This is realtime. It is UE3. A bit of aliasing, and the armor has some odd artifacting. The grass is nice how it waves and gives a great sense of motion. I dislike the models, although part of it is a disdain for the art direction. The evil woman has some nice detail in the face and lips and her armor and skin look really good. Besides the wigged out artsy hair she looks very detailed. Very convincing shadowing and skin shader. A+ there. Also the metal pendants on the shoulders look really good. In general characters are chunky, but this is probably related to the fact this is a MMO FPS.

The opening cinematic is not very good IMO. The difference between AAA games and the attention to detail, ESPECIALLY camera angles and transitions, is leap and bounds above the next rung of games. I think every dev staff should have one artist who specializes in cinematics--it can really make or break a game. One of the reasons the MGS4 video is so great is the camera man does a great job. Even the Ruby video which at times has some "meh" camera angles does a better job than most games. They key is to focus on the stuff that looks GREAT and pick angles that ignore/downplay spots that look, well, like a game.

The APCs look squarish and boring. Decent smoke (disappates a little fast) and nice dust pickup on the ground. The troop unies look nice from a distance with the neon-blue sticking out, but up close the "metal" shader seems really off IMO. The faces/skin are a like/dislike issue. The skin shaders make them look like plastic carvings IMO. If you like the art direction it should get you excited though. One thing that annoys is that after HL2 used an intricate bone system for emotions I don't understand why so many games still rely on basic eye/lip movements.

Basically this is a "next gen" game, but on an MMO scale. Lots of stuff on screen and so the quality in some places is lower, but the engine looks solid and if the game plays well with a TON of action the slight compromises in detail will clearly be assumed to be design decisions to have such a vast, varied, and broad game.

Looks really good overall, hopefully it lives up to the hype.

I loled.