It was Vanguard Gamers Day, a special event to introduce a new massively multi-player online game to the gaming press. I sat in a room full of computers while 20 or so gaming journalists hunkered over their keyboards staring into their monitors. "How do I...?" they would ask, "Oh, and where do I...?" I found myself fielding questions from the reporters seated around me. You see, this introduction to Vanguard wasn't really an introduction for me--I've been playing in beta for months. It's just that now I've been given permission to talk about it. I’ve been following Sigil Games Online and its upcoming MMOG Vanguard: Saga of Heroes for well over a year. That’s not as long as some, but long enough to put me squarely in the demographic that has watched this game evolve from a decidedly niche title into a game that is now taking aim at the masses.

In its early days, Vanguard appealed most to the EverQuest veteran--the MMOG player who longs for a simpler time when men were men and traveled many miles, naked and on foot, to retrieve their broken corpses. (And they liked it, damnit!) But as Vanguard nears launch in the first quarter of 2007, Sigil, and Vanguard's publisher, Sony Online Entertainment, have begun reaching out to the MMOG community as a whole and, perhaps more specifically, to players who are ready for more depth and challenge than the World of Warcraft juggernaut has to offer.

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