Welcome to beta :D

Ork Warrior: Kowl Dominant
Orc Dread Knight: Cowl Darkened

First things first, when you logon to Beta you are taken through the character creation process. The Character builder is almost a game in and of itself. There is almost nothing about your character and its appearance that you cant in some way modify. Nose length, chin thickness, eyebrow width, fullness of lips, anything can be changed. If you want a fat and ugly dark elf female, you can do that, a handsome and noble Orc?, you can do that too.

Next comes the choice of Class. Now as my (rl) physical resemblance is very close to that of an Orc anyway and I prefer to be up front bashing stuff, I chose Orc Warrior and hit the GO button.

The screen goes dark and I sit waiting with baited breath for the world to appear around me. Pop and I'm in. Firstly, a nearby Goblin calls out to me that he needs aid to help free the prisoners. Looking about I seem to be on some kind of boat which has run aground. I tell the Goblin that I will help and taking his key I run to a nearby chained prisoner and using the key I release him. The prisoner expresses his thanks and starts to follow me, as I'm not sure what to do next I run back to the Goblin who originally tasked me with freeing the prisoners.

As is proper the Goblin roundly abuses me for being an idiot and tells me to get the hell off the ship and away to a fellow Orc who will be waiting on shore to help fellow such as myself who are newly arrived in this world. I run down the plank and off the ship onto the beach into the middle of a battle. Fellow Martok Orcs appear to be deep in battle with a new, unrecognised force of Orcs. I run between battling soldiers and piles of flaming debris and arrive at my destination, a gruff heavily armoured Orc trooper who gives me a sword and sends me back into battle.

Thus begins the life of an Orc Warrior newly arrived to the world of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. The graphics are lush and like nothing else in the genre of MMO's today. Screenshots simply don't do it justice as there is no sense of movement in a screen shot. In the example I gave of the entrance of an Orc Warrior, the flames leap into the night sky, the grass ripples in the breeze and the tree's sway in the cool night air. Feathery clouds scud across the night sky and the star scape is absolutely beautiful.The only thing you need to make the scene complete is the sense of smell and I'm sure that if they could Sigil would be building that into their engine as well. The depth of the imagery is awesome.

Many will compare the graphics to that of EQ2 and claim that WoW's cartoonish graphics allow them to give more detail. On the surface both of these claims look correct. That is until you get up close and walk around a toon or an NPC in Vanguard. That's when you realise that the light is playing across the surface of the armour showing each nick and cut in the armour surface. The NPC casts a shadow which changes depending on what surface it is being cast against. As you look closer you realise that there are runes and symbols etched into the surface of the armour, you can see the straps overlaying each other on the bindings of the sword scabbard. The close up detail in these models and in every piece of equipment is awesome.

The opening quests in the Orc islands lead you cleverly from site to site and up through the levels. The original quest sets are designed to take you up to at least 10th level and provide you with a decent set of armour and beginning weapons. By the time you get to your major racial city you will have a good idea of the dynamics of your class and how to play it. You will have progressed through several levels of quests and you will have seen the earliest of the monster models that have obviously been lovingly crafted by skilled artisans. There are Mob models in this game that absolutely put any other MMO to shame and those are just the ones you will see on the way to level 10.

Some of my favourite models so far are the frogs with the 6 inch long teeth, or the giant beastie that just wanders the roads of the island, the Razzenbacks in the testing caves are awesome!. The Orcs that you first meet in battle on the beach all wield swords that strongly resemble the Orc weapons from the movie series Lord of the Rings. I want one!






As I move up the levels and follow the opening quest lines I am led slowly through the lore and history of the Orcs. Who did what to whom and why, the early history, the Heroes and Villains and the great items of Orcish history. There is a Weapon called the Harvester which was wielded by the greatest hero of the Martok Orcs in antiquity, just from the description and based on the possibility of Unique weapons it already has me drooling and I'm only level 9. I have read that Sigil has discussed the possibility of one off weapons which can only be gained once per server and they seem to be setting up the lore of the game to allow for such items, or maybe the other way around. I was playing in a graveyard killing off Haarq Bugs when I was jumped by the Haarq Queen. My Girlfriend wandered in to see what I was doing, took one look at this ultra realistic bug rearing up to bite me and ran out of the room with a shriek. I think there went my chance to ever get her to play an MMO.

As I progressed I wandered across the world and finally came to the Orc city of Martok. I organised some banking and received some mail. At this point I decided I would try grouping for the first time. To say it wasn't successful is something of an understatement. Now before I get into this I want to make the following point. Before all the Sigil haters popup and say see its broken I told you so!, this is Beta and bad things can happen. I have lost at least 2 characters so far to unfixable bugs, corruption or Beta Wipe. These are the reasons why we test, so that you don't have to go through these things.

