Van Hemlock

By all counts, the Vanguard: Saga of Heroes beta Non-Disclosure Agreement has been lifted, and indeed, the whole thing has been opened up to anyone with a File Planet subscription now, allowing our intrepid amateur war correspondents to get in to the action and get word out to all us mildly curious bystanders about what this much speculated-on title is actually going to be like.

Or at least that's the theory anyway. Personally, I hate the idea of an 'Open Beta Test' - the word 'Test' is typically omitted these days, and this rather neatly hits the nail on the head. I'm sure there are one or two people who go in there with the right idea - fresh notepads next to the PC, assorted pencils, calculator, stopwatch, etc, and then methodically start experimenting with a tightly focussed area of game mechanics, working through not only obvious scenarios - 'What happens if I attack that monster?' - but obscure ones also - 'What happens if I try to combine my crafting kit with that Paladin Trainer while I'm a ghost?' and the like, and then once they've conducted an exhaustive scrutiny of the world, and everything in it, fill in hundreds of Bug Reports.

But not many. Of course most of us just charge in there, seeing it as a free ride, burn ourselves out weeks before the game is even released, and then get annoyed when the thing goes out fundamentally broken anyway. In the mean time, whichever magazine or website got the scoop and shoved out the almost-finished game on it's subscription or cover-disk pats itself on the back at the sudden and very expected burst of numbers, then drops the whole thing and moves on, only returning to give it a scalding review for not being tested properly, some weeks later.

All very disheartening, but I guess it would be naive to think that anything other than server load was being tested at this 'Open Beta' stage. That being the case, the rest of the product should be taken at face value - if it wasn't finished in all other respects, they wouldn't be letting people in to see it, right? This being the case, 'It's only a beta' rarely cuts the mustard as a defence.

I'm such a dreamer sometimes. Regardless, I've made it something of a personal rule never to touch Betas for MMOs ever again - I've been there before, and all in all, I'd have to say that it doesn't make me want to buy the game, and just annoys me. And it's not fair on the game company either - I'm not really there to test, even if I thought my feedback was important to them somehow. Nowadays, I just wait for, and judge, the finished product - whatever they decide 'finished' actually means. Can't say fairer than that!

Still, whether on not I even bother with the finished product is entirely open to recommendation. Here come the previews!

Tobold - 'Not finished, and not for him'

The Common Sense Gamer - 'EQ2, with odd looking avatars - Not Ready'

Warcry's Razorwire - 'Buy now, install in six months time'

Vanguard Vault - 'Not much new, but fun'

Couple of early impressions there - I'm sure more will be available soon, and if you're a lucky golden ticket holder for Mr File-Planet's Magic Fun Factory, you can even go look yourself. Some varied opinions there, with some common themes across them all.

People seem to like the 'Third Way', the new Diplomacy path - not fighting, not crafting, but something different again. More variety of gameplay is always a good thing, especially in an MMO, where spending five or more hours at a stretch is not unheard of, and this seems to revolve around some kind of collectable card game within the game itself. A good gauge of it's completeness or roundedness however, is to look at it and ask if it would work as a standalone game in it's own right, or merely a minor timeout novelty from beating mobs with sticks, like usual. Still, 'it's only a beta'.

The graphics get a mention as being at once overly PC intensive, and yet nothing we haven't already seen in other titles, apparently falling into the 'pretty, but not revolutionary' bracket, (for those people who have the hardware to see it in it's full majesty, that is). Still, 'it's only a beta'.

Apparently though, the main thing that everyone seems to agree on, it that it really isn't ready yet - surprise surprise - and that by mid summer, it ought to be quite a passable, if more time consuming, alternative to EverQuest II. I don't know...you let 3000+ armchair developers in to a game that you thought was a week or two away from being finished, and this is the thanks you get!

Personally, I always knew that Vanguard wasn't going to be for me. I'd done my time on the grind, I've played 2000-era EverQuest 1 for my crimes, and feel that my debt to society has well and truly been repaid. I'm here for the EZ-mode, and don't care who knows it. Any game looking to differentiate itself from World of Warcraft by being more difficult, is probably not something I'd enjoy nowadays. Still, I'm old, bitter and twisted - there's millions of youngsters who have only ever known WoW, and it's good that they have the option of 'Challenging' if they want. Whether that actually turns out to be 'Challenging', or merely 'Frustrating' is another matter.

So I find myself interested only in the launch, and the spin, and the impressions of others - all fascinating in themselves, and an archetypal kind of event we've come to know and love, The Great MMO Launch. From what I'm reading so far, it seems like this particular one is going to, lamentably, be a textbook example of the phenomenon...

Still, 'it's only a beta'...