The Vanguard NDA was lifted last week.  And Beta 5 (open beta!) started.   Now that I can legally talk... 

I've been in VG Beta for a little under a month.  Ever since Beta 4 started...the shortest beta phase EVAR.  The servers were pretty unstable.  Hourly crashes.  Bad stuff.  The game is truly beautiful, though.  It eats computers for lunch however.  I'm running an Athlon 64 X2 4200 with 2GB of RAM and an ATI X1950XT card.  Not "high end" but certainly no slouch.  I have to run on the "Balanced" settings.  It's kind of like EQ2 did: they made the game to run on future hardware.  Current machines, except the very highest end ones, will need to turn some settings down.  No big deal, it still looks gorgeous.

Now to the game.  Classes and races are great, IMO.  And the way they're developing content in "spheres" is cool.  There are 3 "spheres": Adventuring, Crafting, and Diplomacy.  Adventuring is killing mobs, just like you'd expect.  Crafting is, well, crafting.  Diplomacy is a truly unique and new thing.  You can be a diplomat and the way it plays out is kind of like a Collectible Card Game type of deal, where you build a deck (in this case of 5 cards) from a much larger set of cards, and you have to design it around the type of person you're going to engage in diplomacy with.  It's very strategic and cool -- and also hard to describe in words.  I'll make some screenshots later and post em.

The Necromancer class, something I'm always interested in, is extremely cool.  You equip your pets with "grafts" that you cut off of corpses, and these grafts give your pets certain abilities.  It's VERY cool.

More later, but that's the quick version.  I've preordered the game and fully expect it to be my next MMO.