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Their first entrance into the MMO world is a standard high fantasy game named Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. At first glance the game smacks with its generic-ness. It looks like every other game out there, and worse in places. The UI is uninspired, and from what I was able to gather the combat and class system is exactly what we’ve seen in almost every other game out there. Which is exactly what the guys at Sigil are shooting for. The company is made up of like-minded people who saw the original Everquest as an incredible gaming experience, with its training, grinding, camping, spawn-jumping and severe death penalties. To the guys at Sigil, the MMO world has gone downhill with the introduction of instancing and easier leveling treadmills. And with Vanguard they are looking to create what is, at its core, a purified version of Everquest. Luckily, Sigil has gone in and created some new features that they feel will set their game apart from the rest of the market.

One of the goals of Vanguard’s design is to ensure that a player is passionately attached to their character. One way that Vanguard has gone about doing this is to allow players to have a very robust character creation system. When players start out in Vanguard they pick from 19 different races across 3 continents. The races include goblins, orcs, dwarves, humans, elves, halflings, half-giants, and even fox, cat and wolf people. Each race has several, but not all of the 16 classes available to them. Once the players have a race and class picked, they dive into the character customization screens. Sigil’s goal for their character modification system was to allow people to create characters that you would be able to recognize by their features alone. At a base level, it’s a great idea, but once you start piling on armor to your character what you did with those 50-odd feature sliders at character creation quickly gets covered up. It almost feels like a waste for there to have been all this work on a character’s features just to spend all your time looking at them from behind and covering their face up with armor.

Progression and character advancement involves 3 distinct levels in Vanguard: adventuring, trade skills and diplomacy. Adventuring is pretty straight forward. You go out and whack on monsters while you complete quests. Trade skills is a combination of the gathering and production skills that feed into Vanguard’s incredibly rich trade-skill game. Diplomacy is a group of skills that will allow players to negotiate with NPCs in the game to gain access to special areas and affect how various factions see the players.

Vanguard’s class and combat system revolves around 4 traditional archetypes. You have the Protective Fighters, which are the Warrior, Paladin, Dread Knight and Inquisitor. These guys are your typical tanks. They exist to let other things beat on them and not the rest of the party. The Offensive fighter classes are the Ranger, Rogue, Monk and Bard. They wearer lighter armor than the other fighter archetype, but deal considerably more damage. The casting classes are broken down into the Healers with the Cleric, Shaman, Disciple, and Blood Mage and the Arcane Casters who are the Sorcerers, Druids, Necromancers, and Psionicists. Each member of the archetype will be just as effect as any other member in doing their respective class job, but the different members will do it differently. Dread Knights will instill fear into their opponents to do less damage, while a Paladin will rely on auras to lessen damage. Druids will call down storms and affect the weather for their damage, while Psionicists will focus on crowd control and mental damage.

The really innovate thing that Sigil is doing with their combat system is their reactionary system. Players can start off combat chains with certain moves that will open up other options to their party members. The other players have to react to this move and keep the combo chain going long enough for a finisher option to become available. A fully chained combo will be one of the most powerful forces in the game. Spell casters will also have the option of doing several different things to incoming offensive spells, as well as modify the spells of their party members. Certain classes can use counter-spells to keep enemies from completing their spell casting, where as others can reflect the spell effect back on the person who cast the spell in the first place, and another class can completely redirect the power of a spell into a heal on themselves or the whole party. Spell casters can also synch up their spells in what Sigil called a “sympathetic casting system.” Players will get a notification if a fellow player is casting a spell that yours is sympathetic to. You can choose to combine to two spells into a more powerful version of the two if you work together. This systems is something that could potentially make Vanguard standout from other games of its type by dramatically increasing the usefulness of playing with others instead of just soloing your way all the way to the level cap. Sigil also learned that just because a group is bigger doesn’t necessarily mean that its better. The maximum size a group can be in Vanguard is 6 players, which means that you never have to scrape and beg to get 30 or more people online to enjoy content.

Not to be out down by the combat aspect of their game, the trade skill designers have produced an incredibly deep trade-skill game inside of Vanguard. Players will gather raw material from the environment by themselves, or in a gathering group with other players that can gather resources at a much faster rate than a solo player can. Once the player has enough raw materials they can process that into something usable using a production skill. There are three trade skill trees that players can hyper-specialize their skills within. While all of this is fairly standard for most MMOs, Vanguard goes one step further. As you are following your production recipe you can add special tweaks to the recipe if you have the proper items. Each recipe has a set number of action points, and using these special tweaks eats up your action points for that recipe. This limits the amount of tweaks you can make to any one item, but allows players to make each item they produce uniquely theirs. However, if a player uses too many tweaks they can damage their tools or the item itself, lowering the value of the end product. At higher levels players can build armor, weapons, houses and even ships for other players.

The physical world of Vanguard is broken up into two large continents and 1 archipelago of islands that equates out to roughly the same size as the other two islands. According to the people I talked to at Sigil, each continent is roughly the same size as the island nation of Madagascar. If that’s true, it would make Vanguard one of the largest, if not the largest game in the world in terms of virtual landmass. The impressive thing is that all of this is strewn together in a seamless world that players can strike out and just explore on a whim. In order to help players traverse the world there are mounts, boats and flying mounts that players can gain as they level up. The boats will be the primary form of transportation for players, as traveling over-land will take longer and could be dangerous. That’s not to say that the ocean is a safe place. Players will have to contend with sea monsters that will attack them on the decks of their ship. The navigation of a ship will depend on the direction of the wind. Players won’t be able to sail directly into the wind, but if you’ve got a friendly druid around they can change the direction of the wind with a simple spell.

The wind in the game world will also control the weather. Storm fronts will pop up and move across the virtual world as they would in the real one. Rainstorms can come from clouds as small as a single thunderhead, or be part of a massive front. The weather will affect combat for certain classes, like the druid who can use the power of nature to their own advantage.

Sigil looks to have done a lot of things right with Vanguard, but part of me is hesitant to say that this game will be amazing. The graphics aren’t spectacular and the fact that core design ideas come from the belief that Everquest was right make me think that Sigil designed the game that they wanted to play, but they didn’t bother to check with the rest of the world. The MMO has come along way since Everquest was king, and Sigil has one foot squarely planted in the past and the other in the future. The question now is whether or not players will find something they like and chose to stand with them. For those that are curious, you can get in line for the game’s beta test. You can find a key in the most current issue of Computer Games Magazine.