Alienware M17 vs Vanguard: Saga of Heroes
As earlier mentioned, I bought an Alienware M17 gaming laptop. A quick listing of the specs shows a 2.5ghz Core 2 Duo, 4gb of RAM, and most importantly, two ATI 3870 graphics cards in SLI Crossfire mode. I was interested to find out how this beast of a machine handles Vanguard. To be honest, I am a little disappointed in the performance it gives in this game. Turns out, there is a good reason why.
First, I don’t want to give the impression that the M17 is not a good gaming machine. It is a great one. The 3DMark ’06 score is well over 12,000 and it plows through World of Warcraft at max settings while running at 1920×1200 resolution. WoW has a very refined graphics engine, however, while Vanguard falls far short in this cateogry. It also plays Crysis and other games extremely well.
I expected to be able to run Vanguard at Very High settings while keeping to my screens native resolution of 1920×1200. In reality, the best I could do and still get a smooth experience was set it to High and tweaking it from there. One of the biggest performance killers are shadows, and I had to set them to low quality. I wanted to use full drawing distance but I had to set it at around 70%. Turning on HDR made the game flicker like crazy, so I had to keep that turned off. I also had to lower tree detail at long range.
I am not a FPS numbers kind of guy, so I don’t have that for you. What I find important is how the game feels and flows as I play it. If it hitches or stutters, that is all I need to know that the game isn’t running well at the current settings. With the above modifications to the High graphical settings, the game runs very well while I am out in the field adventuring. Things get much worse when I go into a town. The game struggles to load NPC’s and buildings, which causes major stuttering until all the objects are loaded.
I had read that Sony had made some improvements to the graphics engine that they claimed would improve performance and reduce the “chunking” effect. The Vanguard world is cut into many squares of land, or chunks, and when you pass from one chunk of land to another, the game freezes and churns away while it loads the contents of the new land area. My experience since returning to the game is that there has been no improvement whatsoever. My character still freezes in mid-stride and I have to wait a few seconds before he moves again. Many times my character will start moving again but his legs are stuck in place, which makes him float over the terrain instead of running over it.
Keep in mind that all of this is happing at a high screen resolution. Sure, I could lower it down to 1650×1080 or even lower, but I bought this computer in order to run games at high rez. Other games are not a problem, but it is painfully obvious that Vanguard still has a long way to go before it will run well, even on high-end computers.
Now here is the kicker. After being disappointed in the performance of this game on the M17, I did some research and discovered that SLI in Vanguard is not supported if you are using two separate video cards. Bingo. This is the reason for my troubles. It boggles my mind that it doesn’t. Here we have a game with extremely high hardware requirements and yet it doesn’t support SLI. Fah!
So, the fault isn’t with the M17, it is with the game itself. With this information in mind, the M17 plays Vanguard amazingly well. I am not so disappointed after all.
Read MoreVanguard: A Noob’s First Impressions
I have been playing Vanguard: Saga of Heroes for awhile now and I felt it time to give my overall impression of the game so far. I have chronicled on these pages my Druid’s adventures up to his current level of 17. During this time, I have seen and experienced many great things in this game, and I have also seen areas that need improvement. Has Vanguard picked itself up off the floor from being solidly knocked flat during its horrible launch? Read on and see it through the eyes of a low level noob.
I first played Vanguard when it was still in beta. The game was so rough and unfinished that I could immediately tell that it would not be anywhere near finished before it launched to the public. History shows that I couldn’t have been more correct. The game ran so poorly and had such a great number of game-breaking bugs that it is a wonder that it is still available on the market today. I quickly cancelled my account with the thought of never turning to the world of Telon.
Time moves on and it has now been about a year since Vanguard launched. I began to hear some good things about a game that couldn’t pay anyone to give it a good review when it was new. Intrigued (and because I had the Station Pass), I decided to check it out again and see what all the talk was about. Turns out that a near miracle has been performed.
