We are Live!...

Current Killing Blow count: 22

Well we finally got SA formed last night. Southern Armada now has a presence in 3 games, WoW, WAR and EQ2. I must admit I had a fall back, if we hadn't been able to get enough SA people on-line to be able to actually form the guild, I was going to join TOG. The Older Gamers are a very large Aussie based organisation who have a presence in multiple MMO's as well as Clans in FPS games, tactical ladders etc. They have been around for a while and I have seen them in several games in the past. When I have encountered their members they have always been decent people and if SA wasn't going to get off the ground that was basically going to be my new home.

However we managed to easily get enough people on-line and in The Inevitable City and Southern Armada went live in WAR. At the moment obviously we are only very small but we will use the same sort of recruitment system as Shinrai has adopted in WoW. Basically we make it a lot easier to get in, but its also a lot easier to get booted. We want to expand, but not at the expense of the SA way of doing things. Unfortunately Zarthaz has chosen to side with the forces of Order on an open RVR server and he will not be joining us. If we do get to a decent size who is to say we wont have an Order branch as well for Alts and something different. I was actually thinking we could call an order Guild "Northern Armada" :)

A very very small part of
The Inevitable City

I've been busy levelling up as fast as I can to get past all the stuff I have already done. I've made my way to level 15 and completed all of the current quests available in my Tier for Chaos and Greenskin. I was considering a little trip across to the Dark Elf lands to both have a look around and to check out their quests. Don't get me wrong I have still skipped hundreds of quests as I have outlevelled them, I've just managed to clear the quest lines in the particular areas that I have inhabited.

Beta was fun and this is how I looked at the end of my last day in the Beta before go live.
Some of the most fun quests I've done so far have been the ones in the Troll lands. The Troll models are just awesome looking with different colours and skin textures on each one, the quests are fun with a decent mix of fedex, kill that, PQ's etc. Its enough to keep you entertained and running about the place.

a Plaguewood Troll

I had an excellent couple of nights in Stonetroll Crossing both in open RvR and scenarios. I actually had 2 scenarios run to full term and time out. For those who haven't played WAR, Stonetroll is a chaos human scenario where you have to get a flag in the centre of the map and then take it to 3 different map areas to "capture" those areas for your side. There are a couple of caveats:
Once you have the flag you have two minutes to make it to and capture an area, if you don't the flag reseats and you start again
It takes 3 seconds of uninterrupted time to capture an area, if you are interrupted by attack you have to start the 3 seconds again.
The entire scenario takes 12 minutes.

So basically neither side could force the scenarios and they timed out, 12 minutes of battling the enemy!.

Usually stone troll is dominated by one side or the other and won or lost easily, so people are starting to learn how this stuff works and its getting harder.

Now I'm not saying this game is perfect, it definitely has bugs. One of them is Biletongue. He is the boss at the end of one of the Stonetroll PQ's. We completed the second stage and Biletongue became attackable, I engaged and he one shotted me. Just a touch over powered!.

Biletongue

I have also had several one on one and small group battles in the open field areas. In one I got utterly ganked as I ran into 3 bright wizards, one snared me, the other two smacked me down. Its ok, I took careful note of their names and I will see them again, oh yes I will!. I am hanging out for the anti snare buff BO's get at some point, snares really really drive me nuts as there seems to be at least 3-4 Order classes with a snare including a nasty one that the Bright Wizards get which is also a substantial DOT. As soon as I can break snares, the bloody bright wizards and Engineer's are toast.

I am a kiwi, but on the SA-WAR KOS list I have added a Guild called "fluffy kiwis" just cause the name is so stupid. Much like the guild "The Elite" on Darklands I take great pleasure in smacking any of them I have met during scenarios or RvR.

RvR stories
I was happily killing npc dwarves in droves when I noticed what I thought was a named Dwarf, so I charged him. He took off and I realised he was a player trying to sneak in amongst the NPC's to get some sneaky attacks in on us. He took off back to the cover of his warcamp and I didn't quite have the legs to catch him so I let him go, but I decided to keep an eye out for him as i figured he would be back. Sure enough a couple of minutes later he starts to sneak back. I kept an eye on him making like I didn't know he was there.

As soon as he was in range I made sure I had my snare up and charged him, I got the snare on him straight away and started to hammer him. He took off back to his base, but I made sure the snare stayed on and I followed him all the way into his base. I had 3 NPC's on me by the time I got the final blow on him, I'm sure he thought once he was inside his warcamp he was safe. I turned around, hit sprint, outpaced the npcs and went back to the PQ. About 15 minutes later he was back, this time with buddies and it turned into quite a long protracted battle. RvR rocks.

