Vanguard: SoH

[Spectral Paladin]

I believe this is where I first read about this game and I ended up trying it out back in September, so I might as well share my impressions. If you 're not familiar with it, it was a very ambitious project, aiming to be the new everquest. Its developpers went bankrupt however and the game bought out by SOE, leading to a rushed and very buggy release.

Since then, things have improved somewhat. There is a small but mature community, bugs have been fixed and the game polished. Playing it one can still feel that this was destined to be a great game, although it's now in limbo development-wise. Even so, it is said there's enough content to keep a new player busy for roughly 2 years (although to be honest, it's quite grind heavy as well).

My favorite part is indeed how vast the world is, including the dungeons that are massive as well. Three continents, two of which are huge, the last being mostly sea and a bunch of islands (first one is sort of "european" and the other is mostly a desert). If you wish to lose yourself in a fantasy world, you got to do more than log in, hide the interface and start riding. Even in this manner, you 'll come across NPCs in all sorts of places. That makes harvesting not too terrible too.

Besides the "adventuring" part which is the usual quests and dungeon crawling, there is crafting which is fairly fleshed out. There are crafting quests as well, although not enough and levelling can get quite tedious in later levels. Last but not least there is diplomacy, where the player gets to "duel" with NPCs in a card mini-game. Dialogue is supplied during those "duels" (called parleys), which sounds interesting to an RPG player, although to be honest, a lot of it is fairly cheesy.

And then there's boats, houses and flying mounts. I have a paladin near max level and still play casually. If anyone else here happens to as well, send a pm.