Well, I don’t really care much since I don’t have the game but I guess it’s good to see that Sony is pushing more content out fairly quickly for Vanguard. Their Game Update #1 comes out tomorrow (supposedly):
On Tuesday, March 6th 2007, Vanguard Update #1 will go live. It will be a much larger patch than usual as not only will there be new content but a great deal of additional art as well. Update #1 includes:
Dozens of new weapon models
Six brand new NPC races to battle
Two new mid to high level adventuring areas
Nine dungeons with revamped art and/or lighting
Screenshots of all this stuff after the previously linked jump. Also, some rewards for playing:
As a Celebration of Vanguard’s Launch and look to the future with the first Game Update we’re giving the founders of Telon two gifts as we continue our adventures into Vanguard! Double Adventuring Kill Experience will be awarded to players from Saturday, March 3rd, 5:00am PST (Saturday, March 3rd, 4:00am GMT for European Servers) until Monday, March 5th, 5:00am PST (Monday, March 5th, 4:00am GMT for European Servers)
A Founder’s reward, in the form of an in-game title, will be granted to players who have purchased a copy of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes between launch (January 30th) and March 31st. This title can be applied to each character created on an account now, or in the future. In order to qualify a player will need to have consumed the account key that comes
in the box (if purchased at retail), from a Web site (if purchased digitally) or successfully completed a purchase on the Station Store by the March 31st cut off date (11:59pm PST). The title will be awarded in early April. More details regarding a full Veteran Rewards program will be announced in the coming months.
Has Sigil made any sort of significant performance improvement to the engine since launch? My initial month is over and I didn’t renew. In fact, I mostly stopped playing after the first two weeks, so if there were any late improvements, I didn’t see them.
I don’t think the bug-fixes are listed with this announcement. I wouldn’t really know where to look to get the straight-poop (ie the actual patch notes).
I’ve been playing ever since it came out and, frankly, I haven’t seen that much of a performance improvement. I’m comfortable with my framerates in the wilderness, but cities are still absolutely horrible. Ugh.
I played WoW during the last phase of the beta and at release and it ran silky smooth on my system at all times. I believe you when you say you had those complaints with WoW, but I have to believe you either had an aging system or some driver issue, because I distinctly remember quite a lot of chatter among my WoW playing friends of the time about how well the game ran on even midrange computers for a brand new game.
The problem with Vanguard is that the people who are complaining about shitty framerates are people with pretty high end gaming systems. People with midrange systems are basically SOL from the get-go.
Sure, and if they’re like me, they’re running it at insane resolutions with everything maxxed out while complaining. I can get 60FPS if I just crank down the detail (though cities are still messed up).
PC gamers can’t really deal with the idea that a game could be designed for tomorrow’s PC; for an MMO, it’s not an entirely unreasonable idea, though it might be smarter of the company to actually limit the graphic options at launch and then enable higher-end ones at a later date.
(Of course WoW shoots down the theory you need all of these graphical doo-dads at all.)
Blackrock PVP US was a horribly laggy pile of crap for as long as I can remember, with queues that were completely ridiculous. Apparently the WoW lovers like to remember back with rose colored glasses.
I certainly remember lag in those parts, but once you waited it out for a minute or two, everything always smoothed out for me. Orgrimmar for instance: I would fly in and everything would stop. I would wait a minute, move…and everything ran great.
That was on a machine built in 1999.
I have a brand new machine with the works, and VG runs like ass for me. It would be one thing if the cities were like my Org description, but I almost get sick in them…the constant looking at one spot, turning and suddenly realize that I am looking at the ceiling. Then, I move two feet and the same thing…the entire time.
That is at “Balanced” settings.
The other thing that bugs me, is that when I am out in the wilderness and getting higher FPS, the game still looks like a wierd, plastic…thing. I don’t even know how to describe it.
Yeah, WoW had some significant infrastructure problems when it launched. It could be hard to get into the game, and “loot lag” (and other sorts of lag that I assume were connected to some sort of database access problem) was very common. The game or certain parts of it would crash. Ironforge was an essentially unplayable mess, and continued to be laggy and problematic for a long time after launch. Communication from the Blizzard team to the consumer was sporadic.
Now, in their defense, they were dealing with a game that got much huger much faster than anyone had even remotely anticipated. And although improvements seemed frustratingly slow in coming, on the whole I think they did a pretty good job of ramping up their infrastructure, and now the game is very stable – a remarkable achievement considering how many players they have and how big the game has become (world size, number of quests and objects, etc.).
And as Steve said, their graphical choices were simply inspired.
Edit: This is not to say that Vanguard is better or worse; I haven’t played it. Just pointing out that WoW had a lot of teething problems.
It has draw distances that far, far exceed any of those games except maybe FarCry, though it’s been a while since I played that game. It doesn’t have the terrible LOD problems of Oblivion. Half-Life 2 doesn’t have the same type of distance rendering. Considering all the “Hah hah, Vaguard runs like ass, LOL!!!11!!!” messages that pop up in every thread about it, it performs about as poorly as EverQuest II did at launch.
Which isn’t to say it isn’t a pig; it is. But when maxxed out, you can tell why it’s a pig. (Excepting the city issue, which I suspect is a network issue synched to framerates or something.)
The art direction sucks and the world looks like it’s made of plastic, but those are issues shared with a lot of games that are seemingly using every graphic effect known to man and Nvidia.
Yeah, I never saw the problems people are complaining about in early WoW because I was playing on a very low-pop server. Based on the server you were on, YMMV by quite a lot. With Vanguard’s client-side problems, though, not so much… everyone suffers.
They were talking about framerate. Lag is a completely different animal.
When WoW launched, it ran silky smooth for me (except near the AH in Iron forge, and that was just a RAM issue).
I will grant you the first few days of the WoW release there was a lot of server lag, but after 3 days they fixed it. It did take several more months to fix the lag issue when there were huge out-door PvP raids.
I’ve had my framerate double from one of the recent patches - I run at 1680x1050
on a GeForce 7600GS. I have OK-ish graphics settings and max trees, and cutting
down on clip range has helped the most of all possible tweaks. Older cards may
gain a lot of speed from changing the number of lights and turning off shadows.
But yeah, everything looks shiny - robes end up looking like rubber dresses.
(The game’s still fun at times - I found it helped to move off the US servers)
