Vanguard: Saga of Possibilities?

January 30^th marked the official release of Sigil's and Sony Online Entertainment's joint venture into the quickly expanding market of MMORPGs: Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. After a prolonged development period and the consumption of a reportedly sizeable budget, Sigil's developers admitted in mid-January that they had no choice but to release the game at the end of that month, even though they would have preferred to hold off until the game was more polished and prepared for general consumption. Furthermore, the team has informed players that they can expect to see numerous hot-fixes, patches, revisions within the next few months of live play. With such a shadow looming heavily over the launch of the burgeoning world of Telon, can Sigil deliver on its promises to help you "Set Yourself Free?"

All of the debates about whether Sigil would be able to release Vanguard are now moot. The game is live, and players are now paying to play. Questions abound, however; not the least of which is "Will it last?" In truth, there is no simple answer to that. There are a lot of issues that still need to be hashed out before the game can really be considered stable and solid. Server and chunk crashes are still common enough that when players witness their characters freezing up for more than a few moments, shouts of "Oh-oh," "CRASH!" or "Here we go again!" rapidly fill up the chat box as players brace themselves for their impending return to the character selection screen. Other, lesser, glitches surface often enough to be a hassle as well. Latency issues are reportedly spiking as of this writing, which can lead to a host of difficulties as players have a hard time getting clicks to register on dialog boxes, actions, and even items and creatures. When ping times return to more normal levels, rough edges have a way of making themselves apparent, such as the current difficulties that European players are having claiming their Pre-Order rewards. Not all of the issues currently weighing on Vanguard are bugs and crashes, however.