I've been playing Vanguard for 5 days now, and yes it's quite buggy. I had several times where the game freezes. Mostly in that situation I'd say f* it! and do something else, but with VG its different. Oddly I'm not overly excited to get a new level, get new gear. I've tried 4 different races/classes allready some of it because a specific class bored me, but mostly because I'd just couldn't help myself... I had to experience yet another race. This game looks magnificent, I rolled a wood-elf just today and I stood in awe of the great art-direction done to this part of the game. A whole elven city, and also fox-like humaniod (think disney's robin hood) up in the trees. And not just treehuts, huge trees with multi-story halls in it. The Dark-Elves living in a desert-ish area, live in tents, and undeground cities. Guarded by dragons. To give an example I was reading a quests objectives when a large shadow was cast over my char, something like a dragon. I expected to see a small dragon-like create like I've seen and slain before, near me. But when looking up I could see a dragon, a huge one hovering several, maybe hundreds of meters above me.
I haven't tried crafting or diplomacy other than tutorials yet, but I see its potential. Crafting for instance is strategy, making a cartwheel needs you te clean several times to ensure quality, but clean it to much quality goes down, action points are wasted and your wheel will be a shabby one. It's much more than having the right ingredients and clicking the recipy and .... ding there is your item. You need tools, the better the tools the better the crafting process, you can even upgrade your tools by crafting them yourself. And all I made yet was a cart-wheel... there just so much to do, like lumberjacking. You even see the trees fall down making the ground shake under yer feet.
The depth of this mmorpg is far beyond anything I've played before. This game, and I'm not saying this as a fanboy, this game needs some time, to be optimized, balanced, expanded and it could become the one true mmorpg for the real rpg-fan. Vanguard could be compared to WoW as Divinity to Diablo, if it handles its current problems and expand on the great ideas there are allready in the game.
I shall see to get much further in the game, try diplomacy and crafting more. Get into group required quests etc and tell you more. My only concern it could be long before I've done all that, there is so much to do, to look at, to get a tast of... that leveling goes extremely slow.
Be aware that it is a game made for high-end pc's of the feature, in open and detailed area's like a oriental city my 4 month old PC can't even hack it. But what's to be expected of such detailed graphics, where I could even see trees up to 2 kilometers away.
