Then a character modeler and a texture artist.

There’s finally out there a short video that shows some of the game. With some new screenshots here.

At a first glance it even looks quite good (there’s also a new fancy SOE logo at the beginning), but if you observe it with some attention the flaws start to show.

To begin with (and even somewhat acknowledged) the animations are *terrible*. Pretty much everything that moves looks awful. In particular the horses and the dragon.

And this is why I say the game needs a skilled animator. In the requirements put “must have NO experience with mmorpgs” and maybe you’ll be able to hire someone who knows what he’s doing.

Good animations are essential to have good controls on the character, show clearly what is happening (feedback), immersion and, in particular, to make the monsters feel more different and alive.

Take for example that giant that is shown for a couple of seconds. Why his mace doesn’t hit the ground? Why it doesn’t rise a cloud of dust, throwing away the players nearby? Why he draws back the weapon so quickly as if he was scared to actually hurt someone? Good animations should have a good flow. Swinging a weapon shouldn’t look like hammering a nail. There should be some dynamism, some weight. You don’t just move the arm to hit and then play the same animation backwards to move the arm back into its original position. A giant is supposed to be slow and heavy. Only a few attacks but meaningful ones. So it would make sense to have complete animations that take their time. Designing attacks and combat should be already imagining the way the monster moves and reacts.

Things look even worse when you go with a more realistic look and then have those kind of animations that are also cloned on all the characters. It completely disrupts the game. It feels too generic, amateurish and without personality.

The most improved thing seems to be the lighting system. On the grass it still looks odd like if it was photoshopped on the screenshots in a second moment, with colors too flourescent compared to the rest, but overall it should be decent. It helps to make the scenes feel more consistent and the characters less estranged from them.

I still continue to have mixed feeling when I look at those screenshots. I always have the impression of an amateurish game like those mmorpg studios that come out from time to time. Vanguard is one of those games to claim “cutting edge” technology but it still looks quite bad. I also wonder about the performance of the engine with that level of detail because if it looks like that, at least it has to move well. And not looking bad AND also having a terrible performance.

This is also another game who uses LOD heavily. Already in the video you can see objects popping up at a relatively close distance. At least let’s hope that the buildings will be persistent on screen, instead of watching just hills and trees.

Again, I’m more worried about the technical execution and production value in this game, than the design. It just looks very amateurish, generic and approximate. Brad is still aiming at about 400k subs, even hoping for more after WoW seemed to open the market for everyone. What if the “core” players are instead around 60-80k? That’s my prevision for the game at this time.

It would be a problem because it would cripple Brad’s plans with the future development and they’d have to decide if it’s enough to continue to support it, or just give up and getting reabsorbed into SOE, as in that scenario.

The point is that if Vanguard wants to seduce some of WoW’s players, it will HAVE to pass through EQ2. This is why I’m so unconvinced about the decision to publish the game with SOE. The truth is that Vanguard is EQ2’s most direct and serious competitor. They share the exact same market, and there are even some ironical analogies. Like the characters models and animations that suck in both games. And both look passable only on higher-end hardware because of “cutting edge” technology that looks bad and that has horrible performance.

From Smed’s blog:

One of the things I like best about SOE’s overall development direction is that we’re creating a wide variety of new games. We have four diverse MMO titles in internal development, not counting the five MMOs we currently have live, or our partnership with Sigil for Vanguard.

Each of these new games is aimed at a very different market and all of them are in different genres. From our perspective, it’s time to shake things up a bit in the online gaming space.

In the case of Vanguard what he says just doesn’t make sense because it will directly overlap with EQ2, and realistically only one of the two will survive (while I guess that the developer they acquired was from that show in China).

Right now EQ2 looks much more solid and I think it has the number to succeed over Vanguard even despite all its flaws. There’s also a video about EQ2’s next expansion. Blackguard says it’s alpha footage, still in too early development to be intended to be shown (and where we discover that a “Fae” is just an elf with wings).

Imho it looks terrible. And when I say terrible I mean much worse than what is in the game right now. So I just hope it’s just the video. The animations are worse than ever, the ground textures the usual, generic stereogram. Also quite blocky and unnatural in the way the terrain is shaped. EQ2 also needs a better, more natural-looking terrain editor. Add to the list.

I was also thinking while observing again God of War animations that the cloth he has on the hips moves wonderfully. EQ2 uses a laggy, ugly cloth animation system and I wonder again why you cannot just simulate the cloth animation, record it to the actual animations, and then have it directly in the game exactly as in GoW, without any fancy (and laggy) system.

The combat between the Fae and the rock thing has the sound completely desynched from the animations. The second combat between the two guys and the mechanical helicopter instead looks like a Power Ranger episode. Ugh.

So, really, Vanguard and EQ2 rival for who has the most ugly, jerky and confused animations. I cannot believe that with all the resouces SOE has, they still cannot find a first class animator and some good character modelers.

Btw, what happened to the Station Pass overhaul that was announced in a press release during this last E3?