Pumping Irony

I wanted to see what the new Isle of Dawn (IOD) experience had to offer so I created a cleric on the Sartok FFA PvP server to give it a whirl. First I’ll describe the main adventuring quest storyline then some bullet points of the Isle and of the state of the GU6 game. As the title states, this is my impressions not a “review” so do not take it as such.

New characters are given the option of beginning their adventures on the Isle of Dawn or in their normal racial starter area. The Isle of Dawn was once part of the continent of Kojan, so expect a mythological Japan feel the Isle and its inhabitants.

For those seriously interested, I would highly recommend listening to the first few minutes of  Voyages of Vanguard #48 which featured Vanguard’s Lead Designer, Silius. The first segment was all about the Isle of Dawn and he gives a developer’s standpoint of the Isle’s intent as well as some of its content. New characters quickly become involved in a serious story involving the Ulvari, otherworldly creatures who destroyed the Raki homeworld and have begun an invasion of Kojan. The overarching Ulvari theme is already prevalent in some of Vanguard’s quest lore, and Silius hints that it will continue and grow in the next few content updates to the game.

After creating your character and loading into the Isle you begin your adventures at Tentrees’ Farmstead, a small rural community scared by a mysterious corruption of the local marshland. The adventure quests obtained here are of the standard kill and collect variety, typical Vanguard fare. While I only plan on describing the Adventuring sphere of IOD, the Crafting and Diplomacy spheres are also immediately available the moment you appear on the Isle. As is the case for the first few levels in most MMORPGs, the mobs in the Tentrees quests are non-aggressive though exploring quickly yields hostiles as well. Creatures we slay range from tadpole-ish gataro podlings to marsh dwellers (scaly lizard-men with a distinctive “Creature from the Black Lagoon” look) eventually to some Hobgoblin Overseers in the marsh itself. By the time these first quests are finished, you’re at least level 4 and have received new weapons, a new small bag and several armor upgrades.

Next, you’re sent to Sun Village where more quests are available. Hobgoblins are poisoning the crops and causing general problems, and they ask the noble adventurers to help. There’s a hobgoblin camp or two nearby plus a non-instanced underground lair known as the Earth Den. During the course of these adventure quests we get a full gear upgrade and at least one more small bag. Eventually we get clues to the nature of the corruption the hobgoblins are spreading and are sent across the river to the Magistrate’s House to pick up some more quests continuing the story and meet our first Ulvari. The local priests inform us the Ulvari come from another realm and have made their lair inside the nearby Temple of the Ancestors. Naturally, bold adventurers such as ourselves are in demand to put an end to the Ulvari threat! This begins the final chapter of the main storyline, and we’ll see one last gear upgrade as a result of completing these adventure quests. The final few quests take place inside the Temple of the Ancestors itself, which is only reachable via a pegasus ride! I was a little surprised the Temple quests themselves were labeled as solo, considering similar content on the mainland would certainly be group-only, but for a trial it was probably the best way to go. As I landed my pegusus on the entrance platform, a disciple was already there fighting her way in. We took turns at the various mobs rather than trying to kill-steal from each other until more players arrived and we all grouped to give the Temple a real go, Vanguard-style. We ended with a four-man group: a warrior, ranger, disciple, and my cleric. The four of us were a devastating force to the Ulvari and their ilk; we were doing crazy dps and I only had to cast two or three heals the entire time, which was good because I am not accustomed to having to scan CoreUI’s group panel and it took some time to find a comfortable routine. Clerics in Vanguard are not the squishy robe-wearing priests of WoW, we are heavy armor-wearing, shield-using fighters who also heal, buff and resurrect!

Temple of the Ancestors is just plain cool, no two ways about it. It’s a non-instanced multi-level environment, with neat features such as a magical energy elevator to go up and down between two particular levels (with enemies patrolling a central level), and disabling a fiery barrier by bathing your armor in blood to enter the last area for the boss fight. Again, the Temple is solo difficulty if you’re careful but with so many classes in the game, I cannot recommend enough that you take advantage of this final opportunity to experience grouping in the Isle of Dawn.

At the completion of the final Temple quest, you are rewarded with the final pieces of armor and your first hero title, “Hero of Dawn.” Vanguard subscribers will then receive a quest to speak to the nearby Rift Keeper who will send your character to one of the mainland continents via the game’s Riftway system. Oh, I should mention that Isle of Dawn’s level cap occurs on the high end of 10 and not immediately upon reaching level 10, so you’re able to continue gaining xp but cannot achieve level 11 without leaving the Isle.

The Isle of Dawn is exciting in that it’s the new SOE team’s first time creating this type of content, a whole new world area. From the terrain, to the towns and NPC’s the Isle of Dawn is consistent with what you’ll see on the mainland. Bringing up the world map, the full island is a 3×3 grid of chunks but IOD adventurers are restricted to the central chunk. Attempting to cross a chunk line rewards you with “That area is currently down or locked.” While a single chunk sounds limiting — and to a degree it is — there are still plenty of opportunities for exploration that the various quests will not take you. A favorite of mine was stumbling upon Ki Ta Village, inhabited by hostile level 9 hobgoblins. In the center of the village, however, are some friendly hobgoblins on whom you can practice diplomacy. In the middle of this group we find Slappy the Cool, Master Entertainer, who is busy bustin’ a move to some real-world Earth blues-rock dance music and spamming emotes such as “parties on, gets his groove on, gets jiggy with it, breaks it down” while his hobgoblin friends cheer him on and occasionally join in the dancing. Purists may cry “immersion-breaking!” here, but here’s my suggestion: pull that stick out of your ass! Slappy was so unexpected and so hilarious, it’s hard to not at least crack a smile. Vanguard is often overly serious, so an overt display of humor goes a long way towards showing the new team is having some honest-to-goodness fun building the game.

