Archive for April 22nd, 2011

For no particularly good reason, several of us will be jumping into an ancient Sony MMO called Vanguard, a relic from the ancient days of yore known as “2007”. Sign up for a free 14-day trial and post your character name here to join us. Furthermore, it’s a bonus experience point weekend, so what better time to get started than now? And stay tuned to this space for a game diary in the coming weeks.

When it was released, I reviewed Vanguard for Computer Games Magazine. It was a collaborative review written with Kelly Wand and editor Steve Bauman. They made fun of me for liking it as much as I did. Well, who’s laughing now? Okay, they are. But who’s playing again Vanguard four years later? That’s right. Me.

And lest you think Vanguard is just another MMO, well…you’re only partly right. It has a hearty combat system, varied character classes, a cool collectible card game to model diplomacy, some of the most interesting crafting you will ever do, and a pretty well realized and expansive world. And with only a single server for the US, it’s not nearly successful enough that you won’t be able to find the other people who happen to be playing.

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I’m sitting in the starting area of Karelia in my KV, waiting for the battle to begin. Karelia is one of my favorite battle maps. One team (mine, this time) deploys in the northeast corner on a two-tiered hill that looks like a short, wide wedding cake. The other team starts on a similar hill to the southwest. A road with very little cover runs directly between the two, but most players decide early in their careers that it’s explosive suicide to venture down it.

The northern and southern edges of the map offer much better avenues for attack. The northern axis boasts a number of large boulders that provide shelter from enemy fire, and some of them are even tall enough to block arcing artillery projectiles. The southern route is dominated by a high ridgeline with sheer cliffs on its northern face that can be skirted to the south. The team that commands this approach can move tanks to the top of the ridge and fire down on large portions of the battlefield. Both axes eventually lead to the enemy base which, when captured, ends the fight.

After the jump, choosing and losing Continue reading →

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