After just two hours or so of play, here are my initial, immediate impressions (not a review!) of Vanguard.  As I mentioned in my previous post, I created a Kojani Disciple on the Xeth Server.  I decided on my class first, just from reading the class descriptions and choosing one that sounded interesting to me.  This was a harder choice than I thought it would be, because so many of the classes sounded cool.  I also considered a Paladin, Ranger, Necromancer, Druid, or Shaman.  Again, no other game I’ve seen has a group of classes that seems as varied and interesting to me than Vanguard.  Once I had selected Disciple, I was now restricted to which race I could choose.  None of the Thestran races could be a Disciple, so that left a Kojani or Qaliathari race.  The majority of my time in the beta was spent in Qalia, and I don’t think I spent any time in Kojan as I think it was inaccessible at the time, so I settled on a Kojani race.  From there, I chose the human simply because I prefer playing human-type characters, nothing more, nothing less.

I didn’t spend too much time with the character customization.  I actually liked the pre-generated look that came up by default.  I changed a few sliders here and there, but I wasn’t too worried about the look of my guy.  I spent more time thinking of the name, Qae Zhynn, which ultimately came out sounding like a spice.  Ah well.

With all that done, I soon found myself on the shores of a small island amidst an invasion on nearby Shang Village by the Imperial Army.  As a member of the invading army, my first quest was to boost the morale of some fellow soldiers who were having morality issues with the fact that the village was comprised of just women and children and weren’t carrying out their orders.  It didn’t take long to discover that I was heading down a bad path, blindly following orders without thinking of the consequences.  A few quests down the road I was tasked with killing Master Fhungusu, the leader of Shang Village.  I became a little concerned when I saw he was level 50, slightly over my head as a level 2 character.  It turns out he foresaw my coming, and he reached out to my character, telling me it was time to be born again.  I was instantly teleported miles away from Shang Village to Dellerjuba, where my road to redemption was to begin.

I quite enjoyed this opening experience; it felt very dynamic.  It was neat to see non-player characters running around, fighting; for once I didn’t feel like I was all by myself.  It was also nice to know that this is just one starting experience among many, based on which race you choose. 

I’m still in awe over the world of Telon.  The world graphics are great, and I haven’t had any performance issues at all.  I’m currently playing with my settings on medium which looks just fine, and performs just as well.  I’ve even run around a bit with all the settings at max which looks even better and is still decently playable.  There has definitely been some optimization done since the beta period.

Before I get into some of the things that I thought were really cool, I have a few issues that jumped out at me.  Remember, this is only after two hours or so of playing.  First, the font over characters’ heads is butt ugly.  It’s so incredibly plain that it stands out, and I find it to be quite jarring.  Secondly, I can’t stand the targeting reticule.  It just seems so big and stupid looking.  I’d prefer it if it was just a flat circle around the target, rather than the three dimensional monstrosity that it is now.  Finally, some of the character animations are crap, plain and simple, especially while swimming.  I’ve heard that the character models are going to be revamped, which is sorely needed, because they don’t fit with the gorgeous looking world.

Here I go again about the world of Vanguard, which I think is top notch.  It was what sold me on Vanguard in the first place, back during the last hour of beta when I got to fly around Qalia.  This is the closest I’ve seen an MMO come to creating a play space that feels like an actual world.  What I wouldn’t give for a flying mount now…

Next, there was something awe-inspiring standing by the shore and seeing a player-made boat float down the river.  It’s hard to explain, but it definitely served as a “cooooooool!” moment for me.  That’s just another thing to strive for I guess, but at this point I have no idea what it would take to get one.

So after just a short time with the game, currently sitting at level six, I must say I’m enjoying it a fair bit.  Of course, it’s pretty hard to get bored of an MMO this early in to it, so I’ll just have to wait and see.

This is Qae Zhynn, which I’m realizing now sounds like “Cajun”, (oops), my Kojani Disciple in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.  At the moment, this means two things; first, I’ve finally decided to crack open my retail box of Vanguard, purchased on launch day, and give it a go.  Second, it means that after three and a half years of playing in Norrath, I have cancelled my EverQuest II account, which will officially close on March 17.  It’s been over a week since I’ve even logged in to EQ2, and in fact, I haven’t really had any great desire to play it for some time longer than that, so it was with a tiny bit of trepidation that I logged in to my station account and cancelled my EQ2 subscription while my wife did the same on her account.

I’ve outlined my decreasing interest in EQ2 in a few earlier posts.  The long and short of it is I just don’t have the time to play it any more.  I don’t have the time to dedicate to leveling my characters up to 80, nor was I finding that process all that fun.  There’s just something about RoK that killed the experience for me.  To prevent myself from typing fifty pages worth of stuff about the subject, I’ll just say that the move to solo questing in RoK put the final nail in the coffin for me.  When I was max level at 70, it was easy to log in, join a group and hit an instance for two hours then log out.  I just didn’t find that experience in RoK, and it didn’t take long for all those solo quests to get really boring for me.  Again, I don’t want to go into too much detail about it because it’s been outlined here before and on a few other blogs.  I have no doubt at all that at some point I’ll return to EQ2, just not for a while.

