I checked the Vanguard forums and found that its true: The NDA has been lifted and I can talk about my impressions from the beta. Now I just got into the beta this weekend, so this isn't a complete review. This is what I learned from 16 hours of /played in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. (I'll just call it Vanguard, not using the VSoH abbreviation).
The first thing to mention is that Vanguard is slow. In every possible aspect. Even just starting up the game takes at least twice as long as World of Warcraft (unless you are in a queue, of course). Going from A to B is slow, because the distances are much bigger, and there are no gryphons to ride on. Leveling up is slow, in 16 hours I only got to level 8. And the graphics, while very pretty, often produce lag and make the game slow as well. Now the lag and slow startup are probably unintentional, but the slow transport and leveling is deliberate. In Vanguard you aren't supposed to reach the level cap as fast as you did in World of Warcraft. And you aren't supposed to teleport and fly all over the world, you have to run or use a mount for most places, except for a few boats between continents. This is all part of the Brad McQuaid "vision" ™, which has downtime as a deliberate element of the game. If it takes you longer to get somewhere, you feel more of an achievement once you get there. The WoW philosophy of instant gratification is frowned upon, although I'm sure instant gratification will always be more popular. Vanguard is a MMORPG for the hardcore elite, casual players don't even need to apply.
Vanguard is a pretty big game, at least if you count it in square miles or in the 17 GB footprint on your hard drive. But sometimes I couldn't help but think that a good part of of this size is achieved by cheating. For example there are 19 races, which sounds like a lot. But of these 6 are human races, and 4 are elvish races. That saves a lot of textures and animations, just use the same model with a different color. Just like Blizzard did with the blood elves. A lot of the landmass size is gained by having empty landscape, with little or no mobs. That creates a feeling of distance, because you have to run so far to get to the next quest target, but didn't require all that much work from the artists. The one aspect where Vanguard is a bit too small is quests. I have no data on exactly how many quests there are, but they seem to be a lot thinner on the ground than in World of Warcraft. Even to get to level 8 I had to do some grinding because I ran out of quests, and then move to the starting zone of another race to pick up more quests. Of course this is a beta, and we can only hope that more quests will be added. Especially since quests don't seem very balanced yet: By doing the quests in both the gnome and the Qalia human starter areas, I noticed to my surprise that the quest reward items were better for the humans. From the humans I received armor with the same armor class as from the gnomes, but the human armor gave a bonus to hitpoints, which the gnome armor didn't. And around the human city there were a lot more quests than around the gnome city.
From the general gameplay and mechanics Vanguard is very, very similar to World of Warcraft. The user interface looks similar, and even the keyboard shortcuts are identical. The gameplay of the adventuring part is the same as in WoW: You take a quest, are told to kill 10 foozles, you go and kill them, you come back, you get xp and a quest reward. Nothing wrong with that, this is a gameplay which works, so why change it? Experience points give you levels, every two levels you get new spells or abilities, and during each level using your abilities raises your skills to a cap of 5 times your level. There are some minor differences in targetting, you can have one friendly and one hostile target, which makes switching between healing and damaging easy. If you solo you just have to think once to set yourself as your friendly target, there is no auto-selfcast.
I am not a big fan of the World of Warcraft maps, especially the dungeon ones. But in comparison to Vanguard, WoW has excellent maps. The map and mini-map function in Vanguard is so useless, it makes me cry. You only get to see where on the continent you are, but you don't see any details. There are no city maps, no dungeon maps, and even in the outdoor zones you only see the mountain ranges and major rivers, and no details at all. Vanguard makes up for that by having a system of waypoints. So your quest target area is often marked on the map as a waypoint. And on the compass you can always select one waypoint to show up as a red dot, giving you the general direction to your target. You might not be able to go there straight, and the map won't tell you the way, but at least you know the direction.
I didn't group much in the Vanguard beta up to now. Only once I teamed up with another character for a series of quests in a library at the end of some cave, which was rather hard. Instead of "normal" and "elite" mobs, Vanguard mobs have between 1 and 5 dots, and soloing anything beyond 2 dots is very hard. I don't know if there will be soloable mobs available up to the highest level, or if Vanguard has forced grouping. But I know that the interesting places, the dungeons, have the mobs with more dots, that require a group.
Besides adventuring, you can spend your time harvesting, crafting, or doing diplomacy. Harvesting works similar to World of Warcraft, you can learn up to two harvesting skills, then you go out and find resource nodes, and click on them to harvest. Unlike WoW you can have separate sets of clothing for harvesting, crafting, diplomacy and adventuring, you have 4 paper dolls to equip, not just one. Equipment is always automatically put on the right doll, and you don't need to switch anything when in the middle of monster killing you want to harvest some resources. Nice!
