In case you hadn't heard, well, crawl out from under whatever winter blanket you've been hiding under, and drag it down to your computer, because you're about to miss out. Vanguard has been released. My hope is that you pre-ordered, because rumor has it that stores are already running out of copies. And I have to say that I'm not surprised in the least. I'm totally hooked, and have been since playing back in beta. Let me explain why.

Follow up:

To my knowledge Vanguard is the first MMO that didn't totally shut down for a week or two between the end of beta and opening of the servers for live release. In fact, as a reward to their beta testers who pre-ordered, they actually opened the live servers three days early and let us get a head start. And what a glorious three days it was!! Obviously I played in beta (see my preview for what I thought in those early days). There were major changes since those days, to the point where I can actually play without TOO much lag on the live servers. The game still requires you to have one heck of a system computing power and video card wise, but they really did make improvements that were noticeable to me, at least. Cities are still pretty bad, but it seems that cities in every MMO are bad. Some day a game developer is going to figure out how to do a city right so that there isn't huge lag just because there are a lot of NPC's all packed into one place. (And btw, it is NPC's, not PC's which lag me, because I can be in the newbie starting area with TONs of other players around me and not get the lag I do with just a handful of folks around me in a city). There are moments when the game is unplayable in the city, but they are few and far between. And I have got to say that I'm proud of whoever was running the server end of it all. The game was up and stable without crashing for days (though it came down for patches), from what I've seen and heard.

Now note that not everyone has had the great experience I had. One friend discovered the hard way that the game MUST be installed on the same hard drive (and partition) as DirectX is. That same friend still has problems reading text in game due to a graphic bug, one that has yet to be solved. And there are posts on the forums with people having this same problem and little help being offered from CS to date. But all in all, I've got to say that these problems seem to be in the minority, not the majority. In fact, over the weekend they opened a new server for EU, presumably because the ones already out there were getting a bit full. And I know we have at least a couple EU players on our US server because they are in our guild.

Ok, so what did I do this weekend? Well, here goes...

I created a Kojani (human) Disciple and got her to level 8. She's also a level 8 outfitter, so I can make bags!! Did a TON of quests, usually with my husband (player of Meiyen, who also blogs here), and generally relearned the early levels of my chosen class. I then decided to create my first alt (yes, I'm an altoholic), and made a dwarven cleric/blacksmith. Got her to level 6 as a blacksmith, but no adventuring levels. Oh, and my guild formed up over the weekend too. That's been great!! Most of the people in it are new to me and they are proving to be a ton of fun to hang out with. While I was interested in the game itself for the gameplay,, graphics, storyline, etc, it is the people I play with that will keep me there. So thank you to each and every one of my guild mates who made this weekend so much fun. And thank you to Sigil for making the game that brought us together.

I haven't logged in yet today (first day of release) to see how the servers are now that the game is live to all. I'll let you know. But so far, the game is off to a great start for me!!