With that said, why Vanguard?  Obviously the whole lack of time issue will still apply, but this is a new game to me (aside from my short experience in the beta), and the world will be all new to me as well.  The thing I like most about MMORPGS is exploring the world, and from a “world” viewpoint, I’ll argue that Vanguard has one of the best.  The other reason for giving Vanguard a shot is because I bought the game for $60 way back when and hadn’t even installed it.  If I’m going to spend that much on something, I may as well use it.  So I figured I’d give it a play for the initial 30 day trial period and then reevaluate after that time.  I’m leaning towards taking a break from MMOs altogether for a while, so Vanguard’s going to really have to knock my socks off for me to continue the subscription.

For the thirty days of Vanguard, my only goals are to have fun and enjoy the experience.  I’m not going to take it seriously.  I haven’t consulted any web sites to check which race is best suited to which class, which stats I’ll need to work on, etc.  I just selected a race and class that sounded interesting to me, and I have to say, this game has a lot of interesting sounding classes.  I haven’t checked any forums to see which classes are “good” or “bad” but just from reading the class descriptions in game I feel that Vanguard has some of the coolest sounding classes that I’ve seen in any game.  I chose the Disciple because I liked the sound of a monk type fighter that can heal.  I’m hoping it’ll serve me well as a solo’er.  I have no plans to join any guilds, and will spend most of my time on my own, so the solo-ability will be important.  I’ve also decided I’m going to read all the quest text I come across, and do all the quests without consulting any online databases.  I think I ruined a lot of the EQ2 experience by just rounding up all the quests I could find and then using EQ2 Wiki to blast through them as quickly as possible, so that will be strictly forbidden.

With all that said, I’ll try to post my initial impressions of the game within a day or two.  I will say though, that after just an hour or two of playing, I’m really enjoying the change; it’s very refreshing.  Anyway, more details to come!

Given my EverQuest II sabbatical, I’ve been able to finally sit down and play through The Orange Box, particularly Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Portal.  While I certainly enjoyed Episode 2, I found the end to be a bit of a struggle, not because it was overly difficult, I was just ready for it to be over with already.  Unlike Half-Life 2 itself (Episode Zero?), where the end caught me by surprise (I think I literally said, “What?  It’s over?”) and left me wanting more, I found myself struggling to continue through to Episode 2′s conclusion.  I finally just said to hell with it, sat down and powered through the last twenty minutes or so.

Ultimately I was satisfied with the Episode 2 experience, but I think I’ve reached a point where I’m more interested in the over-arching story line than the game play.  I found that when you get right down to it, Half-Life 2 is really just a puzzle game framed in a first-person shooter.  It’s just a series of closed set pieces strung together.  Once you’ve figured out one set-piece and completed it, you’re allowed to move on to the next one.  I found this mechanic to be painfully more obvious in Episode 2 as opposed to the previous episodes, and it “took me out of the game”. 

The first third of the game, spent fighting ant-lions in various tunnels was a bit of a drag.  Quite frankly, I don’t want to fight ant-lions, I want to fight the Combine, and sure enough it was the later levels where I began to enjoy the game more.  I don’t want to discuss the game any further for fear of spoiling something for anyone reading this that is still looking to play, but the ending (despite my diminishing motivation to get through it) has me looking forward to the next, and hopefully last episode.

I also finished Portal, which I found to be a fairly entertaining game as well.  This game is all about the end, not so much the content leading up to it.  Again, I won’t go into details to avoid ruining anything, suffice to say that Portal served as a very nice time filler for those times I just wanted a few minutes of game play.

Not long ago I also made my through Bioshock.  In my humble opinion, this game did not live up to all the hype and love surrounding it.  Granted, the production values are top notch.  The graphics and sound are both terrific, and the setting and atmosphere are fantastic and quite absorbing.  The game itself though quickly became monotonous and, especially toward the end, quite tedious.

The first few levels were very captivating, but each level after began to fell the same as the last.  There are essentially only two types of enemies to fight, Splicers and Big Daddies, so every encounter felt the same, despite the number of plasmids available.  The hacking mechanic, while fun and interesting at first, quickly became frustratingly annoying.  The story was interesting enough, but it dawned on me quite early on in the game what was going on, and that’s all I’ll say about the story to avoid spoilers, except to say that I hate it when story-tellers, be it in games or movies, think they’re being so incredibly clever, when really they’re just following the same formula that’s been done many times before.

I’ve got a couple other gripes I’d like to share, but they run the risk of spoiling something so I’ll keep them to myself.  Ultimately this game really let me down, as my hopes for it were quite high based on all the pre-release, and even post-release hype.  I’ve played much, much better shooters in my time.

Anyway, it felt good to get in some single-player game time instead of spending every ounce of free time I had in EverQuest II.  I think I may finally get to all those other games calling out to me on my shelf.