Vanguard Pisses Me Off – AGAIN
Look, it is a well-known fact that Vanguard has its share of problems. Coming back, I was willing to overlook them in the hopes that I would like the game enough to continue with it. With that said, I’ve just about had enough with these stupid quest problems. The same quest line that gave me major problems earlier now has me banging my head against a wall again.
I am on the next phase of the URT: Undead Envoy quest line. The quest is named “Soul and Brain Power.” The objective is to run over to Veshka’s Monastery, kill a few of Veshka’s followers, and aquire a brain and torso from their bodies. I also needed to go to the graveyard behind the monastery and absorb the spirit of a Wandering Spirit that can be found there. Veshka’s Monastery can be found along the road east of Misthaven.
I easily found the monastery and killed a few of Veshka’s followers that were milling around outside. I quickly obtained the brain and torso. I then ran around the back of the building and found the graveyard. It is full of aggressive undead. I spotted the Wandering Spirit and watched what he was doing. The Spirit will slowly wander around the graveyard, which made this part of the quest much easier. I killed several of the undead to clear out a corner of the graveyard. I then waited for the spirit to wander past. I used the URT Spirit Absorber when he came into range and it was done in an instant. So far things are going great.
Quest completed, I ran back to Misthaven to turn in the quest to Helave Velore. Just one problem. She doesn’t think I have completed the quest. My quest journal shows all objectives complete. The quest tracker shows everything complete. Why won’t this bitch acknowledge it? I tried putting all the items in the bank and then logging out. I put the items back into my bags upon re-entering the game but that didn’t work when I tried to turn them in again.
This is frustrating beyond belief. How long has this game been out? As a casual player, I don’t have the time or inclination to be put through crap like this. I want to have fun playing a game, not cursing at my screen and writing articles like this one. Right now, I can’t see paying to play this game when my free time is up. Why should I when everything I try to do is broken?
Read MoreVanguard: URT Or Bust
After receiving that response from a Vanguard community representative, I had hoped that they would fix the quest Harvesting The Parts in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, nothing had changed as of the last time I logged in. But, I was not going to let a screwed up quest defeat me, so I decided to work it until it was finished.
I needed five broken hand bones from my undead friends, so off I went to the nearby hilltop to kill a few of them. As I mentioned before, due to the problems with this quest, once two hand bones drop, you won’t get another one until you run to town and put them in the bank. A hand bone dropped on each of the first two undead that I killed. I killed several more to see if the quest had been fixed. It wasn’t, so I ran to town, dropped them in the bank, and ran back. I did this until I had the required ten that the quest called for. What a pain.
Helave Verelore, the NPC that I need to turn this quest into, is located in Misthaven. Since it is a long run to get there, I flew a griffon north until I reached Misthaven and turned in the quest. She then gave me the quest “Soul and Brain Power,” which is the next task in this URT quest line. It seems she needs a good brain and strong torso for this undead envoy they are building, so I must go to a monastery and kill some minions there in order to aquire what she needs. I am also to use a device to absorb the essence of a spirit that wanders the graveyard there.
I dinged level 20 after completing the Harvesting the Parts quest. The druid spells I received were:
- Thunderclap 1: 810 to 855 arcane damage
- Venomous Thorns 3
- Sooth 3: 578 heal and 1206 heal over 16 seconds
- Tranquility 1: Invulnerability for 20 seconds
- Okeli’s Shield 1: Reduces damage taken by 100% for two hits or 30 seconds
- Ire 3
I have so many quests in my journal that I don’t know which ones to go after. Many are lower level quests that I never got around to. I am assuming that the URT quests are more important because they give nice equipment upgrades for the level.
Read MoreAlienware 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: Saga Of Frustration
Edit: Please see the end of this post for an update.
My first night back in Vanguard after not playing for eight months turned out to be a very frustrating evening. I logged in, fully expecting to have a good time, and re-learn all the basics about the game that I had forgotten. I ended up logging out after several wasted hours and experiencing no fun at all.
To get back into the swing of things, I decided to get started on the many quests in my quest journal. The quest that I picked is called: URT: The Undead Envoy. This is a United Races of Telon quest that has several stages to complete and has a nice equipment reward at the end. I picked it up at Arlinora’s Retreat from Elkisa Harok. The idea of the quest is that they want to start diplomatic relations with the undead of Telon and they think that the best way to do this is to build their own undead envoy. The thing is, they don’t know how to build one. So, Elkisa gives me the quest “Background Knowledge,” so that they can learn how to do it.
