Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

I played through all of beta, few months of release until they nerfed the whole game. Less mob HP, more DPS, less damage taken, all that.

Has the game improved at all? Not just confined to difficulty either. Have they added in enough content? I loved the game until they nerfed it, and that was the final straw. I'm rebuilding a pc soon and am thinking about trying it out again (along with AoC). If Vanguard is still fun, I plan on playing both if I enjoy it.

I have played from beta and month after release too. Now I'm back and can say that there are so much content so you have to develop at least 3x50 chars to compleat all of it. Thats nice because XP is also increased so level up is much faster. Even it looks that game play is easer now its better because it is casual player friendly and are still many challenges - half of the quests are "small group" that can be done solo aka initial solo quests. In all of this with the faster progress game play is much more diverse. There are small casual features that I personaly do not like - the one of them is riftway system (many teleports on different points of telon) that almost ruin exploration and jourey of the game (and ship are almost useless now). At last if its not perfect VG now is a great game for both newcomers and old mmorpers.

GU6 will bring a big rebalance of the game.

Right now its too easy, which actually isnt too bad for me, as I need some more highlevel characters right now, for having some alternatives for raiding. But for enjoying the game, level speed is too high.

Originally posted by iZakaroN

I have played from beta and month after release too. Now I'm back and can say that there are so much content so you have to develop at least 3x50 chars to compleat all of it. Thats nice because XP is also increased so level up is much faster. Even it looks that game play is easer now its better because it is casual player friendly and are still many challenges - half of the quests are "small group" that can be done solo aka initial solo quests. In all of this with the faster progress game play is much more diverse. There are small casual features that I personaly do not like - the one of them is riftway system (many teleports on different points of telon) that almost ruin exploration and jourey of the game (and ship are almost useless now). At last if its not perfect VG now is a great game for both newcomers and old mmorpers.

That's good to hear. The teleports are actually kind of a good thing imo, as getting to groups for dungeon runs could get tedious before. I think exploration should be there, and it is in VG, but not get in the way of gameplay. Then again I was one of the few EQ players that didn't mind the teleports. I remember grinding lumberjacking for nearly a week and getting the 2nd boat on my server haha. If they're not quite as useful, that just means it won't be as difficult for me to get one, which is good for me. I like sailing in that game just for the exploring aspect. Aimless wandering was one of the things I loved about VG.

Originally posted by Adamantine

GU6 will bring a big rebalance of the game.

Right now its too easy, which actually isnt too bad for me, as I need some more highlevel characters right now, for having some alternatives for raiding. But for enjoying the game, level speed is too high.

Nice. I was worried to hear about the super fast leveling, but if they're going to fix it then that's great. Alts are important for enjoyment, but I don't want it to make class specialty useless.

Vangaurd has improved so much since launch. From game play to Quests to class adjustments. If you enjoyed it at the start I don't see why you would not enjoy playing it now if not even more so.

Originally posted by Mattbell69

Vangaurd has improved so much since launch. From game play to Quests to class adjustments. If you enjoyed it at the start I don't see why you would not enjoy playing it now if not even more so.

Well, they have definitely mainstreamed it - and they havent made combat harder again either. I hope they will do it with GU6, though. Leveling is very simple in Vanguard, right now.

The upcoming GU5 and GU6 might improve things further - less hitching, a general class rebalance (Sorcerer will become top dps class, they say, even if I have no idea how they want to manage that, especially since they also announced a mayor nerf of that class).

Originally posted by foulu625

I played through all of beta, few months of release until they nerfed the whole game. Less mob HP, more DPS, less damage taken, all that.

 

Has the game improved at all? Not just confined to difficulty either. Have they added in enough content? I loved the game until they nerfed it, and that was the final straw. I'm rebuilding a pc soon and am thinking about trying it out again (along with AoC). If Vanguard is still fun, I plan on playing both if I enjoy it.

Improvements ranked - My opinion.

1)  Performance.  The game runs much, much better than it did at launch and it continues to improve.  The improvements are noticed the most on low to mid end machines.

2)  Stability.  Many of the crashing bugs, memory leaks are fixed now.  A lot of alt-tabbing still causes me to crash, but other than that, it's nearing a crash-free status.

3)  Bugs.  A huge number of bugs have been fixed.  However, there are some annoying bugs still left in the game.  I believe the VG folks are going to hammer out the rest of their performance and stability issues and then come back to the remaining bugs.  For example, they are SOOO focused on reducing hitching in GU5 and the new environmental shading (which looks incredible BTW) that they haven't resolved some of the GU4 bugs.  They need to come back and clean those up.

4)  Content.  New questing areas have been added, APW has been added (relative to when you first quit) diplomacy sphere updates, Flying Mount quest, etc.  But this is where some 50s are getting frustrated... they want a new raid zone, AAs, new armor quest lines....

It seems that VG is turning the corner on performance and stability improvements now.  It seems that new content is going to get a lot of resources as they wrap up Game Update 5 and close in on Game Update 6.  Sillius recently posted that they have hired even more designers to work on the new stuff which sounds very exciting.

Regarding performance and stablility, is there still hitching/hard drive stuttering?