I think you can judge gameplay to a good extent in five minutes. It's not always a good predictor though, i.e. some games are awesome for an hour then rapidly decline. I found F.E.A.R was that way. After an hour it stopped surprising you too much. Other games are poor for ages and then become the real experience.
I'm not sure that you can judge world design from screenshots or five minutes though. Graphic's yes. Even then though usually the screens you see are taken from the game running at max (and in some cases edited) resolutions and settings.
That given, at this point Vanguard is already showing problems to me. I blame upper management for forcing release too early. It has potential, but why has SOE not learned.. POLISH POLISH POLISH. So far - two days and two patches, nevermind the two that I had to download before even getting chance to play. And a lot of the changes are for polish, e.g. :"The beginning of the Infineum quest line has seen significant alterations and polish"
This is the difference between first day WoW and first day everything else. Immediately you enjoy WoW, everything else you fiddle with for ages till you 'find the fun.'
Re: Judging games in five minutes
I think you can judge gameplay to a good extent in five minutes. It's not always a good predictor though, i.e. some games are awesome for an hour then rapidly decline. I found F.E.A.R was that way. After an hour it stopped surprising you too much. Other games are poor for ages and then become the real experience.
I'm not sure that you can judge world design from screenshots or five minutes though. Graphic's yes. Even then though usually the screens you see are taken from the game running at max (and in some cases edited) resolutions and settings.
That given, at this point Vanguard is already showing problems to me. I blame upper management for forcing release too early. It has potential, but why has SOE not learned.. POLISH POLISH POLISH. So far - two days and two patches, nevermind the two that I had to download before even getting chance to play. And a lot of the changes are for polish, e.g. :"The beginning of the Infineum quest line has seen significant alterations and polish"
This is the difference between first day WoW and first day everything else. Immediately you enjoy WoW, everything else you fiddle with for ages till you 'find the fun.'