Vanguard - I don't give a fuck if it's dead, It's still brown as fuck (Download link in 1st post)

Been messing around with this in the few bits of free-time I have. Aggressively avoiding GM commands or learning whatever they are, mostly because I know it'll just lead to me hating things.

Some things are pretty good, some things definitely need a lot of work. I'm just enjoying exploring the world for what it is.

I'll probably delete and remake my dude to do the isle of dawn intro. I honestly just wanted to replay the cat furry intro cus i remembered it being epic and unique.

It also reminded me about everything they did wrong with this game. They tried too much and went way too wide and ran out of time/money when they should of made a smaller, polished version and added shit in later after a successful launch.

Playing a cat furry really illustrates this well.

You are a race of extra planar hunters locked in an eternal struggle against a race of cthulu-esque gargoyle demons who you chase across the planes. I guess if you play a paladin or something this might have an asguard defender of the nine realms feel to it, but as a dread knight its definitely got a blood war devil vs demons war across the lower planes thing going on.

Your home world is basically planescape's sigil with portals to all these different planes. Its filled with ambassadors and princes from all over the cosmos, devil things rock things sludge things etc. Over the course of your hunts you save this sludge hive mind thing from the demons and in return you meld with one of its children and join the hive mind. This venom symbiote allows you to survive travel across space (well fantasy space, ie the astral plane) so you can hunt down the demons.

You are hunting them to extinction, totally winning the war yet a few escape through a portal. You are assigned to join the Vanguard (tm) and You follow them through to wipe them out for good and end up in telon, the fantasy world of vanguard.

You arrive in telon outside the desert newbie area (qalia?), learn that the portal back to your homeworld is broken, And, thats it. There is 1 breadcrumb quest suggesting the demons have possessed the local wild life (level 5 lion trash mobs) and you should help the qalians deal with this threat. Also while you are talking to the mayor, the vanguard leader asks you to ask him about a job for himself. Guard duty or something, because your all stuck on this planet, cant return and he needs work.

Again i only played at launch to level like 20-30, but this backstory was never mentioned again. Your story abruptly merges into the qalian newbie storyline and you are just an adventurer now. Maybe it happens way later on but I never even saw them reuse any of the unique monster models, landscape, or textures for the various entities that exist on your homeworld. Everything on telon is just brown. Seems like just a colossal waste of resources that got abandoned once they hit crunch time. We're talking months of work, story, art, etc for what is less than 1 hour of game play (lvls 1 -5) for 1 race, out of what, 16 races? Though I am glad they kept what they had to that point, despite it being completely jarring intro to a fantasy mmo.

As absurd as the cat furry intro is, it still beats brads previous outing.
"This expansion is amazing, but what do we do after velious? Where do we go from here?"
"I dont know, fuck it lets go to the moon"
"The. What?"
"The moon. Also there are cats living there."
"Cats?"
"Yeah cat people. They fight snake people. Fuck it. Yo got any more oxy?"

If you've never played cat furry intro its totally worth a playthrough. Its gives you an idea of how large they wanted the world to be.

It is like Brad was trying to make vanguard competitive with eq, content wise as it was when vanguard released, not as it was when eq released. Trying to compete with a game with 4-5 expansions already under its belt including the outer planes.

Of course they ran out of time and had to piece together a somewhat coherent story from all the bits they had already.

For the most part the setting is pretty traditional d&d fantasy world like forgotten realms. This race is from the mountains, these guys are from the desert, swamp, etc etc. Cat furries just happen to start in the planescape setting and end up taking a 1 way portal to the prime material plane that the rest of the game takes place in. If they had more time to develop the story it could of worked, but they didnt so it just comes across as fucking weird.

I only discovered it originally by clicking through the races at character select and reading their racial bonuses when i was deciding what to play. Most are traditional fantasy fare. Cat furries is "your symbiote covers you in a layer black tar like substance hardening you against attacks" and i was like "It. Fucking. Whats?"