I dunno. I'm pretty surprised when Lineage II can come out October of 2003 and run on my piece of shit computer with literally a hundred or so players on screen and no lag. Yet, GW2 comes out in 2012 and if there's more than 30 or so players on screen it culls them out of existence and I still get lag on my decent PC. My situation might be unique, but I'd say they have quite a bit more than "pretty" over the competition. Not to mention TERA online pretty much revolutionized the way action combat works in MMORPGS. I'm seeing the same old shit come out of American devs and it makes me sad. It's really going beyond the games simply being more "pretty" and becoming something much more concrete. That said, I'm still looking forward to EQNext, but Black Desert might come to America before EQNext sees the light of day at this rate.
One thing I will add however, is that Koreans seem to love using invisible walls in their worlds, and that pisses me off to no end.