Polarization, as an intrinsic nature of light, is certainly of great importance to serve as a degree of freedom for manipulating light. The vector optical fields with inhomogeneous polarization distribution have been applied in many areas due to the unique feature with respect to the traditional scalar optical fields. However, the early study of vector optical fields mainly focused on the local linearly polarized vector optical fields with cylindrical symmetry. In recent years, novel vector optical fields with various polarization distributions have attracted significant interest. These new vector optical fields have not only enriched the family of the vector optical fields, but also provided new degrees of manipulation freedom. As a result, these new vector optical fields have been applied in realms such as manipulation of focal fields, optical micro-machining, optical micro-manipulation, and optical information transmission. In this paper, we present an overview of the recently appearing new kinds of vector optical fields, including hybridly polarized vector optical fields in cylindrical coordinates, vector optical fields associated with Poincare sphere, array vector optical fields, vector optical fields with multiple polarization singularities, and other vector optical fields without cylindrical symmetry. The advances, design scheme, experimental generation, properties and related applications of these vector optical fields have been presented.