Vanguard goes for the Everquest feel for at least one obvious reason, a large portion of the team responsible for building Vanguard’s fantasy world was also responsible for creating the original Everquest in the late 90’s. A lot of familiar styles of play pop up in this title as well, including some less than fun corpse runs, spawn camping, and overall grinding. Corpse runs, for those not familiar, involve running back to the place that you were killed and retrieving your body (or resurrecting) in the same spot. You can avoid this by using a tombstone, but the XP penalty can be fairly steep. When it comes to PVP you won’t encounter an issue with XP loss, but instead the player that killed you can steal a bit of your cash. Either way, it can be chore to regain either the lost money or XP, especially as you advance.

That’s not to say that Vanguard is completely “old school” in its mechanics, and I’ll have to admit part of the charm of playing is that sense of nostalgia you get for the days of old, especially if your first introduction to MMO gaming was thru Everquest (as was mine).

Vanguard offers a robust character creation / class system, offering up 19 races with 15 classes to choose from. Each race has its own innate skill too, which makes creating a combination of race and class that much more complex. While some of the class names are unique to the world of Vanguard (Dread knight, Blood Mage, Psionicist), they all form around the basic archetypes genre players are familiar with by now, such as healer, tank, mage, etc. Thankfully, much like Everquest 2, you’re able to really delve into the character creation process and come up with a unique avatar to call your own (something that I seriously wish the Warcraft guys would implement).

The combat in Vanguard definitely delves from the old school auto attack game of Everquest. You’re introduced to a reaction based system, where in if you parry or dodge and attack, you’ll be able to perform a much more powerful attack to counter with. This causes the player to always feel involved in the combat, instead of sitting back and watching numbers fly. The same applies for caster classes as well, you can perform stronger magic attacks in the same way that you can melee by simply dodging, resisting or negating an enemy attack in some way.

The second thing that Vanguard introduces, and easily the most innovative device in the game, is the use of diplomacy. Diplomacy introduces a strategy card mini game that comes into play when speaking with NPC’s around the world. Each card represents a certain type of response, with a marker indicating how well the conversation is going for you after you being to play. If you’re able to keep the marker on your side within so many turns, you’ll “win” the conversation. Winning can grant you a variety of things, such as buffs, faction points, items, and more. Certain conversations require more skill than others, and you’ll encounter more powerful cards to use in conversations as you progress thru the world. This is actually one of the best parts of Vanguard, and you have to give the developers points for taking one of the most mundane aspects of an MMO and making it into something fun.

Vanguard also involves a complex crafting system, something that is probably familiar to longtime Sony MMO players. Instead of simply selecting a couple of items from your inventory to combine into something new, you’ll need to make sure you have a particular recipe, workspace, components, and tools to created whatever it is you’re looking to make. The process can be a bit of a pain for lower tier items, but there is a sense of satisfaction involved when you create something particularly useful and/or valuable. There’s a few other things that can factor into the creation process (or hinder it) and its these variables that the more hardcore crowd of MMO players, which Vanguard caters to, will probably enjoy.

Last but not least, questing in Vanguard is pretty standard for MMO fare. A lot of the quests involve killing a certain number of enemies, or simple retrieval attempts. You can come across some crafting quests as well, but they seem to be fairly spread out. A large majority of your rewards simply involve quests, but you’ll be able to obtain some loot early on as well. There doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of balance to the rewards you’ll find in earlier quests, so certain characters will be outfitted better than others.

Of course Vanguard, being a brand new MMO, has its fair share of bugs and few unpolished things here and there, but with time a lot of these should be ironed out. It seems to be par for the course that a lot these titles will launch earlier than they probably should, and jumping into the waters early can net you a lot of aggravation. Unfortunately that’s just a risk you’ll have to take if you want to check things out.

Vanguard also places a strong emphasis on grouping. You can definitely solo for a while at the early levels, but you’ll eventually find it all but impossible as you progress. Once again, this is definitely an old Everquest trait, so those of you looking for a little less MM in your MMO would do well to avoid this title.

Overall, Vanguard is a different breed of MMO in a world quickly becoming populated with WoW clones, and for anyone that misses the days of Everquest pre expansion 58 (or whatever number they’re up to now) it can fill a certain void that maybe you didn’t realize was missing. Do I think it’s enough to draw away from Blizzard’s massive user base? Not, not really. However, it’s a nice alternative to a play style that some feel is getting a bit stale already, and if you were a fan of the old school, it’s worth checking out for the free month at least.