Since I’ve commented the other (leaked) one (it’s there after the comments on Vanguard), I’ll also spend a few words about the official one (if it’s the official one).

At first glance the video is rather well done and looks very pretty, it even fools you believing that you can see all that in the real game. But then if you pay attention you can see smaller details that don’t look as good.

The new zones still look a bit too bare and empty, the ground textures still too clean and replicating monotonous patterns and the grass blades still follow this awkward choice of being made as a flat block spread horizontally that makes them look more like quite awful placards instead of “decorations” (if you expand horizontally a flat surface you only obtain to make it look even more flat, if the grass was made more like a single vertical blade or flower, it would instead look much better).

The overall layout of the zones seems to be of a good impact but then it’s again the detail that misses and makes these zones feel like just big containers with not much to see from the player’s perspective. Look at the 2:12 minute. There’s some sort of flower-lamp at the border of the road. That’s the kind of stuff that the game definitely misses, the detail at the player’s point of view, more organic terrain, less pattern-like. But then there’s also to consider that EQ2’s engine already doesn’t have a great performance, and the more detail you add, the more it is going to struggle.

The same for Kelethin, the tree city. The layout doesn’t look too bad, but it seems to lack detail and I wonder if a place so big will also have content to fill that space with. “Huge” is good, “wasteful” not so much. I think the noob island in the game looked much better exactly because, being smaller, it was much more detailed and carefully built. More organic and alive. (and I would have loved to see the bridges connecting the platforms on the tree city animate and sway in the air)

The video also does a good work at hiding the glitches that you can see daily in EQ2. I’m not sure if the animations were tweaked specifically for the video or are going to be tweaked for the expansion, but the running animations definitely look much better than what I see in the game right now. The characters don’t look as if they are moving jerkily at super-fast speed as they always do in the game. There are three chars in the video. The tall woman, the dwarf in the blue armor and the gnome in red. Of the three the woman is the one that moves more realistically, with the running animation paced rather well. While the other two have the animation even running too slowly to look as good. The little floating robot elicopters also seem to move rather smoothly, but I suspect it’s again another feature of the video as EQ2 has the flaw of having quite jerky updates on the monster movements (it’s the first thing I noticed coming from WoW).

Nitpicking you can see the woman shooting at the huge mechanical thing right through a tree, and it would be nice if the animation could match the angle at which the bow should be rised (the animations points the bow straight forward, while the arrow is fired upwards). Then that mechanical thing also shows some unrealistic gliding on the terrain as the animation isn’t perfect. At a point a flooded area is shown with boiling water and geysers, all good but the way the smoke blows out is just looks too unrealstic, as large clouds of smoke just don’t move that fast even with a strong wind (the smoke quickly loses pression as it gets more space to expand). And the “Faes” are supposed to float, even if their wings barely move…

Even after all these critics (the game still has many, many weaknesses, even if it largely improved) I still believe EQ2 is a better base to build upon than Vanguard. This despite some claims that I found lost in my notes file (so I don’t have the original links):

Vanguard uses a lot of newer tech that the EQ 2 engine doesn’t have because it’s a newer engine. Ryan Elam and I have listed a lot of these differences in the past. Someone like Ryan would have to post to get into the details, but the big obvious differences are more advanced character customization, lighting, pixel shader 2.0 min spec (and therefore more advanced shaders), seamless world, advanced LOD and portal engine allowing for flying and such in any region, NPC wall, cieling, and sky pathing, world lighting, dynamic weather system, and much more.

None of this is to say anything negative about the EQ 2 engine — the Vanguard engine is simply newer, faster, takes advantage of the latest tech, etc.

—
Mostly yes, but we are still adding some class specific anims and a few other special ones. Some of the races are still getting some tweaks (like the Raki), and there are a few more sets of hair and face options to add to character customization. And there will always be clothing, armor, weapons, etc. added to the game, pre and post launch.

There are also a few tech tweaks to the characters that will make the animations run more smoothly and interpolate better. We also have a lot of action/reaction animations (like the guy shoots an arrow at you from 100 feet and the guy he shot at blocks it, and he raises his shield to block the arrow at the right time — synchronization) to place and tweak. Lastly, as machines grow faster and we optimize the game, animations will automatically look better because the faster the framerate, the more frames of the animations play (we sampled the animations at quite a few frames, so they’re very smooth at high FPS).

Probably some things I’ve forgotten, but it’s mostly there now and it’s all about polish, variety, quality, quantity, and synchronization.

Why every time I talk about EQ2 I have to talk about Vangaurd and vice versa?

Because they are going to overlap. They are going to collide and compete against each other more than EQ classic and EQ2 ever did. I just don’t think there is going to be a place for both, in the longer term.

And that’s what will matter above everything else.