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Vanguard Saga of the Heroes |
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Saturday, 30 June 2007 |
For those long-neglected Ever Quest refugees out there. Vanguard is the new world. The prevailing opinion among its hardcore fans (and the games garnered an awful damn lot of em) is that World af WarCraft is just too "kiddie," EverQuest II went too casual, and nothing else out there offers the same level of immersion, where major accomplishments are made more meaningful through long-term devotion..and failure carries serious penalties. Vanguard's zone-free world, lack of instantaneous travel, absence of instanced content. and less-stylized character and environment design all work toward an uninterrupted sense of reality: frighteningly customizable in-game housing that's actually constructed from those crafted commodities—and assembled by specialized player character craftsmen—also contributes to the concrete realism the game tries so hard to foster.
From a more common point of view it's a poor illusion: The things that make Vanguard so appealing to the cult can also be described as tedious frustrating, dull, and just plain bloody-minded. The "average" MMO player won't enjoy the prospect of traveling for three hours every time he needs to train once his guild moves to a continent that doesn't have any priests. Immersion be damned—that's no fun. |
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