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Originally Posted by Lyrith
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Was this game actually any good at the beginning before it got patches that ruined it I presume? My computer back then was not good enough to run this game...
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Murrpau's post is accurate. Vanguard could have easily been the greatest MMO ever developed.
From a design perspective, nothing really comes close. I'm not the kind of person who tends to have lots of alts since I prefer to focus on one character. But any time that I wasn't playing with my room mates, I'd roll random alts because every class was so unique and fun to play. Vanguard was truly ground breaking and you see a lot of their design pop up in modern MMOs (almost every MMO since Vanguard has had a version of their Disciple class, for example).
Not only were all of the classes worth checking out, but also all of the races. And there were a lot of them. Almost every single race had a really interesting introduction to the game. I say almost because my main was a Halfling and it was pretty generic hobbit stuff... go fetch me some pies, etc.
I was really blown away by my Kojani (Asian themed humans) Disciple. You started on a beach nearby a nearly destroyed village, and you received quests from this general dude riding a dragon. At first you had to do some menial tasks like committing theft and arson. After that you're ordered to go slay the mayor of the village. You find him in the back of his house and he goes through this generic eastern pacifist philosophy dialogue and ends up teleporting you or something? You wake up in a refugee village (populated by people trying to escape the Empire; you were an imperial soldier in the beginning part). There's a progressive quest line that's very eastern philosophy oriented, culminating in you undertaking different tests (the most memorable was something like the Test of Faith where you had to jump off of this really high cliff). You completed the quest line around level 20ish or so, which redeemed you from your dishonorable life as an imperial soldier and you got the "Lao'Jin Knight" title. The whole thing was just so interesting I wasn't even concerned with leveling, I just wanted to experience the storyline and the other rewards were a bonus. I remember there were a lot of opportunities for the quest to diverge and allow you to make the "evil choice," so I assume that was a path you could have taken as well.
I tried looking this stuff up but there's like no information online that I can find even about these introductory quests that you're thrown into when you start. So, I can only imagine how impossible it might be to try to recreate the game with so very few resources. At least EQ was well documented.
Anyways, that's really what set the game apart. Orcs also had a really great introductory quest line where you escape from slavery and must go through this mountain, completing several tasks that emulated some great Orcish hero. Essentially he did all this crazy stuff to reach the summit and light a fire, warning his tribe of another warring tribe's impending attack. Completing the quest and lighting the fire on the top of this mountain was one of the most satisfying MMO experiences ever.
This is how a lot of the quests worked even in the mid and late game. Yeah, they were designed very similarly to WoW quests but the actual content was much deeper and made you feel like you were actually playing a part in a story. That was really what set Vanguard apart, you actually felt like an adventurer in a robust fantasy world instead of an employee of a bear ass delivery service.
Obviously you had to trudge through a lot of bugs and broken game to experience this stuff, and the way they handled subsequent updates did more harm than good. One of my room mates played a cleric, and that class serves as a good example of what went wrong with Vanguard. The cleric class, like a lot of classes, wasn't fully implemented when the game launched. However, they were balanced around not having all of their stuff implemented so the class functioned fine. In one of the first few updates, they decided to "fix" the cleric. This included introducing what was essentially a spec system where you could follow a certain god and receive additional abilities. I think these were split up something like melee, smite, heal. The problem is that this added a ton of new power to the cleric, and since they were already balanced around not having this stuff, the class instantly became the best tank, dps, and healer in the game. It was really, really silly and an obvious sign that Vanguard was not going to last.