Vanguard opened up its servers early this weekend so that pre-order customers can get a head start on those who pick up the game at retail this week. While the servers were up and down intermittently, and lag spikes were a noticeable problem, for the most part players were able to get started on an endeavor that could easily consume the next year or two of their lives. Vanguard was here, and newer MMO players used to being coddled by today's friendlier brand of online experience were going to be in for a shock. Touted as a return to the adventure and exploration of the original pre-SOE EverQuest, Vanguard is an interesting counterpart to World of Warcraft's approach. It would be too hasty to call them polar opposites, however, as Vanguard also draws from Blizzard's design in many ways.

Vanguard makes use of Epic's Unreal 3 engine, and if you have a high-end system, you can really see what this allows for. There's so much that can look spectacular here, when all the settings are raised, like cobblestone path textures, volumetric clouds that float like puffy cotton balls across the sky, and trees that are so finely detailed you can count individual leaves on their gently swaying branches. One interesting feature we discovered is the first-person rendering mode, which allows you to turn Vanguard into a visual experience that resembles Bethesda's Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. You can see hands swings weapons and cast spells, and even look down at your feet as you run across the game world.


The problem with such a powerful graphics engine rendering a massive game world in real time is the hit you'll take on performance. And no matter how great your system, you will have to turn off some of these wonderful graphics options in order to get the game running at a playable frame rate. The machine I tested the game on is a dual core 3.2 GHz Dell XPS 600 running two GeForce 6800 video cards in SLI. I tried running the game at my monitor's native resolution 1900 x 1200, and I was barely getting five frames per second. I then turned off the shadows, and tweaked a few of the many different sliders, and got the game running at a passable clip. Nowhere near thirty frames per second, but playable. If I planned on playing Vanguard long-term, I would probably continue to scale-down the game's visuals, but at that point, it loses its luster. Vanguard can most definitely be one of the more attractive games available today, as the level of detail is incredible and the art direction is quite stunning, but today's gaming machines simply can't keep up with the game's actual requirements (the instruction manual clearly states that you're going to want 2 GB RAM and a GeForce 7800 or better to get turn on all the effects.)

After getting the game to a playable frame rate, I found that on a very basic level, player movement in Vanguard feels very floaty, with characters that don't have much weight to them and whose animations make them seem like they're sliding back and forth across the ground instead of strafing. It can be painful to negotiate closed doors and cramped halls in the game's many indoor areas, and you'll need a dose of good luck controlling your jumps mid-air when you encounter things like broken stairs and assorted platforming elements. The way movement and spellcasting worked, in particular, was fun and had enormous PvP implications: You can cast spells on the run.