Last weekend, the folks at Sigil Games invited myself and some other sites to their office to get a look at their new game Vanguard. Sigil, for those of you who don't know, was founded by many of the original creators of Everquest, and is being backed by Microsoft's money. Many gamers have been waiting anxiously to see what goodies they were going to come up with. Wait no more. Considering the game is not slated for release until 2006, they were able to make quite an impressive showing. The graphics are like stepping into a Keith Parkinson painting (he is their lead artist after all), and the ideas they were giving about the eventual game play sounded very intriguing. They even had a playable game for us to tinker with. The scope of what they may actually have by release is pretty mind boggling. While many of their game concepts were still in infancy, I was especially impressed with their multi-dimensional quest system which allowed for them to program in multiple quest solutions based upon how they thought the players might try to solve the quest. The one they showed us was a basic rescue quest, but with a twist. All you got from the NPC was a request to rescue the victim. From there, you could do a side quest to obtain ransom if you wanted. Or you could go to the camp and wipe out all of the kidnappers. Or you could kill a couple of the camp scouts, steal their gear, and sneak into camp and back out with the hostage. The idea of it was that different players would think of different ways to solve the quest and each would have an actual solution programmed in to cover it. Neat. I could go on, but I am going to stop here. I took a lot of notes, and fully intended to write up a lengthy review of the game. However, many of those who attended have already written up very thorough and interesting reviews, and I can't see how I can significantly add to them. So instead of writing up my own review and repeating all of the nice things everyone else said, I am going to direct you to all these other sites and spend my time instead updating the site with more information for our current games. Read and enjoy. Below are links to the reviews I know of at this time.

Anyuzer

Epic Vanguard

Okratas

The Safehouse

Total Aggression

Gamergod

Vanguard Live

Vanguard Stratics

Vanguard Warcry