So I join up with 2 other players, a Sorceror (Make things go BOOM) and a Necromancer (Cool pets!) and we decide to help each other fight our way down into the Ogre caverns to see the Ogre King as we all have a quest which involves talking to him. As a trio we absolutely breeze through the Ogres guards and make it down to the King. The Necro runs up to the King and before we even know what's happened, the King attacks and the Necro is down. The Necro tells us he had just hailed the king and run through the quest text when the King attacked. I figured as a Warrior I would have the best chance of surviving the Kings attacks so i would give it a go. Boy was I wrong. The King and his bodyguard turned me into so much greenish paste on the cavern walls.

So I respawn at the altar just in time to see the Necro's hp dropping and his death. Bugger now we are all dead. Much like any Warrior through out History, without my weapons I am pretty much stuffed. So I begin the long run back to my corpse. As I run I am trying to sort out a CR with the other two, neither of them respond in the 5 minutes or so it takes me to get back to the Cavern entrance. Just as I get there the Sorceror leaves the group. I try to ask the Necro what is going on, but without answering me he leaves the group about 5 minutes later. Then it dawns on me, in WoW there is no such thing as a CR, players don't need to help each other or to work as a team very much as any class is more than capable of soloing all the way to the top. I think what I have just experienced is the "Every man for himself" attitude of many of the players in World of Warcraft. Vanguard is not designed as a fantasy based First Person Shooter in the same way that WoW is. In VG you will have to group, you will have to co-operate and its going to hurt a lot more if you die and cant get your corpse back. The WoW players will adapt or die and the WoW guilds will rapidly disintegrate, old school EQ, UO, Lineage 2 guilds will do really well in this game.

So my corpse is now at the foot of the Ogre King and I am naked. So I head over to an altar and decide to take the corpse summon hit (If you summon a corpse you get it back but lose XP), I summon the corpse and get told " you have no corpses in this zone". Bugger. So now I am corpseless, no Guildies to help and no one in zone. Ah well, I'm only level 10. I /bug the corpse loss, log out and start a Dread Knight.

I run through the Level 1 - 10 quests again and come out with a slightly different Toon. When playing the Warrior I got a couple of random item drops which improved him significantly. With the Dread Knight I didn't get those rare drops so the Toon is different not only in skills and abilities but in equipped items. As I am levelling I learn an interesting tit-bit. If you stand at extreme distance from the Ogre King you can hail him and complete the quest. So once I reach 10 I decide to see if I can solo down to the King, whaddaya know, I can!. So I hail him, complete the quest that got me killed last time and I have started off into an entirely new Quest thread!. The King sets all his minions to ally so I don't have to fight my way in and out of the Ogre caves each time i want to come back to him. Voila I am now an ally of the Ogres and may walk within the Ogre kingdom safely!.

The Port of Khal.

Mission Statement/Suicide Note

This man killed himself by setting fire to himself on a Chicago onramp.
Yes he was a native born American WASP. A member of Mensa. This is his requiem. A powerful piece of writing.

Mission Statement

My actions should be self-explanatory, and since in our self-obsessed culture words seldom match the deed, writing a mission statement would seem questionable. So judge me by my actions. Maybe some will be scared enough to wake from their walking dream state - am I therefore a martyr or terrorist? I would prefer to be thought of as a 'spiritual warrior'. Our so-called leaders are the real terrorists in the world today, responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden.

I have had a wonderful life, both full and full of wonder. I have experienced love and the joy and heartache of raising a child. I have jumped out of an airplane, and escaped a burning building. I have spent the night in jail, and dropped acid during the sixties. I have been privileged to have met many supremely talented musicians and writers, most of whom were extremely generous and gracious. Even during the hard times, I felt charmed. Even the difficult lessons have been like blessed gifts. When I hear about our young men and women who are sent off to war in the name of God and Country, and who give up their lives for no rational cause at all, my heart is crushed. What has happened to my country? we have become worse than the imagined enemy - killing civilians and calling it 'collateral damage', torturing and trampling human rights inside and outside our own borders, violating our own Constitution whenever it seems convenient, lying and stealing right and left, more concerned with sports on television and ring-tones on cell-phones than the future of the world.... half the population is taking medication because they cannot face the daily stress of living in the richest nation in the world.

I too love God and Country, and feel called upon to serve. I can only hope my sacrifice is worth more than those brave lives thrown away when we attacked an Arab nation under the deception of 'Weapons of Mass Destruction'. Our interference completely destroyed that country, and destabilized the entire region. Everyone who pays taxes has blood on their hands.

I have had one previous opportunity to serve my country in a meaningful way - at 8:05 one morning in 2002 I passed Donald Rumsfeld on Delaware Avenue and I was acutely aware that slashing his throat would spare the lives of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people. I had a knife clenched in my hand, and there were no bodyguards visible; to my deep shame I hesitated, and the moment was past.

The violent turmoil initiated by the United States military invasion of Iraq will beget future centuries of slaughter, if the human race lasts that long. First we spit on the United Nations, then we expect them to clean up our mess. Our elected representatives are supposed to find diplomatic and benevolent solutions to these situations. Anyone can lash out and retaliate, that is not leadership or vision. Where is the wisdom and honor of the people we delegate our trust to?

