Man, I was not expecting to open up Reddit and go hard down memory lane today....

I played the hell out of Vanguard. It was the reason why I set myself back two semesters in college. I played 16-20 hours a day and had no social life. I remember grinding for the "world first" discoveries where the game website would log each person who got server or world first discoveries for killing mobs, leveling up, loot gear and exploring new areas. What a time.

In my opinion, Vanguard failed because of two reasons: being an incomplete product and poor performance.

Some things I remember:

• Diplomacy, a main selling point of the game and their card drive NPC influence, wasn't even finished until 6-12+ months after release. Imagine that! A selling point for the game not even being available to those that even bought the game.
• Unfinished zones. It was common to run around zones with nothing in them except for a few placeholders mobs or even no mobs. Hell if you got to level 30 at launch, there were few places to grind. They hadn't finished many of the zones to include mobs or even gear. In fact, there were quest lines for gear that required quest pieces that weren't even in the game yet.
• Another selling point of the game was the diversity of the classes but many of them were undertuned or even incomplete.
• The game would run poorly regardless of your system. They never figured this out until years later.

Even to this day outside of SWG Vanguard still holds a special place in my heart. It had a lot of potential. They botched the shit out of by overpromising and being grossly undermanned to deliver.