Evening walks.

Overall, I think Vanguard is fun.  It says I have 4 days worth of playing time so far, and I just got to lvl 19 and have 0 harvesting skill, lvl 5 crafting and 60 diplomacy skill (meaning that i’ve focused completely on lvling).  In WoW i’m sure i’de be lvl 35 already, or even a little higher.  And I’ve heard that it gets much harder once you get to the 20s.  I…like this, f-those who say it’s too hard to lvl and tedious.

I’m late for the gym, so this is just a quick review.

My major disappointment, is of course, the early release.  I’m not sure why they had to release it so soon.  It makes no sense to me and I feel it hurts the game in the long run.  Why did they release it when it obviously needed more beta to be ready.  And why release it when the most popular game of all time just released it’s first ever expansion?  Horrible, horrible horrible planning - I think it destroyed a lot of the bored WoW player base.  I just can’t figure out why; were they trying to steal away players from playing BC?  They should have known they couldn’t take on the WoW addiction.  Their best bet would have been to wait till people got bored with BC, or at least to have waited a few months after its release.  And worse of all, they rushed to release it when it’s buggy and broken!  WTF were they thinking?  Why release a bugged game when BC was coming out!?  Any WoW minion who might have decided to play Vanguard instead of BC would probably play it for a few days and go. “WTF.  Why would I play this bugged game instead of playing that new BC expansion where I can bone Blood Elves?!”  Edo wha?

Anyhow, I fear for the long run of the game.  I fear that they’ve scared off too many people.  But as long as they got enough players to keep the game going for many years then I don’t really care.  And it’s not really that broken, just too broken to keep people who don’t care about the game, that don’t play it because they remember EQ, that don’t play it for a bit more of a challenge than WoW.  I mean, I’ve probably already ran into…4 broken quests?  Yea, that sounds about right.  I dunno, out of maybe 70 or so?  So that’s not too horrible.  And there’s a few other minor flaws and the fact that I have to run it in the lowest possible setting to get good FPS, but that’s not a bug.  BUT, I like the gameplay, I like the overall setup, and I like the huge maturity increase of /ooc chat.  This review was not planned so it sucks, but I was blindsided by an email this morning so had to put something up.  Now I’m late and i’m pissed, but I’ll recover.  Hopefully I’ll put up a more meticulously planned review in the near future.  Oh, and there’s only 4 hair styles for the human women: butch, muffin tamer, princess lea, and lil’ kim.  That sucks and it pissed me off royally.  The emote movements look really cool.  I don’t like the auction house style trade system, I like EQ bazaar.  Ummm I’m out.