I wasn’t expecting anything amazing but even Krone’s comments are better than what I saw.

The animations are awful. But really beyond what is even acceptable. Completely generic for every model. Horrible even if we compare them with games five years old or more.

The first scene really looks that lame. The character is standing like a wooden puppet in some sort of egyptian tomb with big, empty rooms and a few graffiti on the walls. Then he farts some glowy buffs (I’m not joking, he really stands there and then smokes comes out of the ass), enjoys the smell till he is able to resist and then attempts to run away. It’s obvious that noone warned him to be careful while handling a long sword, in fact while running he manages to amputate his poor leg. Repeatedly. Yeah, he runs and flings repeatedly this long sword against this leg, but at this point a big flashy caption appears on screen to instruct: “suspension of disbelief”. So I look with disbelief the character running past the corner and here the scene ends to move to another one where the character is standing in front of a giant scorpion. It’s combat!

Yeah, or maybe the characters is thinking to be somewhere else. It looks like the farts of before gave him some hallucinations. Instead of fighting the dangerous (sleeping) scorpion he… fishes. It’s true. He attempt to fish with his sword like if he’s thinking to have a pole in his hands (which would explain the carelessness of before). He tries to fish repeatedly while the scorpion keeps oscillating back and forth. Then he tries to fish again and fails, gets angry, kicks something, farts again (this while the damage numbers appear before the character even starts the action, speaking of synch). And this goes on forever at turns. The character fishes and the scorpion oscillates back. Rinse and repeat, each completely unaffected by the presence of the other.

The scene ends and a new one starts with another crazy guy running amok through a town in the country. The graphic engine tries to keep the pace but fails miserably. This guys keeps spastically running at an insane speed, amputating repeatedly his leg with a featureless axe. He runs and runs till we finally discover his urges. He was searching a tree to get some wood:

Yeah, ugliness of the model aside. look at the hands. Come on. Where was the animator looking when working on this? The left hand is completely off the handle of the axe and the movement of the arms is way too unnatural to be acceptable. You feel hurting just by watching it. Look at the movement of the shoulder on the second image. Well, assuming that there’s STILL a shoulder because that movement doesn’t look belonging to a human body…

Now I would suggest the devs to add some plasticity and dynamism to these models. There’s absolutely no sense of realism if all the limbs are rigidly set at 45 or 90 degrees and if every character just stand there like a wooden dummy. Add some variation and personality. Instead of having the axe absolutely perpendicular give it a more natural position, allow the body to relax some more and move because right now the only thing that these characters communicate is a sense of arthritis.

…

The rest of the video goes on and ends with another scene of combat between another farting character against some giant (and flying) beetles. Again what happens on screen doesn’t give any idea of what is going on. There are just this odd spell effect firing randomly with no animations and nothing else.

It’s vanguard of video games. World of Mummies would be a more appropriate title for all we know.

Some of the comments are precious:

Chantado:
Wow. Let’s hope that that video doesn’t illustrate the direction the game is heading as far as combat because it looks about as fun as when I was soloing those big cactus things, tigresses, and rhinos or whatever the fuck in the Overthere about 3 years ago.

Digo:
Side note:

Is it just me, or is fighting giant bugs, bats, and spiders getting REALLY REALLY OLD? I know they’re supposed to be the staple of every nerd’s fantasy world, but come on. Oh wow, another giant spider. Another giant cockroach.

Metranon:
also like others mentioned, compared to WoW the art looks good in the distance but animation is poor. When the character models were in combat there is no noticeable change to a more “ready stance” like in WoW, instead they just kind of stand there and swing their weapons like a robot.

Zistrix:
Man I am totally and utterly unimpressed with vanguard. Do we live in a world where nothing lives up to the hype? Shit, we all get to 60 in WoW and suddenly never want to play it again. Oops off topic..

It’s like they overhauled everquest with a new engine and added some realism elements that probably should of been out years ago. I can now run through realistic tall blades of grass at selos speed! wooo

What the fuck is vanguard? A training simulation for advanced pest control? I mean I understand the training necessary in case your pest spray mutates a beetle to the size of a jeep – what ARE you supposed to do?

Shit and we are back to luclin again fighting insects and small animals and everything that was probably never intended by this fantasy genre that these games violate in the rear with a large pole.

And the best one:

the world is shit. i’m going back to consoles.

Pump-up the hype!