Vanguard: Saga of Heroes Preview

I'm a bit torn on this game. It seems every video and screenshot I've seen looks horrible. However, everything I've read in interviews and from people in the beta say its great. I hope I can get in on the beta or free trial to see for myself.

are they forcing grouping from the get-go or do they give you some time?

I was a big EverQuest fan and am really looking forward to Vanguard. That said, I doubt I will be playing it. My system equals the recommended specs released by Sigil, yet I get bad performance, and I mean bad.

On high performance, my frames per second only go as high as the upper teens. They usually hover around 12 or so. And this is with the recommended specs! The game even defaults to balanced, which is worse. I just don't see how this game can have much of a following when you have to have a state of the art PC to run it.

That was pretty good. I'm also playing the beta and indeed it has stability issues. I would like to see her source for the Brad McQuaid quote saying they have run out of money and are releasing it premature. That is a very bad decision and could kill this MMO in the long run.

Vanguard TWEAKS:

Ok, I can't take credit for most of these, but a few of them make a huge difference in game performance. It turns out that Vanguard is quite a bit like Oblivion in that certain tweaks here and there can make all the difference in the world. It's just simply not optimized yet, but you can go a long way in doing that yourself. I personally left Antistropic and

#1 GENERAL Tweaks
TURN OFF Hardware Occulsion while in the field and TURN IT BACK ON in town. The FPS gain in the field (for me) is close to 10!!!
VGCLIENT.INI Tweaks
go to:
:\ProgramFiles\Sony\Vanguard\bin\vgclient.ini

Open it using notepad and make the following changes:

AnisotropicFiltering=off (which supposedly works for NVidia folks VERY well) Side Note: ALSO go into your card's propertied and change this there as well
UseJoystick=False (I don't know why but this did give me an extra 3-5 FPS)
UsePrecaching=True (For NVidia folks and some ATI folks, this is the holy grail)
UseTrilinear=False (For some folks this was an incredible boost)
UseCubemaps=False (I only noticed an ugly load screen, the game still looks fine to me)
ReduceMouseLag=False (this has worked for a few folks as well)
UseTripleBuffering=True (Only do this if you also set the vsync)
UseVSync=True (it gave me a few extra FPS)
GlobalHardwareSkinning=True (gave me a noticable bump 2-5FPS-ish)
TextureDetailWorld=5 (this controls the texture details, raising this to 5-7ish can save you a significant amount of memory and reduce stuttering. This can range from 0-7, 0 being the most detailed textures to 7 being lowest texture detail) RenderQuality=5 (Setting this to 5 sets the game into "very high" mode but coupled with a higher TextureDetailWorld setting, it will give you the special effects of very high with the memory requirements/stuttering of a low or medium settings)

(NOTE: Changing the in-game drop-down graphics settings to Medium or High (or whatever you change it to) changes BOTH RenderQuality and TextureDetailWorld to their default settings. The trick is to adjust all the in-game settings FIRST, THEN mess with the .ini settings for these two and don't flip between low/med at all in-game since that would reset this change)

THINGS TO MANUALLY ADD:
Now look for the [Engine.NullRenderDevice] Heading.
There add the line: CacheSizeMegs=64

*Note: Some people report better success with bumping the above amount to 128,256 or even 512 megs if your card can handle it. I choose 128 myself for a 512 meg card.

Look for the [General] Heading and add:
bUseShaderCaching=1



Sound: Under sound there a numerous entries about EAX that appear as FALSE by default, I set them to TRUE and it appears to work, but it might just be turning on EAX by default.

Unknown:
iShaderCacheSizeMB=10

I'm thinking this does exactly what it appears, it's the cache size for shaders. Haven't changed it yet, but will try later.

I'm playing. It's not anywhere as bad as it's made out to be. It has some issues, quite a few, but I like the world. As for performance, I'm going to post a list of tweaks I've come across that will really help. I plan to keep my pre-order and get the retail game later this month.