I got involved in another battle across a wall where Greenskin and Dorf PQ's are on opposite sides of the wall. We were happily outpacing the Dorf killing speed and they kept losing their PQ's. So they decided that it was going to be easier to come across and try and stop us. They attacked en mass while we were heavily engaged with large numbers of NPC's. The battle raged for a good 15 or so minutes with Dorfs and ourselves rezzing and racing straight back into the battle. We finally managed to complete the PQ with about 30 seconds to spare and the Dorfs at that point backed off. It was an awesome battle with no quarter given on either side. Kudos to the Dorf Skum for a great fight.

Undead Dorfs

Ulaa at 10th Level

I will update the screenie every ten levels so I can track how the 'look' changes.

WAAAAGH! - Again

One of the things I've seen a lot of bitching about on various web boards is a perceived "imbalance" of sides. The usual whine goes something like "Waaah Order has 2x as many players, there is no way destruction can win". I have to say bollocks to that. I'm 15 now and I've been participating in PQ's, scenarios, solo questing, open RvR and battleground RvR. Every single thing that you do generates influence points, completing a questing, participating in a PQ etc. So even if you don't directly participate in RvR, you are still contributing to your sides victory simply by showing up and playing. You can PvE all the way to the top, apparently you can PvP all the way as well.

Influence points go to a running total of "who owns the zone". Battlegrounds and open RvR tend to generate more direct influence, however I've been in a lot of fights now and "who has more peeps" on the ground has sod all to do with victory. If a battleground has a massive imbalance it will shut down and send the players back to their start points.

Open RvR is a little different, if there is a massive imbalance it can make a considerable difference, however this game is strongly tactical and a well organised team will decimate a zerg rush. The focused fire power of a number of DPS classes will crush any target its directed at. Once you add in the use of siege weapons, which can change a teams advantage in seconds then there is a lot more to it than just the numbers of people engaged.

Once guilds start to get seriously involved (and they are beginning to) and people sort out how the game is played, RvR will be dominated by tactical squads of skilled players. A team that knows what they are doing will beat a zerg rush every time. I was involved in a keep siege last night where the enemy were using boiling oil to defend their gates and we were using siege weapons (buy able from your friendly local neighbourhood dealer for only 20silver!) to attack the defenders at the top of the towers. Open field RvR is one thing, fighting inside a building is a completely different experience and I'm really looking forward to large keep sieges and city fights!.

I went and had a look at The Inevitable City last night, the Chaos home town. I have to say WOW. I have no idea how it gets taken by the enemy but its HUGE. Ogrimmar looks like shite next to it and it stands up against even best of the VG dungeons without the corresponding hit from framerate.

One of the things I'm enjoying is that there is always a choice of things to do, you can PvP (solo or groups) you can PQ (solo or groups), you can run scenarios (groups), you can run battlegrounds (groups), you can solo quest or you can just explore. This is all without the advantages of a guild to chat and learn with. I ran around between all of the above last night, both in green skin lands as well as Chaos lands. At the moment all the good PvP is in Chaos territory as the cowardly Dorfs don't seem to want to defend their own lands. This is going to be a game that will be better the more people that play. If every PQ is full, every open RvR field is raging, battlegrounds are restarting every 10 minutes and players are everywhere this game will rock.

My one concern would be a lack of people. If a server is half full I think the experience will suffer as, like VG the world is truly massive. It wont feel "empty" like VG did as the world is very cleverly designed to keep your horizons low, there is always a new village or war camp just over the horizon. The fun in the game tho comes from its interaction with other players and without them the game will suffer. I certainly hope they have the technology to be able to run 10,000+ players simultaneously on a single server, then WAR really will be everywhere all the time!.

I really hope we can get an SA presence going in WAR. It will be a huge amount of fun to share the battles of this new world with my comrades in arms of the last decade.

WAAAAGH!

Ulaa Da Black Ork Level 14 beta

WAAAAAGGH! The NDA is down!.
I logged into Warhammer Beta last night and had an absolute blast. I fought in 5-6 PvP battles both in Battlegrounds and in open RvR zones. Now PvP is something I've never, ever done before and I loved it. After each fight you can see the "zone" capture tabs swaying one way or another between Order and Destruction as to who owns the area. Initially Destruction was dominant and the zone capture was definitely moving towards Orkies, then the Order guys started to rally and by the end of the night although order hadn't gained ground, destruction had definitely lost ground.

