Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

.. the english on this post is VERY hard to read.

and the world is not truly seamless.  A better advertisement would be "VERY SHORT loading times between zones"

Don't get me wrong, but I liked Vg a lot. I used to play it.. daily. got one character to 50 and a few more to mid 30's.  The content is.. massive.. but the lack of really any end game NON raiding isn't very.. much fun.  Running APW.. daily.. *yawn*

Originally posted by teabag

As an ex-vets beta tester on vanguard that I did not bought the game but then last week someone interest me with they're lied about vanguard in this mmorpg forum, as "sony fixed this, sony fixed that" and such of the like of epic unreal engine but I had my doubt anyway. So I download the trial with isle of dawn and so I bought vanguard online from a cheap flea market under amazon costing just £2.38, then I intalled the game and patch it, created a character and play the game.

Gameplay engine is the same as beta but with an 8800 geforce upgrade, faster cpu and faster rams at 667 mhz as oppose to 400mhz. Dawn Isle was a little nice but it all a smart sly tactic from sony because it a one zone where you cannot zone or as they say "seamless world" whichever I am more interested. Leveled to 10 and clicked the portal to zone into one huge world, it nice and I felt good. So i test the very thing about "seamless world" which actually had not even been fixed as it is still a loading please wait crap in every square line of the damn map. Furthermore I had tested the very buggy annoying farce that had been in beta test is the stairs still UNPLAYABLE. I cannot just believe this and so left the game and refused to play any further but hey I got it cheap

I feel better for myself because for that lied about vanguard almost had doubt myself but hell no, I told you that epic unreal engine is so crap that it is great for SMALL MAPS not STEAMLESS WORLD.

Brad if you read this, I suggest you get a refunded from epic team or get a lawsuit and sue the pants out of them for they are full of lying rats by pretending that they're engines is great for seamless mmorpg?.

For anyone who is wondering what this guy is talking about:

The world of VG is made out of chunks which are loaded into memory when you enter one. That means if you stand on the western chunk border and walk into direction of a mountain far to the east.,  after 2-15minutes (depending on your speed) youll reach the eastern border and notice a 1-3 sec delay where the game is loading the next chunk. Thats it.

The rest is the usual "I hate Sony!" and "VG without Brads Vision - The sky is falling!" rant.

Oh yeah... stairs suck btw.

Originally posted by teabag

Sorry could you clarify again please, because I don't understand your argument between seamless and loading please wait chunks, hitchs, glitch or whatever it shall be called?. Stairs sucks? oh come on, it unplayable for small race!.

The sky is falling my fat ass.

There are no loading please wait messages.  The world is chopped into squares.  Each square is fairly large and takes maybe 15 minutes to run across.  The world is designed without reguard to these squares.  Think of taking the US map and cutting it into squares so there are no artifical boundries.  So if you are in town and you see a mountain in the distance you can run to that mountain.  At any point you hit these edges of the square the screen will freeze for a few seconds and you will continue moving.  The delay is usually pretty short sometimes only a second sometimes maybe 5-6.

Hitching is a term that refers to the the normal smooth movement of graphics displayed on the screen doing subsecond freezes that create a hitch or stutter.  What is technically happening is that there is I/O going on that prevents the graphics from properly updating.  Months ago this would be really band as all the textures were on disk and large and had to be read in and compiled whenever you entered an area with new graphics assests.  In the past several months this has changed as these assets are now precompiled and cached in memory.  So when you move around in vanguard you still do get some hitching but it is much shorter and doesn't tend to repeat in any area you are in the current play session.

Stairs in vanguard are sometimes a problem with small races.  You can get stuck on them.  It isn't anything serious and you just move a bit and you continue up it just isn't smooth.   I play a halfling and really don't think much about it.  It happens I just jump of move a bit sideways and keep on going.  Definitely has no impact on anything other then being something to bitch about...

Originally posted by teabag

Sorry could you clarify again please, because I don't understand your argument between seamless and loading please wait chunks, hitchs, glitch or whatever it shall be called?. Stairs sucks? oh come on, it unplayable for small race!.

The sky is falling my fat ass.

I simply described what a player will experience. He/she walks in a direction and after some time there will be a couple of seconds lag, than the game continues. In other games, lets say AoC as example, you get a "loading zone screen instead".

Ethion gave the technical explanation, if it really interrests you (I kinda doubt it).

I often make fun out of "The Vision", but one thing McQuaid did right was giving the players the impression of a giantic environment without visible boundaries. 2 years ago I thought this will soon be standart in mmorpgs, but the newest game releases, where the firms choose the easy way with instancing, proved me wrong.

I didnt know that your ass is fat, nor do I care.

It has gotten better, but I think it's too late. I just don't forsee VG pulling the population it needs to thrive.

Originally posted by teabag

ap

I feel better for myself because for that lied about vanguard almost had doubt myself but hell no, I told you that epic unreal engine 2 is so crap that it is great for SMALL MAPS not STEAMLESS WORLD.

 

Lineage 2 is made with the unreal engine 2 also. It is seamless and you can easily put over 100 players onscreen at once.

Originally posted by Shol

I simply described what a player will experience. He/she walks in a direction and after some time there will be a couple of seconds lag, than the game continues. In other games, lets say AoC as example, you get a "loading zone screen instead".

There is a big difference in VG pausing for a couple seconds when you move from one chunk to another compared to AoC zoned world where you wait for 30+ seconds at a loading screen and can only go from one area of the world to another area of the world in a small passage basically funneling you from one area to another.  Fact is most of these trasitions in AoC aren't even zoning.  You go to an npc or some other object and click and it zones you to another game environment.  It is very much like EQ2 where you have a bunch of independent playfields connected by npcs and objects.

This is in contrast to VG where you have one enormous unrestricted area that has been arbitrarily separated into chunks with a very short few second pause as you move from chunk to chunk. 

The first feels like a collection of play areas, the second feels like a world.

Originally posted by darwa

I'll resub the moment a load of endgame content that isn't raid-related hits live.

I had/have a lvl 50 in every class, but couldn't stand the raids.

I actually took advantage of the free vets trial last week and found that performance has dramatically improved. I couldn't face spending an hour to alter the UI to my favour though.

So anyway, I heartily recommend everyone to use their free trial and have a go :)

Amen to this.  I hate, absolutely HATE it when a game caters to the raiding crowd.  That part of the market help corner off content for themselves only to abandon the game later on for something else, leaving the more "normal" players with content that is just too retarded to even look at.

Originally posted by teabag

Be warned though, that Isle of Dawn free trial is one small excellent seamless zone..

.. is the best and clever cunny ploy from sony ever!.

 

??  I think you are just plain nuts...  Isle of dawn is no different then the reset of vanguard?  It has the same zoneing mechanism and the same seams as all the rest of vg.  In a sense it is worse cause when you pass out of the central area that is the bulk of IoD into one of the adjacent zones there isn't much to see or do.

As to understanding how VG is different from something like AoC or EQ2 if you really don't get it then it probably doesn't matter to you.  However it is a large difference to me and some poeple.  I love the sense of VG being an open world as opposed to a collection of play area's strung together.  Even wow does this and even throught they hide the transition from one zone to another it still is a zoned world.  Where there are no loading zones but ranther corradors you transition through while they load the next zone.