Crafting is supposed to be a mini-game, but unfortunately it is a boring one. You click a lot of buttons in series. Sometimes you have a choice which button of several possibilities to click, but the choice is usually rather obvious. For example if a complication appears, you better click on the button that deals with the complication first. You need to do very few real decisions, and these mostly deal with how high a quality of goods you want to craft. Higher quality uses more materials and more clicks, thus takes longer. And you only have a limited number of action points, and as each click costs some of them, you can't drive the quality up indefinitely. I got to artificer level 4 in the time I played, which didn't get me any further than making intermediate items, no useable goods yet. The crafting system is very complicated with lots of different skills which you can increase by doing it. But in the end you are standing in a city in front of a workbench and click buttons for hours. Not all that exciting. On the positive side there are "work orders", where you craft things for a NPC who pays you for them. You won't get rich from that, but it is a nice change from having to spend much money to train, as in WoW.
The third alternative occupation is the one where Vanguard really shines: Diplomacy. This is a kind of collectible card game, which is a lot of fun. Each game starts with a counter in the middle, and by playing cards with numbers in the upper right corner, you move the counter towards your side by so many spaces. Each of the two players has a number how many turns he needs to have the counter on his side to win. Besides the victory counter there are four columns of counters called expressions, where both you and your opponent count their expression points. There are cards that don't move the victory marker much, but give you expressions points instead. Other cards move the victory marker a lot, but cost expression points, and you can't play the card if you don't have the points. Every played card can't be used again for a random number of turns. Cards can give expression points not only to you, but also to your opponent, allowing him to pay for much better cards. This requires a lot of strategy to keep the victory marker on your side, and your expression points up, without giving the opponent points he can use. Different opponents have different cards, and often one of the 4 expression columns is greyed out and can't be used in that diplomacy parley, so you need to change your deck accordingly. That makes every parlay different. If you win a parlay, you might get items that give you bonuses, or new cards, and your diplomacy skill goes up. With a higher skill you need less turns for victory. The whole thing is a brilliant sub-game, and great fun. The only problem is that you can't just parlay with everybody, parlays are quests and can only be done once. So diplomats need to travel from city to city to find all the diplomacy quests, and have to travel a lot more than other adventurers.
Your four careers as harvester, crafter, diplomat, and adventurer are totally separate. You don't need to be adventurer level X to reach Y skill in harvesting or diplomacy. And crafting even has a level of its own. But each of these careers takes a lot of time, so you simply won't have the time to max out all of them. And of course harvesting requires you to search the landscape for nodes, with the higher up resources being in areas with higher level monsters, so it isn't really 100% independant from adventuring. But you could never leave the city and level up crafting all day, buying the resources and selling the finished goods via the broker, the Vanguard auction house. And for diplomacy, while you need to travel between cities, you can do so on the roads and don't need to explore the more dangerous corners of the maps. Diplomacy is definitely my favorite here, although it isn't quite clear yet for what it will be good in the long run. The developers talked of opening up trade routes with diplomacy and making money that way, but I'm still far from such things, if they are even implemented yet.
Because one thing is certain about Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, it isn't ready for release yet. In spite of having only between 2000 and 3000 players per server (and only 3 beta servers), the servers crash several times per day. And the client is also prone to crashing every couple of hours. Many quests are still bugged, for example I got stuck in gnomish diplomacy because I was supposed to get somebody fireworks by winning a parlay. Won the parlay, but no fireworks, thus no quest completion, and no further quests. Sigil is working on fixing things, for example I was stuck in crafting with a quest as well on Saturday, and it got fixed by Sunday. But while the game is certainly already playable, it doesn't really feel finished yet. And I sure hope they will add another thousand or two thousand quests.
But it doesn't really matter for me, I won't buy this game. I'm very much a fan of instant gratification and "easy mode" MMORPG gameplay as in WoW. Vanguard is much harder. Not in the skill you need to play it, but by making everything longer, and by punishing you harder if you fail anything. Since I reached level 7, I receive an experience point penalty on dying. Then I can either run naked to my corpse to recover my equipment and some of the experience, or say goodbye to the experience and summon my corpse to the altar where I got resurrected. There is no way to run as ghost to your corpse and continue from there. If you died deep in a dungeon, you will have to restart from the beginning, because dungeons aren't instanced, and the monsters respawn. A wipe is really, really hurting in this game. As I said, Vanguard is targeted at the hardcore, the iron men of virtual worlds. Me, I'd never even get to the highest level, not with all the experience point penalties from dying. And while Vanguard could have some success in its hardcore niche, the fact that this is a niche means that it will never get past a few hundred thousand players. This is not a WoW killer.
But of course if you prefer the harder style, this might be the game for you. On the world <---> game scale, Vanguard is placed a lot closer to the world end than Everquest. Players can build houses, boats, and decorate with self-crafted furniture. You might end up with a unique and fully decorated castle on top of a mountain, surveying all the lands around you. Getting there will be hard, but that is the philosophy of this game: if it isn't hard to get, it isn't worth getting. This is Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, not Saga of Casual Players. I don't have time for this, but maybe you do.
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