Since the release of Blizzard's monumentally popular World of Warcraft and its expansion, it's been impossible for new massively multiplayer online role-playing games to avoid the inevitable comparisons. That's probably for the best in the case of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, for while the aforementioned games have some superficial similarities to this one, their core designs are far different. Vanguard, for better or for worse, hearkens back to the days of EverQuest, when in-game death was more than just a slight annoyance and groups camped for bosses that rarely spawned. But by doing its own thing, Azeroth be damned, Vanguard sets itself apart, thanks to complex crafting and a wholly unique take on non-player character communication. It's also rough around the edges, exhibiting all the bugs and glitches of a game not quite ready for release. Yet while Vanguard is not outwardly friendly to genre newcomers, it's got enough rewarding gameplay to please experienced adventurers willing to overlook its technical hitches.

In Vanguard, home is the world of Telon, which features three main continents, 19 races, and 15 classes. While many of the choices seem fascinating, most of them boil down to archetypes and group roles familiar to anyone who's played an MMORPG before. There are a good number of ways to modify your avatar's physical appearance, so you could easily spend quite some time deciding on the look and purpose of your character. Once in the game, a system of pop-up messages guides you through the beginning steps, and you're off to explore, quest, and level. The starting quests are genre standards familiar to anyone who's played an MMORPG before, but once you've gained a few levels, you'll find just how daunting Telon can get.

I played Vanguard in beta, and I really wasn't that impressed with it. It feels, to me, like they've looked at all the other MMOs out there and copied bits without really thinking about how they fit together, or if they were any good in the first place.

Sure, PVP is cool, big guilds and economies are cool, and flying mounts are cool, but only when implemented well, and only when getting to that stage of the game is fun. If you have to do mindless, boring quests in a badly thought out, generic combat system to get to any decent level, then how many people are going to stick with it?