Reading the manual also showed me a lot of stuff they are planning for guilds and it all looks really cool. Being in a guild is going to be a lot more than just a shared chat channel, Guilds have levels and can affect and be affected by the world. Guilds will be able to design their own Heraldry and the Standard bearer for a Guild will provide the Guild with a definite advantage on the battlefield.

Public quests are cool, I participated in 3 different public quests, you can end up in a PQ without even realising it just by joining in a group that's in an area where a PQ is ongoing. All the quests I did come with a real sense of humour, the gobboe wolf rider wants you to kill the orcs boars to feed his wolves, the orc boar boy wants you to kill the gobboes wolves to feed his boars. Every thing that you do contributes to zone control and the War, from joining a PQ, fighting in PvP, to making and selling goods to other players.

PvP is going to be interesting, the green skins seem to have lots of Tanks and DPS, the Dorfs have lots of DPS and healers. Those bloody Dorf tank/healers are HARD to kill. PvP is easy to enter and a fight (at the level I'm at) is about 12 minutes. I have entered a couple of open PvP zones and had some small battles, Im really looking forward to getting thousands of people on line and having huge battles. I got XP and a title for dieing so much in one battle :). I got an achievement for the numbers of criticals I had done in PvP. The lorebook is fantastic, its a game unto itself and ALL the lore/knowledge for the game is in there if you want to read it.

Orc quests are fun, yes there is the usual go and get me X, but there is always a twist. Go and get the head of this dorf, take it back to town and put it on a spike cause it will make this gobboe laugh, talk to the gobboe once done. Go and find unconscious dorfs, put them in this barrel and then kick it off the side of the battlements , we are having a competition to see who gets the barrel furthest etc etc

I am seeing higher level Black Orcs around, I can tell they are Black Orcs because of the model and I know they are higher level because of the cooler gear and adornments they have. I also know whether a BOrc has gone down a defensive or a DPS path from their gear.

Graphically, the world has a sort of WoW look, but I wouldn't mistake one for the other and the models look utterly different. Think WoW landscapes, burned, strewn with debri and corpses and Vanguard models. I have this nasty feeling I am going to be spending a lot of time killing filthy dorfs, then filthy humies, elvses etc. I knew from the minute I stepped into the world that I was in an orc encampment and that I was in the gathering of the next WAAAAGH and exactly who my enemies are.

This game rocks and I would highly recommend peeps giving it a shot.

I've been playing for about 5 days solid now. I haven't found any of what I would call major bugs yet. I've seen one graphics anomaly (one mob in a bunch of about 20 was all warped) I have had one CTD. That wasn't to do with the application, it was related to the authentication server crashing. I had one piece of equipment that I couldn't equip till I logged out and back in again.

The PvP and PvE streams are beautifully integrated. You get PvE quests in PvP areas and vice versa. There are PvP quests around the killing of different enemy classes (they say it much better in the quest but its like kill a dorf priest, engineer and warrior) and you get gold and XP as a reward. You get a PvE quest to scout an area (such as a remote tower) in a PvP area. There are literally hundreds of quests.

I have finished Tier One (thats a PvP tier) in Orc lands, so now whenever I enter a PvP zone at level 12 I get a warning and then I get turned into a chicken!. So I have moved up a Tier to Tier 2 and I am starting to PvE and PvP in there. To give you an idea of how much content there is, I would guess-timate that I have done maybe 30% of the content in the Ork/Gobbo PvE T1 zones (about 4-5 "zone areas" in each zone, about 2-3 PQ's per zone area). I have done about 20% of the PvP content and participated in only 2 of the battle grounds in those areas. I spent some time in the Chaos Zones doing PQ's, quests and PvP and I've done maybe 10% of that content. I could easily create alts in each area cause they are all so utterly different.

PvP seems to be run in two ways. There is zone based PvP where you sign up to a battle queue and when there is enough people a battle is created. This can have as many as 36 players per side involved. I've seen 3 battlegrounds so far, one in Chaos, two in Green skin lands. Think WOW battlegrounds but with different objectives, in some its hold certain points, in others its kill the messenger etc. Then there is open world PvP, where you are warned when you enter the area that you are in a PvP area. each area will have multiple objectives to take and hold. There will be quests in the RvR area (Both PvE and PvP quests) you can choose to do them or not. Two I liked were "Blood on your hands" and "Green Faced Killa" which are repeatable and involve killing enemy players for an xp reward.

