From Tom Chick on Yahoo Games, a preview that anticipates some interesting bits from Vanguard:

This is the tough-guy MMO with complicated tactical combat, mandatory group harvesting, extended dialogue trees, grueling corpse retrieval runs, prohibitive death penalties, and metal clamps that send a shock to your nipples when you take damage.

Group harvesting isn’t mandatory in the sense that everyone will have to do it, but it will be used as a way to “control 3D space”, as Butler puts it. For instance, there’s a cave-in at one end of a dwarven city. It opens the way to mines beneath the city where there are unique quests. But getting through the cave-in will require a certain amount of mining skill, not to mention specially crafted tools. And even if you do get through here, you’ll have to develop your relationship with a powerful but secretive dwarven family to unlock the associated quest.

This is an example of how some of Vanguard’s content is locked behind separate layers of gameplay. If you want to access that content, you’ll need to engage in harvesting, crafting, diplomacy, and combat.

The combat in Vanguard is arguably where the game most deserves a “hardcore” tag. For example, there are rules for wound locations. Head wounds can slow mana regeneration, leg wounds will reduce movement speed, a serious chest wound can cause hit point drain, right arm damage can be an offensive debuff, and left arm damage can be a defense debuff. How’s that for hardcore?

There’s a system of counters, chains, and cooperative attacks that are built into the interface. This is where you can really get a sense for how the combat is distinct. There are four tiny windows along the bottom of the screen, designated for chains, counters, rescues, and sympathies. Whenever you have the opportunity to use one of your abilities in the appropriate situation, its icon appears in the related window.

There are no facades or skyboxes. McQuaid mentions “integrated ground, air, and water pathing”, which means that you’re not going to get away from that drake you see overhead by simply putting a river between you and it.

McQuaid rides a dragon into the sky to show off the volumetric clouds. He has a programmer show us the weather systems they’ve built that will sweep across the world. Clouds build up and darken as a storm rolls in. The idea is that this will even have an effect on gameplay. A druid, for instance, might have spells that only work when it’s raining. Imagine what this might then do for weather prediction spells, or even cooperative spells that can summon rain. Like so many things in Vanguard, there’s a cascading set of interrelated systems being carefully pieced together.

This preview hands out more concrete informations than all the steam that emerged through the beta along these months.

Some of the principles, on the general level, are valid. We still have to see how much of this will reveal to be consistent and not just vapid. Vanguard is really the only mmorpg that I cannot figure out. I just cannot anticipate if it will be a big success or a tremendous failure.

I remain skeptical for now, but the plan to give the game world more consistence and integrate different systems together has potential.

Brad may actually be able to create a virtual world and a sandbox by just improving the same, stale patterns we have seen till now. Focusing on the “adventure” and giving back relevance to all the parts that have been frustrated in the more recent games (travel, inventory managment, environment, exploration, interaction and so on).