The game runs about 200% better than it did at launch. Where it was barely playable then, it now runs acceptably well on my computer (AMD X2 6000+, 3GB, Nvidia 8800GT). Make no mistake, however, that Sony still needs to do a ton of enhancements to the game engine in order for it to run as it should. The game still hitches and there is still a delay when you move from one land chunk to another. The developers say they have found a fix for that and it should be coming soon, so keep an eye out for it. I still can’t come close to running it on maximum settings. I keep it at the High setting and customize things from there.
The game world is incredibly huge. The sheer landmass of this game can be a bit overwhelming and this started to become a problem with most players. If you wanted to adventure with friends, chances are that you would have to run for half an hour or more to get where they were. But, Sony listened, and this is another area that they improved upon. The riftway system was expanded, allowing immediate travel to most major areas, which allowed people to group up much more quickly.
The game world is also a sight to behold. In my experience, it is beyond a doubt the most beautiful looking game world I have ever played in. Granted, it takes a high-end computer to get the most out of it, but I’m always in awe of the graphics. I am constantly stopping to take a screenshot of the scenery for use as my desktop wallpaper.
The game play is where Vanguard gets a mixed review from me. The character animations really need some work. They are jerky and not fluid at all and it breaks the immersion factor. Sometimes game textures will not render correctly, making things look strange and out of place. When I first used my Wolfshape spell, I thought that I was turning into a cool looking white wolf. Instead, the texture wasn’t showing and the next time I used that spell I was the normal shade of brown. I also found an infamous old Everquest bug that seems to have found its way here. It seems fish have no problem swimming onto land and attacking you.
As a Druid, my combat usually starts with rooting the creature I want to kill. For some reason, even though I am standing a good distance away, the creature will sometimes hit me with its fist or weapon. I am not sure what causes this. Is the game client not catching up fast enough to accurately show me what is happening? Sometimes I will root a moving target. I get the text message that it is rooted but the creature still walks up to me and starts whacking on my head. My in-game network meter always shows green, so I don’t know what the problem is.
I have only played a Druid, so I can’t speak to how well the other classes play. I do know that I hear nothing but great things about all the classes and I think it is almost unanimous that all the classes are designed very well. Each class steps out of the standard mold and offers something unique that you may not have seen before. That said, there are some problems that need ironed out and a few classes are slated to see revamps.
As for the Druid, it can hardly be compared to the Everquest druid of old. Yes, I can heal a little bit, and yes, I have some damage over time spells, but what makes it interesting is that some spells can do two different things. Some spells have a direct damage component mixed with an additional damage over time feature. Doing two different types of damage at once is nice.
What makes the druid most unique is how the class uses what is called Phenomena points. Certain spells can use these points instead of using mana. The neatest one I have seen so far is called Starfall. If I have enough phenomena points available, the spell calls a star down from the sky and smites my enemy. This does massive amounts of direct damage. I can easily kill same-level creatures in one shot with this spell and it doesn’t use a drop of mana. The number of phenomena points is limited and they regenerate back over time, so you can’t chain cast these things, but it sure makes you feel powerful at a low level.
Questing is a very large part of Vanguard. My quest book has never been empty and there is always something interesting to do. Sure, many quests are of the “go kill X number of Y,” but there are also many that have neat stories attached to them. Also, as a new player starting out, I like how the quests move you from area to area. I am only level 17 and I have already travelled a very long way from my starting spot. It helps keep me interested in the game because I am always seeing new things.
Vanguard has always had a reputation of being a group-oriented game. This may be true at higher levels (I don’t know), but I have been able to solo every step of the way with my druid so far. In fact, it has been almost too easy to solo. As I said above, some of the mechanics of the druid class really make me feel powerful, and that is a great draw for me. I am told that the druid is one of the least played classes and I was shocked to hear that. I haven’t played a more fun class in ages. I think it may suffer from the druid’s reputation from Everquest and that keeps people away.
Despite its flaws, Vanguard has come a very long way. I wish things would get fixed more quickly, but Sony has decided to put only a small development team on it. Be that as it may, they have worked wonders on what was once a completely awful game. I can now honestly say that Vanguard is worth a try. If you played it at launch and hated it, come back and see what has changed. You might be surprised at what you find. The game is far from perfect, but it’s not a complete stinker anymore, either.
–Wolfen
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