Things started out well enough. She gave me an Invisible to Undead potion and told me to run over to a nearby graveyard. I am to use the potion, sneak past the undead that walk there, and steal a journal from the local necromancer who resides in the graveyard. The location sits atop a nearby hill and it is full of undead skeletons. There are three small buildings in the middle of the graveyard. My first assumption is that the journal would be found inside one of the buildings. It turns out that I was correct.
I popped the potion and ran over to the nearest building. I opened the door and found myself face to face with a big, named skeleton. Luckily, the potion was working and it did not attack. No journal was to be seen. I ran to the next building and found two skeletons and the necromancer himself inside. Still no journal. Third time turned out to be the charm. The journal was sitting on the floor of the third and last building. No skeletons were inside. I snapped it up and ran back to town to turn it in. Everything was going great.
Here is where my night turned sour. Elkisa takes the journal, reads it, and then gives me my next task, which is the “Harvesting the Parts” quest. I need to go back to the graveyard and kill skeletons for their body parts. I also need to find some zombies and get their body parts. Two body parts in particular ruined my night. They are zombie skins and broken hand bones. I killed what seemed a million skeletons and zombies and yet all I had was five skins and two hand bones. I kept at it, hoping the next kill would give me what I was looking for. After more than an hour, I was frustrated and pissed off. I finally asked in OOC who I needed to blow in order to get these things to drop. The answer I got ticked me off even more.
It turns out that the quest is screwed up. If I want to have more of these items drop, I must first put what I have in the bank. What? The nearest bank is Veskal’s Exchange, which isn’t exactly close by. In desperation I decided to try it, so I put the items in the bank and started killing again. Two hand bones dropped immediately and then stopped dropping. Five skins dropped right way and then stopped dropping. In the end, it turns out that only two hand bones and five skins will drop if you have any of these items in your bags. Now, the quest requires 15 skins and 10 bones. If I want to get that many, I must run back and forth to the bank time and time again. This is amazingly ridiculous. This quest has been in the game since forever and it is in this condition. Totally unacceptable.
I ended my night with an unfinished quest and frustrated beyond belief. Nice job, Vanguard team, nice job.
Edit: In fairness, I want to pass along a note I received from an SOE community manager about the issues I encountered with this quest:
Hi there! I’m a Community Relations Rep at SOE and I just stumbled across your blog post here about your frustrations with Vanguard. I wanted to let you know that this quest issue has been reported to the team, and we hope you’ll still come back to Vanguard and enjoy adventuring in Telon. Have a great day!
That is great news! I am sure that others who try this quest will be very happy. Thank you!
How Time Flies
Wow, it has been a long time since I have posted anything here at the MMO Notebook. Unfortunately, my job took a strangle-hold on my life and all of my MMO playing time with it. The past months have been rough and tumble for me, but things are finally starting to settle down a bit, which hopefully will get me back to playing the games that I love.
First off, I was laid off from a job that I very much enjoyed. Needless to say, all my recreational expenses had to come to a quick halt. I had to say goodbye to my MMO subscriptions. It was necessary to do so, but that didn’t make it any easier.
It took more than two months to finally find a good job. I was happy to be working again, but I was also working a crazy amount of hours, usually six to seven days a week. As you can imagine, there was no play time to be had.
Now, months later, the job is starting to slow down some, which has allowed me time to play again. I am not sure which game I will settle on as my main, but I am currently back in World of Warcraft. I am also taking advantage of the free play time that Vanguard is offering former players. This will last until the end of January. Chances are that I will keep both World of Warcraft and Vanguard and split my time between them.
A friend of mine wants me to come back to Everquest, and while EQ will always be my first and best MMO love, I just can’t see myself doing it. Everquest requires more play time and it usually requires several people to get anything done. My play time is casual at best, so Everquest doesn’t really fit what I need right now. I wish it did.
So, I will slowly start posting on this blog again. My adventures in World of Warcraft and Vanguard will mostly be lower-level stuff, so I am not sure how interesting it will be for most people playing these games. I will do my best.
Read More