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I played in Vanguard beta, and it was alright. The interface borrowed heavily (very heavily) from world of warcraft, but was very customizable without requiring any addon downloads. I didn't make it past level 12, but what I played just really reminded me of WoW. The whole quest system is basically identical to wow, down to the design of the quest window. The skill trainers were also identical to wow. The intentions of the developers is obviously to assimilate a chunk of WoW players into their own game.
The gameplay itself, i.e. combat and stuff, felt like its own game. Even if the interface and controls felt like WoW, the combat felt more like Everquest 1 than WoW. Slightly slower paced combat, but more difficult and much more at stake. I think the penalty for dying (exp loss, corpse running) is a good thing, since it gives an actual reason to try and stay alive. It seems like you can have an IQ of 50 and still make it to level 60 in WoW because the game is just too easy and doesn't punish you for being a terrible player. Vanguard kind of fixes this problem, but in this age of MMO's, I think that feature is going to hurt the game more than help it.
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