After much anticipation you can now buy Vanguard Saga of Heroes right here on VanguardMMORPG.com! You can have Vanguard Saga of Heroes delivered in just a few days, or download it and begin playing today!

Vanguard brings unique game play to MMORPG’s:

1. 3 expansive land masses awaiting discovery
2. Unique crafting experience, challenging but quite rewarding
3. Unique diplomacy experience, political intrigue at its finest

Create characters as unique as you are:

1. 19 playable races
2. 15 unique classes
3. TONS of visual customization features

Buy Vanguard Saga of Heroes

VanguardMMORPG.com has added new & updated content to our Vanguard Crafting area including a Basic Vanguard Crafting Guide. Beta 5 brought a slew of changes to many of the most basic elements of the game, including many improvements, tweaks and changes to the crafting system.

Find answers to your questions about the basics of the unique crafting system of Vanguard. From start to finish, harvesting to Work Orders and everything in between.

Dungeon:
Ksaravi Hollow

Location:
near Khal

Level range of Mobs:
2 dots, couple 3 dots, level 7 through 11.

Overview:

1. Consists if a very large cave, with a bridge to a series of platforms constructed with wire mesh and boards.  The entire cave is graphically stunning but it can be difficult to see which way you need to go because of the “ratty” look of this construction.  When you first enter the cave, it doesn’t look that big, but the number of mobs in there makes it a very long dungeon with great exp.
2. Alter not too far from cave, however, re-spawns cause a huge obstacle to reforming the group if only partial deaths.
3.  Experience is very decent, but drops lacking a bit.  Very few weapon/armor drops until the final boss.
4. Group of 3-4 level 7’s without healer, can easily take everything up to the boss, and its great exp.  A tank would be important though, since the mobs do decent damage.
5. Because of re-spawns, keeping moving is very important.  Boss fight especially, can be a lot tougher with a few re-spawns during the fight.  When in doubt, kill boss and loot before the others take you down.

Final View:
Re-spawn was definitely a factor in this place.  It’s a very long journey to get to the boss, and without much dropping on the way, you don’t want to retrace your steps.  The boss fight was tough, and there are mobs inside the room that you may not see at first.  Fighting the boss where he stands is probably your best bet for avoiding re-spawn.

Instance:
Arcanium

Location:
near Leth Nurae (just outside of town).

Level range of Mobs:
2-3 dots, level 7 through 11.

Overview:

1. First off, this dungeon is very close to Leth Nurae, but it’s obscenely far from the nearest altar.  Obviously, you can bind in LN but only usable 1x per hour, so expect to hold up your group for quite a while if anyone takes a fall.
2. There are several quests outside with decent armor rewards (well worth doing), and I had access to all of them at level 9-10.
3. Entering the Arcanium is tricky if you have never seen the hidden door.  When you get to the bottom of the stairs, you will have to left click the walls on your right and one will open.
4. There are 2 main wings of the Arcanium, one leading to a room of ethereal mobs, and the other heading toward a similar room with spiders.  The spider room also has access to a decent sized cave full of tougher spiders, that ultimately leads out to an exit further south on the map.
5. The spider wing has some challenges with adds, since standing around will usually bring extra spawns.  Look for a safe spot, run to it and battle there, rather than just fighting where the mobs are.
6.  The only boss that we encountered was a “mother” spider that was extremely easy, and did not drop anything of significant value.
7. With a healer and a tank, this dungeon is not too difficult for 3 level 9 or 10’s.  Without a healer, it’s very doable with 4.

Final View:
When I say that it took me 15 minutes to run back, that might be an understatement.  But, other than that, this instance was decent.  The quests made nice additions to my gear, although nothing spectacular.  As for mob spawns, this place is impossible to farm out.  Head to the spider room and cave below, you will not have any issues waiting for mobs.

It looks like Vanguard beta findings are starting to pay off - the game is more stable now than I’ve ever seen it. We played for about 3.5 hours last night with little or no performance issues. We had a group of 4 from Sinister Guild - 2 casters & 2 melee - we experienced minimal animation lags from time to time, a few segment load jitters, and a few bugs, but nothing that slowed down our game play.

There was one are in Qalia (near the outpost/tower at the base of the first long road down toward Khal) where our group kept auto-dispersing (bug reported) other than that things went pretty smoothly.

