Vangaurd saga of Heroes
In Vanguard, home is the world of Telon, which features three main continents, 19 races, and 15 classes. While many of the choices seem fascinating, most of them boil down to archetypes and group roles familiar to anyone who's played an MMORPG before.
There are a good number of ways to modify your avatar's physical appearance, so you could easily spend quite some time deciding on the look and purpose of your character. Once in the game, a system of pop-up messages guides you through the beginning steps, and you're off to explore, quest, and level. The starting quests are genre standards familiar to anyone who's played an MMORPG before, but once you've gained a few levels, you'll find just how daunting Telon can get.
The first and obvious challenge once you are around level seven is that, like it or not, Vanguard isn't for the solo player. That isn't to say it's devoid of content for the lone adventurer, but consistent soloing is a good way to get quickly frustrated. Most quests are obviously designed for groups, even if they're not necessarily identified as such in your quest log, and soloing what should seem like a simple mission can result in quick death if you aren't careful.
Even with a full group, some areas and dungeons can be a time-consuming challenge, particularly because Vanguard doesn't feature any instanced quests. As a result, you might need to wait a while before the boss you need to vanquish reappears after the last group's battle. Multipart group quests may take three or four hours to get through, and even with a good party, a simple mistake can cost you your character's life.
That cost can be pretty high, since resurrection entails experience loss and a trip back to your corpse, assuming you want to regain some of that XP. You may summon your tombstone at an altar, but at higher levels, the amount of time you need to put into regaining all the lost XP is intimidating. In any MMO, returning to your corpse in a monster-infested dungeon may be next to impossible, and the additional loss of experience often makes the penalty even more frustrating in Vanguard.
There's no experience loss by falling to the sword of another player on the free-for-all player-versus-player server, which eliminates the need to retrieve your corpse but means your killer can loot up to 15 percent of the coin you're carrying. Conversely, a second PVP server groups races into two separate teams. Along with the usual duels common to the genre, that's the only PVP content Vanguard offers on US servers.
Features like player housing and boats for travel extend Vanguard's shelf life for players approaching the top level of 50, and even with plenty of room for future questing content, there's plenty to see and do. But Vanguard is undoubtedly not for everyone. Multiple bugs, forced grouping, and a vocal player community sensitive to criticism currently keep players looking for an easygoing adventuring experience at arm's length. But Vanguard gets a lot right, and the engaging combat and nifty diplomacy are more than enough reason for genre enthusiasts to give it a shot.
Source: www.gamespot.com
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