The designs of the battlegrounds are the same of the open world PvP, so after doing an instanced based battleground, eventually you will reach the real world area which is the same place and recognise it. The PQ's work in the same way, you will get a PVE quest to go to a certain area and kill stuff and on the way there, or while there, you may run into an area that's a part of a PQ. Joining a group in a PQ or anywhere in the world is as easy as "show me open groups" button and "join" button. PQ's have their own rewards based on something called "reknown" which you earn by taking part in PQ's. PQ's also have RvR elements. You may be doing a PQ to kill the Dwarf attackers and be busy killing NPC's. The Dwarf PC's will have a PQ to kill Ork Attackers. Whoever finishes first resets both of the PQ's, so you could be interfering with the enemies plans. War really is everywhere.

Some players may flag themselves RvR and attack you while you are doing a PQ under cover of the NPC's (I've had this several times) so then you are fighting PC's and NPC's together. Its a blast.

Southern Armada Beta Diary

Southern Armada Beta Diary

Well its been 6 months or so since the first of us ex-SA found each other in VG beta. It started , as it often does, in a rather innocuous fashion.

Let me set the scene.
Its the middle of winter in New Zealand and its fucking freezing. Now in NZ we get winters as cold as you get them in places like the UK, but New Zealanders have never really taken to that wonderful invention known as insulation. We build our houses entirely out of wood with only a thin wooden skin between us and the outside 0C and 60Kph winds. Insulation is for "Poofs and whinging Poms" *poke Wolfe*.

So anyway, there I am huddling in my study, leaning into the warmth generated by my LCD monitor, logged in on one screen to VG Beta 2. 0 and on the other screen to my Cisco study material. Guess which one is being ignored :), when I get a /tell from some one called Durak.
"Oi are you a kiwi from Prexus eq server?"
"yup, whos this?"
"Alltear"
"Maaaaaaaate!!"

About 5 minutes later we were sick to death of /tell and we had decided to form a version of Southern Armada on the beta Server. Now I dunno about Allty but I had no intention of joining all the beta guilds that had started to up all over the place. I was happy to wear the SA tag for 3 years in EQ and a year in WoW and had every intention of continuing. I figured I should ask permission of the powers that be so I shot Kez a quick mail asking if it would be cool if we started an SA chapter and he said go for it. So I flicked an email to a GM and within a couple of days SA was born.

As soon as I logged in with the tag I got hold of Durak and invited him. It turns out that one of the advantages of having a guild with a very long term membership roster is that we all generally use the same names across all the games we play. So very quickly, Durak, Feninine (I can never spell that right) Qualm, Red, Pinkie and myself were all happily chatting away in /gu. After a while I began to realise that there was no way I could sustain a decent beta test schedule and pass my exams so I pretty much dropped out of Beta for several months. I kept up to date with the ongoing issues of beta and logged on occasionally but simply couldn't spend the amount of time the game deserved to be a good tester.

In the meantime the guys invited a few people from outside the guild and couple of others from SA started to pop up and the numbers started to flesh out a bit. There are about 20 people in SA right now including alts. For those from EQ we currently have Roottouch as a member :) Every day there a few more joining us in the beta experience and the SA spirit grows back just a little bit more.

I have now finished my exams and I'm back in playing as much as Telecoms shitty ADSL network and a random reboot from my PC will allow me to. It actually really hard to write anything about beta because it changes so damn much. To give you a couple of examples of how much it can change, I have now been through 3 complete rebuilds of the combat system and I don't know how many incremental changes. Diplomacy has been totally rebuilt twice and so has harvesting. Each Class is now on its 3rd complete rebuild, major systems can change at the drop of a hat and be tweaked, learned and gone again by the next patch. Every patch brings new sounds, new spells and abilities, new animations, new game systems

Having said that, the game is a lot of fun. I can see myself in VG for many years to come simply because its a tough game to master. I know that many people are out their bitching about Vanguard but I honestly think most of those people think they are going to experience that first time you logged into EQ again.

lets face it, when EQ first started it was not a good game. They couldn't keep the damn servers up for longer than about four hours a week for the first month. Crashes and item loss were constant. No one had a clue how to get around, Humans couldn't see in the dark and would spend hours running randomly with a completely black screen hoping for a light in the distance. No one understood aggro and Monks spent a LOT of time dying until the players figured out how it worked.