State of the GU6 Game

Vanguard is certainly making strides, but it’s also still very obviously a work in progress. GU6 brought new character models for players, which ranged from slight to sweeping changes, but in nearly all cases improved the overall look. Tipa’s halfling even got her eyelids back! IOD is, to my knowledge, using the all-new art assets to improve performance while adventuring and also seems to have re-worked the NPCs. In the mainland, where the new art assets have barely begun to appear, many NPC’s still look, well… freaky. On IOD the NPCs look much better, easily the best-looking NPCs in the entire game. As a disclaimer, my Dread Knight is in Thestra and I did not take him back to Kojan to compare the original Kojani NPCs to what I’m seeing in Isle of Dawn so don’t take my impression on this as a hard fact.

The purpose of the new character models was to improve performance, specifically while grouped. I very much enjoy the challenging group content in the game, but my performance always took a serious hit when grouped. My overall performance while solo remained largely unchanged from GU5 to GU6 but when I grouped for the Temple of the Ancestors my frame rate was steady whereas in GU5 and earlier I would have lost at least 10-15 fps, probably more.

In the first few quests in IOD we’re adventuring in a marsh, and are quickly shown that Vanguard has a horrible implementation of swimming, and the “fix” included in the January 25, 2008 patch was nothing more than a quick hack to stop the skipping. Characters often float mostly above the water while swimming and the transition from land to water is rarely seamless; I often bounce as if I’d hit a small invisible object before sinking into the water, and the same when coming back onto the land. “Swimming” is merely a character animation, there are no additional effects that would demonstrate swimming or even movement, indeed nothing to even show that the “water” even exists other than the “breathe” bar. Terrain is always a down-slope when entering water but rather than actually swimming on the surface, characters will continue downward on the same gradient so the player has to actively direct his character back to the surface to avoid drowning.

The “fade in” effect of GU6 works fine when it works, which unfortunately isn’t very often. The majority of the objects and mobs are still popping into view in both IOD and the mainland.

Object hit boxes are still a huge problem for targeting. GU6 now shows a new cursor type to show you the corpse has no loot but the hit box still exists which means extreme difficulty targeting a corpse which does have loot if corpses are stacked. This also means difficulty in selecting a target. Since my main is a tank, it is absolutely imperative that I’m able to quickly target the correct mob but instead, not only am I contending with multiple hit boxes from additional mobs in the fight but also the huge corpse hit boxes, making it practically impossible to target by any other means than tabbing through the list until I arrive at the correct mob. Unacceptable! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if the mob has nothing, eliminate the hit box entirely from my screen. Every other game on the planet does that, and while I’m placing most of the hit box blame on the Unreal Engine 2.5 (or at least McQuaid’s intentionally hacked-up version of it) this is still a very major in-your-face issue that needs to be addressed to have a properly playable game experience.

Fonts are still wonky, sometimes partially disappearing into objects placed on the terrain. The “enormous font” bug still has not been addressed, where any object or mob that is even slightly larger than normal also has its font size increased. Harvestable trees are the worst offenders, their names are gigantic.

Twice while inside the Temple of Ancestors the game suddenly decided I was underwater and brought up the “breath” bar. I’m in a group, busy fighting in the climatic finale to the story and the game is going to drown me? Really? Luckily the game returned to its senses mere seconds before drowning.

Finally, I noticed a design flaw in Vanguard’s atmospheric changes. You know, like when you walk into a marshland and suddenly everything is foggy or misty, or you walk into a burning village and the sky turns reddish and dark smoke fills the air? Vanguard bases that atmospheric change on the camera location rather than the character’s location. I can step into a marsh but if I keep the camera zoomed behind my character, no mist appears until the camera crosses that invisible line. This one is not UE2.5′s fault. It’s quite probable that this has always been the case and I’d just never noticed it, but it became glaringly obvious in my IOD adventures.

All in all, while IOD illustrates all of Vanguard’s strengths and weaknesses, I still found it to be a very enjoyable experience, especially the Temple of Ancestors. The tutorial tips do a nice job of explaining some of the mechanics and UI and it was great that they included every possible aspect of Vanguard all within the 1-10 bracket in IOD, including all three spheres of the game and a flying mount. The most noticeable positive aspect of GU6 was my performance while grouped, while the targeting/hit box issue is still the primary negative aspect of grouping. Presuming the performance is related to not only the new character models but also the new art assets in IOD, I won’t discount the possibility that my frame rate might take a hit while grouped on the mainland which is still constructed of the original, more inefficient art assets.

For now, I’m back for this month part-time, and really enjoying getting reacquainted with the Dread Knight, but the targeting/hit box issue was the final straw last time around and it’s still a major issue that directly impacts my ability to perform my class’ role, so until this is finally fixed I can’t say with any degree of certainty how long my stay will be this time. On top of that the Vanguard chapter of Revelry and Honor is nearly dead, most of them following Karen to EQ2 so I’m quite lonely other than talking in general chat. If I stick around in Vanguard, even part-time, do I stick it out with RnH or find another friendly guild on Xeth that won’t mind part-time players? Plus WAR is on the horizon next week, though I am currently undecided if I’ll play immediately or give it a month or three to smooth out the launch issues.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Vanguard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.