1. Playable for hours between any crashes or restarts
2. Many bugs fixed, few remaining
3. Better performance at higher quality settings

The last, although not a focus for many MMORPG fans, is of the utmost importance to some players. I am particularly interested in getting the best visual quality and smoothest game play performance I can and I’ve noticed a remarkable improvement in the games quality/performance over the last few days of patches.

Where previously I was forced to play at the lowest quality settings (Highest Performance) at 1024 x 768 resolution for 15-25 FPS, I can now play in the next quality settings level (High Performance) at 1280 x 1024 resolution for 12-18 FPS. I know that’s not great FPS, but its playable and makes a dramatic difference in visual quality. (see below)

High Performance - 1280 x 1024 Radeon 9600xt 128mb 2.4ghz Pentium - 1gig ram 12-18 FPS

Highest Performance - 1024 x 768 Radeon 9600xt 128mb 2.4ghz Pentium - 1gig ram 15-25 FPS

Like most MMORPG’s Vanguard SOH will test your spell casting & blade wielding in combat, but Vanguard also introduces a whole new type of warfare - diplomacy. From striking up friendships to petitioning heads of state,  diplomats must have their wits about them and stay one step ahead of their counterpart in order to keep the upper hand. 

Check out our new basic Vanguard Diplomacy guide

Sigil & SOE (Sony Online entertainment) announced today that Vanguard will be available in retails stores January 30th! This is quite a bit earlier than most of us anticipated. There is quite a bit of speculation and discussion about whether the game is in fact ready for release. For many beta testers the experience leaves somewhat to be desired, but I’ve been BLOWN AWAY by what I’ve seen so far. Still…I understand some of the misgivings that this may be a bit too early for public release.

I think Vanguard has some of the best story telling and game play of any MMORPG out to date. The games graphics are absolutely stunning and enveloping - the visuals draw you completely into this fantasy world, which makes the game play that much more believable and addicting. Here-in lies one of the games biggest issues, and by result the number one complaint as well. It takes a great deal of power to render the games beautiful landscapes and believable characters - power means hardware, and many players systems just aren’t prepared for this level of engagement.

The biggest complaints I’ve heard from beta testers is:
A) Lag (related to the games servers/connection speeds)
B) FPS (frame per second - related to the player systems/hardware performance)

Lag will be taken care of when the game and servers have been optimized - probably one of the last elements to be complete before the game delivers. The bigger problem for many players is the performance requirements that the games graphics demand on their hardware. Again, before the game is delivered to stores there will be a great deal of code optimization, which will reduce the hardware load on systems, but it appears that the stated minimum requirements may not allow the game to be very playable.

If you were planning on attempting to play Vanguard : Saga of Heroes on a system with ‘Minimum System Requirements’ - I highly recommend upgrading your video card and having at least 1G of memory even better if you have 2G ram and faster HDD(lots of page load lag on the systems I tried with low memory and slow drives).

VanguardMMORPG.com’s recommended system minimums:
Intel 2.4ghz (or athlon equivilant - as prescribed by Sigil)
1 Gigs of memory (double the rSigil ecommended dose)
256mb Video Memory (AGP or PCI-E; No PCI cards tested could handle the job)
Sigils recommendations mention “100%” DirectX 9.0 and Vertex and Pixel Shader 2.0 compatible. Even cards that say they are compatible - may not be “100%” compatible.

 I’m still unclear on the exact minimums, but suffice it to say you’ll want to have better than the posted minimums if you want to play the game with any style. At any rate, don’t fall for the negative chatter - Vanguard REALLY ROCKS!! Don’t miss the release - See you in Telon!!

 
The SOE Press Release:
VANGUARD: SAGA OF HEROES MAKES THE JOURNEY INTO RETAIL STORES ON JANUARY 30, 2007

San Diego, CA - January 11, 2007 - Sony Online Entertainment and Sigil Games Online today announced that the upcoming massively multiplayer online role-playing game Vanguard: Saga of Heroes will be released to retail outlets across North America and Europe on January 30, 2007, for the suggested retail price of US$49.99. A limited edition is also available for a suggested retail price of US$89.99.

(read more…)

This video clip shows some VERY heavily armored characters entering some sort of dungeon/castle - looks like some high level/endgame level combat & gear. Looks very interesting. I’m still lucky to get equipment that actually has stats on it

Once again Lee from down under (Sidney, Austrailia) kicks out a decent preview of Vanguard. See the game from the start - character creation, all the way through to some inital gameplay, questing, combat etc.

Thanks again Lee!!