Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3804 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Sony
• Released on: 2007-01-30
• ESRB Rating: Rating Pending
• Platform: Windows XP

Manufacturer's Description
From the developers of the award winning Everquest Online, Sigil Games Online comes the next generation of MMO gaming.

Welcome to Telon, a vast and ancient world of magic, intrigue and adventure. Facing the challenges of a war torn world, the diverse people here struggle to rebuild their once great civilizations. A fragile alliance has been struck, with the lands set upon by invading forces, the races must band together to survive

Welcome to Telon, a vast and ancient world of magic, intrigue and adventure. Facing the challenges of a war torn world, the diverse people here struggle to rebuild their once great civilizations. A fragile alliance has been struck, with the lands set upon by invading forces, the races must band together to survive.

Join a community of thousands of players online as you traverse a breathtaking landscape on the back of a dragon as you explore the grandeur of a world designed by the seminal fantasy artist Keith Parkinson. Create and customize your character from 19 races and 15 professions. Combat fierce opponents with a groundbreaking dynamic combat system that forces you to react to your opponents as you tie together devastating combinations of attacks. The challenge awaits the boldest of heroes

Customer Reviews

In the dark without a light,
this is entirely how a large majority of European customers are feeling at the moment, the problem is the game and all of it's management is directed from America, which means anyone East of the Atlantic gets the sticky end of things.

The combat is very similar to many MMORPGs out there however the crafting and diplomacy is new to this genre and very enthralling expanding the story lines and the quality of items which can be created.

The graphics are beautiful and run well on quite high settings with bloom and other dynamic lighting options acitvated on a 7900 GFX card.

The game itself is very inviting and very fun, however the European's at first only had 2 servers open to them, which meant severe amounts of lag and server issues, after pre-release another EU server was opened however now we have had to suffer atleast 48 hours worth of accumulated downtime with no real explanation or reimbursement. If SOE decide to give compensation to players this will be abit more acceptable but if they expect the European community to carry on as if nothing has happened I would advise waiting atleast a month until the teething issues are out of the way and they get a competent technical support team set up in Europe.

Overall; Great game, terrible customer support for Europeans.

Good Potential
Vanguard is one of those games that has/had huge potential. Diverse classes, huge world, Wonderful landscape and a good crafting system all help this game along. While i played i found crafting good fun as you where creating something useful from fairly low levels. Combat was more or less the same as any mmorpg, with a skill bar and bashing out those skills until the monster dies. All in all pretty good fun.

A few things spoil it though, the high system requirements in the game mean that even a high end system gets pretty bad frame rates. This means that it is difficult to keep playing for extended periods. Although im all in favour of encouraging people to group to do quests, which is required in vanguard past level 10, there needs to be an easy way to form those groups, which vanguard is seriously lacking. The main problem is that the world is so big and the quests spread out so much that its quite hard to fill a group with people doing the same quest as you because there not many people around. If quest givers where in central locations such as the major city's it would force people to interact.

The lack of guidance seems to have frustrated many people I know, as they do not know where to go for another quest line.

Vanguard is a game with huge potential, but to many people at the moment it just seems to be a game that makes it hard work to do anything. I intend to go back in a few more months to see if its progressed much.

Gem of a game past the bugs..
This game would of recieved 5 stars but ofcourse like every new Mmorpg there are bugs some more then others.. Anyway this game has been the game i've been seaching for since i Began playing mmo's 3 years ago. Its got a very good list of features such as player controlled boats, player owned houses, Flying mounts, large range of ground mounts, a complex and quite fun crafting system and something entirely new called the Diplomacy system which is very fun and also helps the community by providing buffs if enough people go into diplomacy with a certain npc.

The adventuring itself is considerably slow compared to the standard mmo's of today such as World of Warcraft. This for some may become quite tedious but for other it will most likely provide a bigger feeling of accomplishment where as in other mmo's where you get levels so fast that it loses all feeing of accomplshment. Like most people have already said most of the content is this game is group content which is quite true but i wouldnt let it put you off, once you join a guild etc.. it becomes quite easy to group and get on with the game. Also Vanguard has brought back the death penalty so you do lose quite abit of experience points unless you retrieve your corpse. This may come as a shock to people who have come straight off WoW where thee is next to no penalty for death. Though i feel this penalty makes the game alot more exciting as you will fear death. Also one of the games biggest qualitys is the size of its world its huge! There are 3 continents which require quite large amounts of time to travel across, dont let this put you off though as you get your first horse quite early on which makes your travel experience a hell of alot easier. :)

One thing i must express though is right now there is alot of bugs in the game, the Developers of the game ran into financial diffucuilties and had to release this game early unfournatly i would put some serious thought into buying this game in its current state if you are easily put off by bugs as first impressions can happen only once its not a wise idea to waste your first impression if you think its likely to be a bad one, I can see a very good future for this game so you may want to put it off a month or two untill it improves so you get the most of your first impression and find it easy to stick with the game. Though i must express the game is not Unplayable! I have happily leveled to level 16 since launch with only running into about 5 bugs i couldnt get past and plus i'm not easily annoyed.


Ok so to round it up in my opinion the kind of people who would enjoy this game are people looking to revive the experiences they had in Everquest 1 while this game isn't quite so hardcore as Everquest it certainly has many similarities, also if you looking for an mmo with probebly the biggest amount of features in a game to date and even more on the way then this game is certainly for you. People who probebly wont enjoy this game are people who are new to the genre as it is quite diffucuilt and it would probebly be better to move into the genre with something smaller such as WoW to get a nice taste for mmo's before moving onto something more diffucuilt and in my opinion more rewarding.

ONE last note, sorry if i'm boring you but this game does require a fairly powerful pc do not buy the game based on the minimum specs otherwise you will not be able to play the game effectivly, try to get as close to the recommanded specs as possible or you will greatly cripple your game play experience i'm afraid to say. Thank you for your time hope i was helpful. :)