To the rest of the world we are cowards - demanding Iraq to disarm, and after they comply, we attack with remote-control high-tech video-game weapons. And then lie about our reasons for invading. We the people bear complete responsibility for all that will follow, and it won't be pretty.

It is strange that most if not all of this destruction is instigated by people who claim to believe in God, or Allah. Many sane people turn away from religion, faced with the insanity of the 'true believers'. There is a lot of confusion: many people think that God is like Santa Claus, rewarding good little girls with presents and punishing bad little boys with lumps of coal; actually God functions more like the Easter Bunny, hiding surprises in plain sight. God does not choose the Lottery numbers, God does not make the weather, God does not endorse military actions by the self-righteous, God does not sit on a cloud listening to your prayers for prosperity. God does not smite anybody. If God watches the sparrow fall, you notice that it continues to drop, even to its death. Face the truth folks, God doesn't care, that's not what God is or does. If the human race drives itself to extinction, God will be there for another couple million years, 'watching' as a new species rises and falls to replace us. It is time to let go of primitive and magical beliefs, and enter the age of personal responsibility. Not telling others what is right for them, but making our own choices, and accepting consequences.

"Who would Jesus bomb?" This question is primarily addressing a Christian audience, but the same issues face the Muslims and the Jews: God's message is tolerance and love, not self-righteousness and hatred. Please consider "Thou shalt not kill" and "As ye sow, so shall ye reap". Not a lot of ambiguity there.

What is God? God is the force of life - the spark of creation. We each carry it within us, we share it with each other. Whether we are conscious of the life-force is a choice we make, every minute of every day. If you choose to ignore it, nothing will happen - you are just 'less conscious'. Maybe you are less happy (maybe not). Maybe you grow able to tap into the universal force, and increase the creativity in the universe. Love is anti-entropy. Please notice that 'conscious' and 'conscience' are related concepts.

Why God - what is the value? Whether committee consensus of a benevolent power that works through humans, or giant fungus under Oregon, the value of opening up to the concept of God is in coming to the realization that we are not alone, establishing a connection to the universe, the experience of finding completion. As individuals we may exist alone, but we are all alone together as a people. Faith is the answer to fear. Fear opposes love. To manipulate through fear is a betrayal of trust.

What does God want? No big mystery - simply that we try to help each other. We decide to make God-like decisions, rescuing falling sparrows, or putting the poor things out of their misery. Tolerance, giving, acceptance, forgiveness.

If this sounds a lot like pop psychology, that is my exact goal. Never underestimate the value of a pep-talk and a pat on the ass. That is basically all we give to our brave soldiers heading over to Iraq, and more than they receive when they return. I want to state these ideas in their simplest form, reducing all complexity, because each of us has to find our own answers anyway. Start from here...

I am amazed how many people think they know me, even people who I have never talked with. Many people will think that I should not be able to choose the time and manner of my own death. My position is that I only get one death, I want it to be a good one. Wouldn't it be better to stand for something or make a statement, rather than a fiery collision with some drunk driver? Are not smokers choosing death by lung cancer? Where is the dignity there? Are not the people the people who disregard the environment killing themselves and future generations? Here is the statement I want to make: if I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country. I will not participate in your charade - my conscience will not allow me to be a part of your crusade. There might be some who say "it's a coward's way out" - that opinion is so idiotic that it requires no response. From my point of view, I am opening a new door.

What is one more life thrown away in this sad and useless national tragedy? If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country. I was alive when John F. Kennedy instilled hope into a generation, and I was a sorry witness to the final crushing of hope by Dick Cheney's puppet, himself a pawn of the real rulers, the financial plunderers and looters who profit from every calamity; following the template of Reagan's idiocracy.

The upcoming elections are not a solution - our two party system is a failure of democracy. Our government has lost its way since our founders tried to build a structure which allowed people to practice their own beliefs, as far as it did not negatively affect others. In this regard, the separation of church and state needs to be reviewed. This is a large part of the way that the world has gone wrong, the endless defining and dividing of things, micro-sub-categorization, sectarianism. The direction we need is a process of unification, integrating all people into a world body, respecting each individual. Business and industry have more power than ever before, and individuals have less. Clearly, the function of government is to protect the individual, from hardship and disease, from zealots, from the exploitation, from monopoly, even from itself. Our leaders are not wise persons with integrity and vision - they are actors reading from teleprompters, whose highest goal is to stir up the mob. Our country slaughters Arabs, abandons New Orleaneans, and ignores the dieing environment. Our economy is a house of cards, as hollow and fragile as our reputation around the world. We as a nation face the abyss of our own design.

A coalition system which includes a Green Party would be an obvious better approach than our winner-take-all system. Direct electronic debate and balloting would be an improvement over our non-representative congress. Consider that the French people actually have a voice, because they are willing to riot when the government doesn't listen to them.

"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government... " - Abraham Lincoln

With regard to those few who crossed my path carrying the extreme and unnecessary weight of animosity: they seemed by their efforts to be punishing themselves. As they acted out the misery of their lives it is now difficult to feel anything other than pity for them.

Without fear I go now to God - your future is what you will choose today.