Vanguard is the long awaited MMORPG from one of the creators of EverQuest, Brad McQuaid. It's had an interesting history. Originally it was conceived as a game for the truly 'hardcore' RPGers, challenging in the extreme. However, since World of Warcraft has been such a massive hit with its more casual player-friendly philosophy, Vanguard has softened its outlook and morphed a little more along these lines.

Warcraft's influence is clearly visible here. Much of the interface is very similar to Blizzard's MMORPG, which means that WoW players will be readily at home. Unsurprisingly, the game also has the feel of EverQuest, with bits of that interface borrowed and a similar visual style to EQ2. Overall, it seems like a hybrid of the two.

But don't get the impression that McQuaid's efforts are totally unoriginal. As well as the core adventuring game - kill beasts, complete quests, explore dungeons, grab the shiny loot and level up - Vanguard mixes in some interesting innovations such as a diplomacy system which is entirely new to the genre.

The idea is that instead of persuading monsters to die by whacking them over the head with a morning star, you level up your diplomacy skill and tackle alternate quests and situations using your brain-power instead.

This diplomatic wrangling is represented by a tactical card game. You engage the NPC you're trying to cajole and play cards turn by turn, and these raise the levels of certain meters (demand, flattery and so on) which enable you to play more influential cards and eventually win the debate. It's both novel and fun, and early in our adventuring career we found ourselves running more diplomacy than combat quests.

Many of the game's quests are these simple combat "kill tasks", which aren't overly inspiring. However, the fighting itself is well fleshed out, with all sorts of interesting abilities spread across the diverse and well thought out character classes. Warriors, for example, can actively protect a weaker member of the party being beaten on.

This is all well and good, if you can actually find a party to protect. The game world is very large and the European server we played on seemed sparsely populated. As a result, the world felt rather empty and lifeless; not what you want from a massively multiplayer environment. It's early days, and perhaps the population levels will pick up, but finding a group to quest with was an exercise in frustration.

Vanguard has problems on the performance front, too. The graphics are very grand and detailed but hit our system hard, forcing us to run it with pretty modest detail levels on our reasonably-specced PC. Even then we experienced bouts of sluggishness.

Vanguard is a solid MMORPG with some novel ideas such as the diplomacy system, but it's machine-hungry and the world feels empty and somewhat uninspiring. For the time being, we'll be sticking with World of Warcraft and its Burning Crusade.