having a relatively smooth pre-order launch (servers have gone down for extended maintenance here and there) I'm still guesstimating Vanguard at about the 200k+ subscription point. If it goes above 1M (something only three American-released MMORPGs have ever done and probably only one on American subscriptions alone) I'll be floored.
And now for something completely different.
I hear they had abandoned their ideas of going multi platform, so I wonder if I should make anything out of the contents of \Program Files\Sony\Vanguard\Skins.
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Joey
Terracotta Army
Posts: 56
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After several hours of downloading, I finally got the game installed and patched, only to be met with an "All worlds are down" message.
After waiting another hour and a half, I finally got to pick a server (Florendyl) and create my character, but unfortunately, I can never actually get into the game. It just hangs on the character select screen. I tried numerous times, but it was to no avail.
After reading about the return of the "character select screen bug" over at MMORPG, I've decided to give up for the night. Oy!
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