There were no pages long in-depth analysis of game play, class interaction or why the Devs hate . Crafting was broken for about a year and SOE denied there was anything at all wrong with it. They hired an absolute fucking moron as the player community person (To this day, 6 years later, I still hate Abashi) There was NO information outside the game, no eqmaps, no eqnecro, no steelwarrior, no database driven fansites of any sort. All of that in depth stuff came later and yet people seem to have this idea that all of those sites came with the game, that they evolved full blown from the brow of Aradune.

In fact the question is not "Is this game as good as EQ, will it hold my attention like EQ did?" because depending on your personal experience with EQ and why you left, that's a next to impossible question to answer.

The best question to ask is:
Will this game be as Good as EQ?, does it have the potential to evolve and develop in the same way that EQ did.

The unequivocal answer to that question is Yes, yes it does.

Beta: What it is, what it isnt

What is Beta?

Many many people seem to be under the impression that being in a Beta is an excuse to get 12 months worth of play time in for free before anyone else can play. Many seem to think that when they logon to Vanguard for the first time they will experience one of two things:

1. A finished game with only light polishing to complete it. These people become very upset with graphics bugs, disk transfer hitching, unfinished quests etc. Generally they will post one giant "fuck you all this game sucks, you bastards lied to me all along, another crappy SOE product!." in the beta forums. They then proceed to head on over to the Fires of Heaven Boards and break NDA left and right about how crap the game is and they know cause 'they are in beta'.

2. The other type of disappointed Beta player is the one who thought that being in beta was like the WoW public Beta, again a largely finished game. These players will generally whine on the Beta forums about how its not like WOW and how WOW "was a much better game at the same point". They will complain that this game will be a complete failure because its "not like WOW" and it wont get as many people as WOW". They miss the point co9mpletely that the game isn't and never wanted wanted to be WOW.

It is unfortunately very obvious that a lot of morons have applied to play the Beta. Sigil seems to be very adept at finding them out of the tens of thousands who are registered on the Vangaurd forums.

For those who do get into the beta with the right attitude they will find the early under-pinnings of a good game. The basic mechanics are in place but there is a long way to go. There are LOTS of bugs, everything from spelling mistakes in Quests and item descriptions out to crashes to desktop with programming errors. I have had 2 characters I have had to abandon completely as they were too buggy to logon to. I spent 3 weeks with an average fps of 5-10 until they found a graphics driver bug and squashed it.

The good Beta player submits every bug they can find, I would probably average 3 bugs submitted per play session, some days more, some days less.

However, despite the bugs, the falling through the world, the flawed game mechanics, the testing of some horrible game play there are definite benefits to being a beta tester. One thing Ive been told is a benefit is "getting a head start on other players". Honestly I don't believe that mainly because I have no idea what the game will look like live. So far the Dev's have moved around the racial starter towns, major cities, dungeons, Castles etc I have little idea what the final geography will look like, although it does feel like it will start to solidify now.

It has also been said that although we may be testing the mechanics of the Game a lot of it wont be put in till they go live. We will have tested the basics, but they wont put the polish in until the final master goes gold. So there will be content in the final version that I wont have seen.






To the left you will note an Ogre. He is big, ugly and hits like a Girl. Early level damage tweaking is going on right now. At the moment you can completely breeze through the early levels with no real danger of dieing. The Ogres are east of Martok (I wrote about them in my last Blog) and are a really fun quest line. As you can see from my tag Southern Armada is live and well in Vanguard Saga of Heroes Beta. I started playing in late Beta 1.5 and almost as soon as I logged into Beta 2.0 I got a tell.
Is that Ulaa from Prexus?
I replied it was and I found a fellow SA member, Alltear. We got to chatting and I found out from Allty there were another 2 SA in beta as well. We figured what the hell and started an SA chapter.

We quickly found our numbers around 10 fairly regular players and it stayed at that level well into beta 3.0. Around that point, suddenly we had a flood of SA getting into VG and we expanded rapidly. Its amazing what people remember, Alltear started getting requests to join the guild from people outside of SA who knew our reputation from either EQ or WOW. I started to get tells from people asking;

"Is that the original SA?, the Aussies from Prexus?"

When I replied that it was, mostly they were really happy to see us still in existence and still playing as a guild. They were largely people who had had good experiences with us in various other games and were glad to see solid, quality players coming online.






The entrance to Hathor Zhi

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.