Reception
Gamespy awarded Vanguard the "Biggest Disappointment" award for 2007. Vanguard also won the awards in the categories for "Least Fun", "Most Desolate" and "Lamest Launch" in the MMORPG.com MMOWTF Awards for the worst games of 2007.
There have been numerous criticisms of the game by the game press and the fanbase.
- The game was released before it was ready, leading to:
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- Content was low for high-level players, and spotty even in some lower-level areas. Much planned high level content was not included at launch.
- Large numbers of bugs and performance issues, which make gameplay difficult, and on some systems rendering the game virtually unplayable.
- At release, performance was poor on many systems, including some high-end configurations. For example there was no anti-aliasing, and anisotropic filtering support was buggy.
In April 2007 Brad McQuaid, CEO of Sigil Games Online, addressed these issues and provided some explanations:
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- "Had I had the financial resources, ability to place the product later, etc. I would have given us about 3 more months to get more polish in, more high level content in, and to distance ourselves from the WoW expansion." Full quote
McQuaid also alluded to the game's performance issues:
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- "For a variety of reasons and mistakes on our part that I won't get into right now, Vanguard was released with system spec requirements that were too high for January 2007. " Full quote
In the months following the release, the game code has been updated and many bugs have been fixed. On at least one web site (MMORPG.com) Vanguard is - as of July 2008 - routinely in the top 15 games, as ranked by visitors to the web site. In both May and August 2008, that same website (MMORPG.com) revisited Vanguard and gave the updated version a favorable response. However, no major game magazines or web sites have chosen to re-review the game with a scored rating since mid-2007. The eurogamer website have completed a 1-10 level test pitting Vanguard against Everquest 2 - they promptly decided to uninstall Everquest 2, stating Vanguard had come along very well during the bug fixing SOE had made, and the state of the game is very playable and actually very fun.
One of the first and few sites to support Vanguard : Saga of Heroes was The Angry Guild Leader. This site is no longer around but they were responsible for one of the most popular articles on Vanguard entitled Vanguard – Ready for Release which came 1 year post release after quite a bit of work had been done on the game.
Read more about this topic: Vanguard: Saga Of Heroes
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
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—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)