Well, I spent the majority of my weekend glued to Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and my Ranger on Florendyl. When I wasn’t in Telon, I was gaming it up with fans in one of our numerous GameDays.

I had a lot of fun at each of the GameDays. We’ve got another one coming up tonight at 6pm EST for Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. I think we’ll do a series of FFA and 3v3 games. Don’t forget to jump on our ventrilo server, provided by UGT Servers.

Server IP: ga1.ugt-servers.com:6222

Also, here’s the schedule for the rest of Winter-een-mas:

• Monday the 29th -Dawn of War: Dark Crusade (PC) 6pm EST
• Tuesday the 30th – Crackdown Co-op Demo (360) 7PM (slots by contest winner only)
• Wednesday the 31st – Halo 2 (360) 8PM

I’ll be notifying the winners of the Crackdown Co-op demo contest this afternoon, so if you entered, be sure to check your email later tonight.

So Vanguard. Love it. It’s not perfect, it’s still got quite a bit of polishing to do in the next few months. There are some bugs being worked through. Overall, the 3-day head start launch went pretty smoothly, in my vast experience with MMO launches. The servers were up and pretty stable the first day, and only came down once for an emergency patch.

Vanguard isn’t for everyone, certainly. It’s graphically pretty demanding, and designed to be visually appealing for a year or two to come. Some people, even with really nice systems, can’t run the game on High Quality yet.

It’s also a more challenging game than certain other MMOs. While not completely akin, it certainly does resemble the original Everquest in a lot of ways. You lose experience when you die, leveling takes longer, everything isn’t just given to you. I feel that it offers a greater sense of risk vs reward, without making death the completely painful and frustrating experience it was in the first Everquest.

If I had any gripes about the game in its current state, it would be the level of character customization. Facial and body morphing is fine, but we really need more options in other areas, like hair and facial hair. And face textures. I know that they don’t consider that top priority, as they need to get the gameplay bugs out of the way first, but for an MMO’er like me, character customization is a big deal.

Here’s to hoping they add in some content in that area in the future.