Golden Anvil

Ok, I'd better stop letting myself get distracted and write up my impressions of Vanguard so far. As my credentials, here's a list of the MMORPGs I've played: City of Heroes/Villains, World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Ryzom, Auto Assault, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and Guild Wars. Ryzom I've only played the demo, and AA, LOTRO, and DDO I've only played the beta.

Vanguard is doing some rather interesting things. They've spent the second largest amount of money in development (World of Warcraft being first) out of all MMORPGs. It's been in development for over five years. This means that their world is huge, and the areas I've seen so far are very nice looking. They are going for a much more realistic visual appearance than WoW did, and the results are some rather impressive looking terrain.

Other interesting features include no zones (all areas in the world connect together without the need for a load screen), no instances (all action takes place in the world as opposed to teleporting to a separate area set up just for you and your current group), player and guild housing (you can buy your own house and decorate it as you want), player built and owned ships, early access to upgradeable mounts, eventual access to flying mounts, over a dozen races and fifteen class (with more of each planned).

They also do some rather interesting things with diplomacy (altering an NPC's opinion of you) and crafting. Both are made into a minigame that's more than just click on a recipe or ability and get the results. I haven't had a chance to play with crafting, but diplomacy is kind of a card game where you try to make points in order to influence the target. It's rather interesting and (in my opinion) works quite well.

So far I'm pretty impressed with the game. It's still beta, so it has it's share of broken quests, server reboots, missing graphics, and other needed polish. Even so, it's already something that I'm enjoying playing, and has some really great potential for interesting things as I continue to play.