-UI
Anyone who's played WOW will find the UI almost identical. In fact it's so blatantly similar it's scary. So all you WOW guys won't have to learn a new UI, you'll be off and running with a familiar interface.
-Quest System
The quest system is almost a carbon copy of the WOW system as well. The only differance that I've seen is that they aren't as guided as they are in WOW. NPC's don't automatically appear on the minimap, you have to go hunt them down, which means actually exploring buildings.
-MAP
Speaking of minimap, it needs some work. Imagine the WOW map before you've explored and revealed it. That's pretty much the Vanguard map all the time. There are no city maps,which make it annoying when first entering a town or trying to figure out where to go for a quest. You can't rely on the map for much of anything at this point. There do seem to be landmarks of sort on the maps, but they don't have anything to do with the quests I'm working on, which puzzles me. The entire map system still appears to be a work in progress.
-Tradeskills
The tradeskill system is more in depth than WOW. That's all I can say about it for now as I'm not a tradeskill person in either game, so I'll let others flesh out their impressions on that side. This system shows alot of promise the little time I had to work with it.
-graphics
The graphics look good when turned up. It doesn't have the cartoonish look that WOW has so it definitely feels more realistic. The player customization is a huge step up from other MMO's I've seen. There are sliders for many of attributes you'd want to change including, height, size, skin tone, facial features, hair, default clothing etc. I found that just hitting the randomize button until I found a combo that looked close to what I wanted was the best method. You can spend a lot of time really tweaking the look of your character. Not to mention the fact that you can go back after he's created and work on him further.
-Sound
The sound in the game has some major problems. The ambient music seems to just turn off and on at random times. For long periods of time there would be no music at all, then I'd finish a fight and it start playing for no reason. The environmental sound doesn't doesn't vary enough when moving between different terrain types or from indoors to outdoors etc. I started in the gnome area where there was a constant humm everywhere. It just became annoying and I had to turn the sound off altogether. NPC voices for this area were also not playing with the correct effects. Every single one sounded like they were inside a cave, even if you were talking to an NPC inside a building. Sound in general did not seem ready for release. It's very unpolished.
-Bugs
When any new game is released, especially an MMO, there are always a certain amount of little things that crop up shortly after that need to be worked out. Vanguard has taken that statement to a whole new level. Apparently the game not only needs to be tweaked, it needs to be properly polished. Let me explain. For the most part, the game is playable, but there are still lots and lots of little bugs, mostly graphical type stuff but nowhere near what I would expect for a released version of a game. For all intesive purposes, this is still Beta quality. A couple examples, door animations were often getting stuck. So instead of a door closing, it would remain open then you'd see the world drop out and the clear blue sky was behind it. When you turn your texture quality down, the bushes and trees become cardboard cutout type objects. When you rotate your camera near one of the bushes, it spins along with your camera.
-Camera
The camera itself gave me a headache in third person. It gets jostled and bounced all over the place as you move around. They really need to smooth it out more. First person seemed fine.
- Framerate.
Framerate wasn't bad once something gets loaded into memory. The problem was, there seems to be a lot of loading and I mean alot. I looked at my task manager as the game was running and it was using 850meg of memory. So whenever you'd round a corner the game would hitch for a second or so as the new textures are loaded in. This is where I think having a video card with 256mb+ memory will help.
Playing the game for me was not smooth at all and I have a moderate gaming setup; Opteron 144@2.4, 2 Gig ram, Nvidia 7900gs 128mb. With the graphics to max performance at 1024x768 it was playable, but I'd still get load hitches alot. Unfortunately setting the graphics this low makes the game look worse than the orginal EQ1 game (and I mean the original game, not the later expansions which are decent looking). There still needs to be a lot more optimizing. Forget your old 9800pro or anything less than a 2ghz single core. It's not gonna hack it.
-This game has potential, but in typical Sony fashion, releasing a game before it's actually ready is going to hurt it alot. They did the same thing with EQ2 and SWG, and now it looks like they've done it again. Alot of the success with an MMO will be determined in those crucial first months. Releasing a buggy game will turn alot of people away who would have otherwise been loyal customers. They'll have to pull a marketing miracle out of their hat to get those people back.
Maybe this is a new marketing strategy for Sony. If they release enough low quality MMOs they'll be able to capture market share by brute force. It's the "Just get the game out there and we'll fix it up later" mentality that really kills it. It's all about giving more leverage to their Station Access so they can make more money off the customers they already have instead of releasing a quality product putting more of an effort trying to attract new ones.
I digress..
Despite the bugs and little annoyances the game is quite playable and I am enjoying it. If your the type of person who is willing to overlook some of the annoyances you'll be quite pleased. There are definitely more positives going for it than negatives and I am going to stick around a while and see if some these issues clear up.